Tag Archives: St Gallen Mafia

Catholicism, Culture, Radicalism, Religion

St Gallen ‘Mafia’

The St Gallen ‘Mafia’ Is the ‘Skeleton Key’ Helping to Unlock Many Riddles of Francis’ Pontificate, Says Author

By Edward Pentin, 31 December 2023

Although the “St Gallen Mafia” is well known to most who follow the papacy and the Vatican, the vast majority of Catholics are unlikely to have ever heard of it.

And yet this group’s influence on the direction of the Church and all of the current and recent upheavals of this pontificate cannot be overestimated.

Founded in the mid-1990s, the clandestine group of high-ranking churchmen gathered in the Swiss city of St Gallen to oppose a Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger papacy.

Hosted by St Gallen’s then-bishop, Ivo Fürer, its members included Cardinals José da Cruz Policarpo, then Patriarch of Lisbon, Carlo Maria Martini, Godfried Danneels, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Achille Silvestrini, Lubomyr Husar, Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann.

Their efforts at the 2005 conclave to install a heterodox, progressive candidate failed, thanks in large part to strong resistance led by Cardinal Joachim Meisner.

The group, which Cardinal Danneels jokingly referred to as a “mafia,” then appeared to cease meeting from 2006 but its influence lived on in the form of a looser network that paved the way for Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ascendance to the Chair of St Peter less than seven years later.

Now Julia Meloni has produced a compelling, well-researched and vital book describing exactly how this “mafia” came to influence the leadership of the Church, precipitating much of the prevailing structural, spiritual, and moral destruction of the past nine years of Francis’ pontificate.

Well-written in a captivating style, The St. Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church (TAN 2021) is required reading for anyone with an interest in today’s Church, for those concerned about the direction her leaders are taking her, and to future historians wishing to examine this tumultuous period in the Church’s history.

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Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, The Left

The St Gallen Mafia – Paul Kengor’s review

Julia Meloni’s The St Gallen Mafia: Crucial Insights into Pope Francis

Paul Kengor, TAN Direction, 21 November 2021

Julia Meloni’s new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, is a fascinating work. Rarely do I push through a book in two days, but this time I did.

The research and writing are outstanding. A read of the text and study of the footnotes and bibliography make clear that Meloni seems to have read every book available (many in Italian) on the central figure of Pope Francis and the core figures that comprised the so-called St. Gallen Mafia, namely: Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini, Godfried Danneels, Walter Kasper, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and Achille Silvestrini. Meloni’s examination of these characters and the connections she draws from them to Francis is admirably skilled and splendidly executed. It’s also eminently fair.

I do not know Meloni, but I partly expected a book on this provocative subject to contain hyperbole and flashes of anger and more than a few digs and shots at the chief characters—or maybe a better word for this group, the chief plotters. Meloni doesn’t do that. She is charitable, level-headed, and allows the facts to drive the conclusions. She narrates exceptionally well.

There is much to take from this book, and yet also, as with any analysis of Francis, much to leave one scratching one’s head. Francis remains an enigma. It is so hard to know the real Francis, especially where and when the man is leading or being led, or frankly, where and when the man is perhaps deceiving or being deceived by those whom he has surrounded himself with at the Vatican.

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Catholic Church, Culture, Politics, Radicalism, Religion

The gang behind the elevation of Jorge Bergoglio

Julia Meloni’s book The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group within the Church, is one of the most important books published this year about the crumbling Catholic Church. I mean the visible Catholic Church.

It is a painstakingly researched book, loaded with references, that lays bare the manoeuvring, manipulation, and agitating of a small group of prelates on the Catholic far left to place Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio on the seat of Peter. Ms Meloni, in this article on her publisher’s website (TAN), provides some background to the writing of the book.

*****

Exposing the St. Gallen Mafia: Exclusive Interview with the Author

Julia Meloni, 12 November 2021, TAN

In discussing my new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, certain questions frequently come up. Here are some of them.

What made you want to write this book?

I still remember the moment when I first became captivated with the St. Gallen mafia, the secret group of high-ranking churchmen who used to meet at or near St. Gallen, Switzerland to plot their opposition to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It was winter, it was night, and I was reading Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope. When the first chapter turned to the mafia’s leader, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, I was arrested. I temporarily put down the book, downloaded Martini’s Night Conversations, and read late into the night.

When I finished, I knew I had wandered into a detective story.

A detective story?

Yes. At the center stood Martini—the man hailed as the next pope by the media in the 1990s. It is said that the mafia at this time wanted Martini as pope, too—but then Martini got sick with Parkinson’s. So Martini’s dream mutated in order to survive. No longer the “next pope,” Martini began in Night Conversations to call himself the “ante-pope,” the mysterious forerunner to some future pope.

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