'The Dictator Pope'?
December 1, 2017
I gather that, next Monday, a book will be published in English which appeared electronically a few days ago in Italian; its English title will be
The Dictator Pope, and its author is Marcantonio Colonna.
It is not obvious whether the book is written from a Traddy or a Trendy viewpoint, and I would not want readers to be under the impression that I desire to be held responsible for every claim or judgement made in its pages. What I do think is that it is a very important book.
At the present moment, the papacy is more dominant that it ever has been before, its iron grip on the Church strengthened by the mechanisms of the instant world-wide media. Inevitably and properly, the person and personality of the pontiff himself are subjected to detailed scrutiny, especially when it appears that we are going to have yet more 'surprises of the Spirit' sprung upon us.
This book brings together pretty well everything which can currently be known about PF. I suspect that Marcantonio Colonna is a trained historian, so you will find in his book not only a wealth of information about the rise of PF, but a subtle analysis of the cultural background which has formed him.
- Have you ever wondered what people have in mind when they say "PF's Peronism accounts for it all"? Dr Colonna will explain to you what that means.
- Would you like a careful explanation of PF's skills in playing people off against each other, in making use of a person and then discarding him, in ruthlessly humiliating or disposing of people whose aptitude for sycophancy he finds insufficiently crafted? It's all here.
Every book has its particular take on things, and Colonna's take on PF will not in itself surprise anyone.
It has, I think, become so clear as now to be uncontroversial that what you get in PF is not what it says on the tin. He is not a kindly humble avuncular figure with a winning smile and a passion for cripples and babies, who spends his days and nights thinking about the poor.
He is a hard and determined politician with a vindictive temper and an appetite for power and a disinclination to let anybody or anything stand in his way. Colonna shows how this was already apparent to PF's own fellow-countrymen well before he burst on to the international scene with his 'Buona sera'.
Under Colonna's tutelage, you will not only understand PF's past, but you will be able to hazard an informed guess about what he might do in his future!
The unscrupulous manipulation of the 'Synods'; the dismembering of the Franciscans of the Immaculate; the 'Reform' of the Vatican finances; the assault upon the Knights of Malta; the 'Reform' of the Roman Curia; PF's poor record in dealing with the scandal of paedophile or ephebophile priests; the St Gallen Group and the parts played by Martini and Daneels and Murphy-O'Connor and the rest of them in plotting for the last two Conclaves; the antics of the Vatican's Gay Mafia - Marcantonio's historian's scalpel will expose to your view all the subcutaneous realities of this pontificate.
The whole game is not yet played out; but we already have a lot of data. Let Dr Colonna offer you a guided tour through them!
Beatrice on her website www.benoit-et-moi.fr/2017 has translated to French an excerpt from IL PAPA DITTATORE which refers to the often-mentioned but now apparently unavailable Kolvenbach report, an appraisal of Jorge Mario Bergoglio prepared by the then Jesuit Superior General at the request of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires who wanted Bergoglio named as one of his auxiliary bishops…
From IL PAPA DITTATORE
In 1986, a new provincial for the Jesuits in Argentina was named [to replace Jorge Bergoglio]… Bergoglio was sent to Germany, officially to work on a doctoral thesis on Catholic philosopher Romano Guardini, which would never be completed.
At the end of the year, he returned to Argentina without bothering to get authorization, an omission for which later, the Superior General of the Jesuits would accuse him of disobedience. For a brief period, he taught theology in Buenos Aires but he was not 'well seen' by Jesuit authorities in Argentina, and starting in 1990, he was confined to an obscure posting in a provincial town.
In worldly terms, the career of Fr. Bergoglio appeared to have come to an end, and he experienced two years of real discouragement, but the Society of Jesus and its mostly leftist leaders did not constitute the entire Church, after all. [It must be remembered that at the time, Bergoglio was considered a 'conservative' by his Jesuit peers.] But he was saved from his exile by the new Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Quarracino, an ecclesiastic from a different school [a diocesan cleric, to begin with, not a member of a religious order].
Like Bergoglio, Quarracino thought of himself as a 'man of the people'. A follower of John Paul II, he would have welcomed the pope's action in 1981 when he deposed Fr. Pedro Arrupe as Superior General of the Jesuits and sought to lead the order into a less destructive direction. The new Superior General, elected in 1983, was the Dutchman Peter Kolvenbach, who however did little to change the ultra-liberal Jesuit course.
In 1991, Cardinal Quarracino proposed to have Bergoglio named auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. It must be understood how exceptional this move was. Because traditionally, Jesuits are not authorized to accept an episcopal rank, and other than from the missionary angle, one had hardly ever seen a Jesuit in the Latin-American church hierarchy.
Thanks, however, to Quarracino's patronage, Bergoglio freed himself from the Jesuit command structure and entered a world where his own inclinations were shared. But since he still needed a dispensation to be named a bishop, it was necessary to get a formal report on him from his order, which Quarracino got in 1991. The report was provided by Superior General Kolvenbach and represented the most critical report ever made on the personality of Jorge Bergoglio before he became pope.
The text of the report was never made public, but the account which follows comes from a priest who saw the report before it mysteriously disappeared from the archives of the Society of Jesus. He claimed that Fr. Kolvenbach accused Bergoglio of a series of shortcomings, from the habitual use of vulgar language to duplicity, disobedience hidden behind a mask of humility, and psychological imbalance.
In the light of his suitability for the office of bishop, the report underscored that as Provincial of the Jesuits, Bergoglio ‘had brought division to the order’. It is not surprising, therefore, that once he was elected pope, Bergoglio sought to lay hands on any existing copy of the report, and that the original, which had been kept in the central Jesuit archives in Rome, has since disappeared.
As to the objectivity of the report, it must be granted that the Jesuits who were running the order in Argentina at the time of the report were hostile to Bergoglio. In fact, however, Bergoglio always exaggerated the report's denunciations to the point that he made himself appear to be a victim (the quality that Kolvenbach probably had in mind when he spoke of disobedience hidden behind a mask of humility). Yet even with every indulgence, Kolvenbach's report could hardly be read as the description of a model religious by his superior.
Cardinal Quarracino absolutely wanted Bergoglio to be his auxiliary, and if it required a special audience with John Paul II to do this, he asked for it and got it. [But what explained Quarracino’s extreme partiality for Bergoglio?]
So in 1992, Bergoglio was named auxiliary bishop, one of many in Buenos Aires. In this role, he followed the line of his archbishop, considered to be in the 'right wing' of the Church but in the 'populist' style of John Paul II. His new career in the Church hierarchy, opened up by Quarracino's patronage, would soon be followed by more progress.
In 1997, Bergoglio as auxiliary bishop was acknowledged to have the right of succession to Quarracino, and so he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires when Quarracino died in 1998. In 2001, John Paul II named him a cardinal.
Thus he became the most important man of the Church in Argentina, and there is no lack of testimony about him, and on how he was viewed in the Church and outside it during this time.
The most penetratuing study on his personality was El verdadero Francisco (The real Francis), by Omar Bello, published a few months after Bergoglio became pope. It must be noted that the book disappeared from bookstores with surprising rapidity, a fate that has also befallen other books which are not favorable to Bergoglio.
Bello (who died in a car accident in December 2015) was a public relations expert who had the task in 2005 of launching a TV station for the Church in Argentina granted by then President Carlos Menem. For more than eight years, Bello worked for Archbishop Bergoglio and got to know him well. By the nature of his job, he found out soon enough that Cardinal Bergoglio was an expert at self-promotion well camouflaged by an image of simplicity and austerity…
An obit for Bello in La Nueva, an Argentine newspaper, described him as a journalist-philosopher who, at the time of his death, was editor of the newspaper La Verdad de Junin and a contributor to the Argentine magazines Perfil and Noticias. It quotes him as saying that he wrote the book on Bergoglio, since he thought the new pope "was not liked by many who accuse him of manipulating their emotions, which, he said, "is logical for someone who seeks to change anything in a major way. And if he is loved by a world in decadence, then we have a problem. In Argentina, he was known for making enemies, where he was not a media darling".
Beatrice notes that since Bello is dead, he can no longer answer any questions nor make any new revelations. However, the La Nueva obit did lead to a book review of El Verdadero Francisco in August 2016, which appeared on an Argentine blogpost 'Amor de la Verdad" (Love for the truth) by someone who is openly sedevacantist...Obviously, little of what follows is 'kind' to Bergoglio, but it's the house-of-horrors mirror image of the pluperfect pope and santo-gia (already saint) enshrined by the Bergoglidolators including the media.
EL VERDADERO FRANCISCO
by Moimunan
August 20, 2016
I am posting a commentary by Penthos after reflecting whether to do so or not. In fact, I do not know the nuts and bolts of Pope Francis's true personality.
But with what we have been seeing and the testimony of those who knew him well in Buenos Aires, there is no doubt that this is a complex personality who shows many contradictions, at times rather theatrical outwardly, but still one who seems to challenge us with his darker aspects. So I post this commentary for the reader to sift what it says through his own impressions and judgments. The commentary refers to a book written by a journalist who died in questionable circumstances, apparently while he was investigating Argentine Mafiosi.
What I am unable to dissimulate is that Pope Francis – whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not – is realizing the work which many in the obscurity of Masonic lodges throughout the world and/or in highly placed in the strategy of the 'new world order' have wished to be accomplished in the world.
I do not think it is even necessary at this point to go through the speeches, interventions, creations, etc of those who show themselves to be the standard bearers of a syncretic universal religion in which "the only certainty is to know that we are all children of God".
I must confess I have not read the book nor even skimmed through it. But I do not rule out reading it soon – since after all is said and done, it is very topical and should interest anyone who writes, reports or posts about the person, words and deeds of this pope, which almost always causes surprise if not amazement to those who adhere to Catholic faith and tradition. Here then is Penthos's commentary:
On the Internet, anyone can now download the book by Omar Bello, who claimed to have known Jorge Bergoglio well because they were in close and permanent contact for at least two years while Bello helped set up a Catholic television channel for Argentina. Bello was personally chosen by Bergoglio for the task.
Once Bergoglio as elected pope, Omar decided to write a book about his friend. But with the scruples of someone who wishes to be an impartial and objective chronicler, he also wanted the book to reflect the true Bergoglio, both what is good and bad about him. With the best of intentions.
But whoever sees the book ends up seeing Bergoglio's 'unknown' face: his thirst for power, for control of everything, his interest in finances, his vengeful character towards anyone who opposes him, his false humility, and his capacity for lying. This last applies to Bergoglio's claim that he flew to Rome for the conclave with a roundtrip ticket, and that it had never occurred to him to be pope [How could he even say that when he was the 'runner-up' in the 2005 conclave?], when everyone who had seen him in the days before he left for Rome, saw a frenzy of contacts with prelates from many parts of the world [One must conclude this had to do with the machinations of the St. Gallen Mafia and their pre-conclave maneuverings.]
Omar Bello, a well-intentioned man who did appreciate what was good in Bergoglio, nonetheless wrote more than he was 'expected' to write, and shortly thereafter died in a doubtful car accident. It may have been a genuine accident, but one cannot rule out the other option that you can well understand, Bergoglio being an important factor for the enemies of the Church who wish to destroy her. His mission is too important for them, and to speak of him in any way that is not favorable would be deemed dangerous by them.
Bergoglio is carrying out his mission very well, confusing millions of Catholics of good faith and misleading them towards perdition. He is playing a very delicate role that only a consummate master of deceit could carry off. He probably thinks he is doing good because he really sees the traditional Church as iniquitous and one that must be destroyed, in order to finally realize 'true universal Christianity' for all mankind that has already been redeemed wholesale by the Incarnation.
One does not rule out that he could even accept to play Judas* because for the Gnostics, this personage is a decisive one. It is a role that Cardinal Kasper gladly took on in public – to be the stoic betrayer of Catholic orthodoxy. Likewise, Bergoglio thinks he is accomplishing a great mission, even if he must pretend and lie because in his ethical code, the end justifies the means, as we see in the new situational and relativistic morality that he champions.
*[Among the fairly recent ‘to translate’ items I have is all about Bergoglio’s most recent favorable citation of Judas in his catecheses with a lookback to other times when he has implied that Judas wasn’t so bad after all and that he was forgiven by the Lord – despite his betrayal and his suicide.]
That Bergoglio lies can be seen in many other issues on which he wishes to deceive us, in which he achieves some measure of success because of our own voluntary blindness.
For example, didn't he say that he chose to live in the Hotel Santa Marta because he does not like being alone and that he needs to be among others all the time? But is that not the exact opposite of what he did in Buenos Aires when he chose to live by himself for years in a one-bedroom apartment? It is an example of the lies he elaborates for those who wish to be deceived.
He tells us that he always wakes up early so he can pray for long periods of time, and so many think he is a great contemplative. But those who know true Christian spirituality also know that contemplatives who live in prayer love solitude and silence, neither of which Bergoglio can bear.
How can we allow ourselves to be deceived by this man, when numerous prophecies have warned us of false prophets who may smell like sheep but act like a dragon? Even Francis of Assisi warned us against false prophets.
What else is needed by those with stubborn skulls?
P.S. For some reason, I failed to post Marco Tosatti's report on IL PAPA DITTATORE from November 29, but here it is...
A book on the Bergoglio pontificate –
and his clear-eyed ascent to power
Translated from
November 29, 2017
For some days now, there has been present on Amazon a book whose title already says everything:
IL PAPA DITTATORE, written by a Marcantonio Colonna, described as Oxford-educated with experience in historical research. He has apparently lived in Rome since the Bergoglio Pontificate began, and has, according to the author data, “close contacts with many persons who work in the Vatican”.
Indeed, one Marcantonio Colonna has written us on gmail to recommend that we read the book, and I wrote back asking to meet him, but it will probably not happen, if my suspicion is founded. It obviously is a noble pseudonym for someone who does not wish to be identified. He probably is not Italian, and maybe Anglo-Saxon, deducing from the fact that his references are mostly Anglophone.
Those who read this blog (and its antecedent ‘San Pietro e Dintorni’ )know that we have been following intensely and with depth the internal workings of the Curia in the Bergoglio era, and of the men and ‘hidden’ events that have brought ‘the Church’ to where she is today. All that material would have been valuable to this book, whose only reference to my work, however, is an article I wrote in English for
First Things.
Nonetheless, it is not important to identify the author. What matters is what he has written because
he fulfills an important task – which is to line up, one after the other, all the elements that are concrete, useful and unfiltered through specialists in justifying current events, in order to reconstruct what will probably pass into history as one of the most disputed pontificates in the last few centuries.
If the book has a defect, it is that it could be longer and more detailed. But as it is, it already represents an impressive image. If only because, immersed in the flux of daily developments, it is difficult even for someone who is professionally occupied with reporting on the Church to keep a panoramic view with both breadth and depth.
The author examines his protagonist from the start of his ecclesiastical career and highlights what now appears even now to be his essential characteristics: “An expert self-promoter camouflaged behind an image of simplicity and austerity”. A circumstance that was essential in the 2013 Conclave, since it drew into his trap even persons (like the late Cardinal George of Chicago) who would soon immediately regret their support for the Argentine cardinal.
Colonna makes use of material from the book
El verdadero Francisco by Omar Bello who worked with Bergoglio in Buenos
Aires for eight years to launch and manage a Catholic television channel for the Archdiocese. Colonna really does not have outstanding novelties nor extraordinary revelations to offer, not even that we are dealing with 'the dictator pope'.
But the work is certainly well documented, interesting and valuable, especially for questionable affairs like the dismissal of Libero Milone, the first Vatican auditor-general (whose successor has still not be named after four months), the Vatican takeover of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and above all, the Knights of Malta episode, an extraordinarily unscrupulous operation on the part of the Pope and his Secretary of State, in which the stink of money prevails over everyone and everything, in defiance of of the mediatic image of a regime supposedly inspired totally by Francis of Assisi’s ideals of poverty.
Though we cannot give you more details about the book, I wish to offer a most relevant citation. You know that for some time I have sought to narrate how, in the 35 years that I have been covering the Vatican, I have never before observed a climate of terror such as we have at present.
Cardinal Mueller in his recent interview with Corriere della Sera merely said what we already knew and have been writing about. Which is that
in the reign of Bergoglio, lives and careers turn on the slightest morsel from snitches, and on anonymous accusations.
This pope, writes Colonna, citing one of his sources who wishes to remain anonymous, is
‘a person who knows above all how to instill fear’. As he was in Buenos Aires, so he is in Rome, he thrives in ‘a spider’s web of lies, intrigues, espionage, suspicion, and, more effective than anything else, fear”. And this is the stuff of the Vicar of Christ?
For his part, Fr. Z notes about the book:
It is not flattering. Some of it resonates with what I have picked up in my last visits to Rome and conversations with friends who still labor there. There is a really bad environment in Rome right now. The tension is so thick that you could cut it with chainsaw… maybe.
REMEMBER: Most of you do not have to read this stuff. Some of us do. Most do not. Be wary, in yourself, of the vice of curiositas. Yes, there is a kind of “curiosity” which leads to sin...
No, I won’t tell you the author’s real name (a question that has come up several times in email). Won’t. Do. It… Unless the author says it’s okay, and by then it will be out anyway. So, stop asking that, please.
Intrigued enough?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/12/2017 12:18]