THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Just a bit of chronological context: 'INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY', which became an almost-instant theological classic, was published one year before Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest.

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI


See previous page for earlier posts today, 9/7/18.




Italian Vaticanista on
why he fights for the Church
by Juliana Freitag

September 5, 2018



Aldo Maria Valli, an Italian writer and Vatican expert, was among the first to publish Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò's testimony on his website and remains in contact with him. He offered comments to Church Militant on why he has involved himself in this war for the Church and what he hopes from all of this.

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It isn't easy for me to explain why I'm combatting this battle for truth. Many feelings abound within me, and I strive to find the necessary lucidity as I know that every word can be misinterpreted. But I shall try.

Francis has been elected to rapidly turn the page after the crisis of the final part of Benedict XVI's pontificate, marked by the news leak regarding the apartment, the arrest of his butler, the controversies about the IOR (L'Istituto per le opere di religione, commonly known as the Vatican Bank) and the impossibility of efficient management of the governmental machine.

From an image point of view, the operation succeeded, as Francis effectively established himself with a new style, one much esteemed by the dominant culture. But a price certainly has been paid: superficiality in the analyses of problems and phenomena (migration, ecology, globalization, Islam), doctrinal ambiguity (Amoris Laetitia), demagogy in the ecumenical and interreligious confrontation — and as a direct consequence, the disconcertment of so many faithful. As for the curial reform, he bit off more than he could chew, delivering some results, but also with high costs and much confusion.

Francis has made the idea of divine mercy the core of his teaching. He believes that for today's mankind — largely indifferent to the Faith but with a pinch of nostalgia for the word of God — mercy is the key that will open the door to the heart and restore the connection between the Church and the distant creature. There's a logic in this vision: to point more to the love of God and less to the moral obligations derived from the Faith can be a way to bring a few sheep back to the paddock.

But Francis banalized divine mercy, stripping it from the dimension of judgment and transforming it in "mercinism." It's true that the Christian God is a welcoming father that never tires of forgiving, but a grasp of conscience, a conversion, is required from the son. But from Francis' preaching, it's almost as if God has the duty to forgive when faced with the right to forgiveness demanded by the creature. This is why secularists and unbelievers like Pope Francis so much: he confirms them in their choices. But in this way, he confuses those who don't feel confirmed in the Faith and see the entire operation as a concession to the world.

From what I see and hear, people ask a lot of the Church (or, rather, demand) but they aren't willing to be put to discussion. And Francis, in great part, reinforces this behavior, when, for example, every time he speaks generically of an "outbound," “non-self-referential" Church. But what does "outbound" mean? If to move outward I must renounce my identity and water down the depositum fidei, I certainly am not rendering a good service to the Church or to souls.

I'll even say the Church has the duty to be self-referential, in the sense that it must continually search for Her center: Jesus Christ. There's no acceptance without moral and doctrinal guidance, without a clear proposal towards conversion. Otherwise, there's only generality and words of superficial consolation. Spiritual direction implicates the necessity to express clear judgments regarding what is objectively good and what is objectively evil.

In this respect, even with all the cordiality towards the world, the shepherds cannot compromise. To appeal to the sole concept of "discernment" is ambiguous. Discernment is always needed, but as a means to arrive to God, not to justify everything and legitimize the ruling subjectivism.

The Catholic Church is dramatically divided. One could say it has always been, because the divisions, or at least the incomprehensions, have been there ever since the first Apostles, but I now see that the risk of schism is real. On one side, we have the Church of "mercinism," of the dialogue with the world at any cost; on the other, the Church of those who wish to render glory to God, not to man.

In the Catechism, we read that the primacy of the successor of Peter has the purpose to guard the depositum fidei, which reached us through tradition so that this patrimony isn't dispersed. The confrontation with the world is necessary and dutiful because the Church lives in the world, but that cannot ever come at the cost of yielding or compromising. This is why the slogan "build bridges, not walls" sounds superficial and ambiguous. Sometimes, a wall is required in order to defend identity and faith. It's not about pride, but about awareness of the fact that we're called to guard and perpetuate this treasure.

The great challenge of these days, as Benedict XVI had well understood, is the fight on the land of subjectivism and therefore of relativism. Under this profile, it's possible to see that two churches exist already: the one that made dialogue with the world some sort of dogma, legitimizing the interpretative subjectivism and moral relativism, and the other, who continues to turn to divine law. The crack is clear. The task of Francis' successor is going to be of an unparalleled difficulty.

The doctrinal ambiguity of Francis reaches its peak in Amoris Laetitia. The document has everything in it. There's the exaltation of the Christian matrimony, founded on indissolubility and openness to life, but as we well know, there's also the idea that, when encountering human behavior, the Church must proceed judging case by case, which opens the road to subjectivism and relativism, as it always happens when dispensations to the general rule are introduced.

Overall the document generates confusion for its ambiguity. And this is so true that we are swarmed with interpretations, in one sense or another. It's true that pastors are called to autonomy, but this is unacceptable. Friends tell me that I am too distrustful, because "doctrine's been confirmed," they claim, "with a few exceptions." But the problem lies exactly in these "few exceptions." When this principle is introduced, it opens a chink from where subjectivism overflows.

And it's useless to invoke discernment, because, I must repeat it, discernment only makes sense in the presence of clear principles, otherwise it's just used to legitimize all other options. Which is exactly what the world wants. And through this path, the Christian message is reduced to a vague sentimentalism who throws truth aside for the sake of the "superdogma" of dialogue.

In the beginning of this pontificate, I truly believed in Francis. I loved Benedict XVI, but I thought Francis could bring a climate of more confidence in the Church. I grabbed onto this hope with all of my strength, but after Amoris Laetitia, I understood I was wrong. Francis, unfortunately, is leading the boat of Peter towards the rocks of relativism and subjectivism.

And if the helmsman makes a mistake in the route, it's the duty of every baptized person to call him back and ask him to convert, respecting the eternal law of God and the sane doctrine — enough of using pastoral and discernment as an alibi. Because a pastoral move founded on a warped doctrine can only bear poisoned fruits and a discernment whose pole star isn't the divine law serves only as justification for sin.

Then, in these recent times, the knowledge of Msgr. Carlo Maria Viganò has further opened my eyes to the moral corruption at the summit of the Church. As a mere Catholic, for a long time, I chose not to see and not to believe the warnings. But at some point, this wasn't possible anymore. And this is when I chose to support Msgr. Viganò in his battle: purification calls for radical change, but change can only take place in truth. I am very much in pain, but I firmly believe this is the only road left.

It's a high price to pay. I am the Vatican expert for TG1, the main newscast of the first Italian television network (RAI, the state-run television channel). I could have had it easy, avoiding the exposure. I could continue to enjoy the privileges of a prominent position, envied by many. Instead, I put it all into question. Humanly speaking I had a lot to lose and nothing to gain.

So why have I done it? Because what is close to my heart is the judgment of God, not the judgment of men. And when our good God finally calls me home, I want to be able to tell Him that I've done all that I could to save the Faith, for the good of the Church.

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Archbishop Viganò: Will the pope
punish him for telling the truth?
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by Francesca Romana from

September 5, 2018

Will Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who brought to light the existence of corruption in the Vatican, singling out those guilty, beginning with the highest ecclesiastical authorities, be punished for telling the truth? Pope Francis is examining this possibility - if it is true, as several sources confirm - that he has consulted Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmiero, and some other canon-lawyer, to study the possibility of canonical sanctions to inflict on the Archbishop, commencing with sospensione a divinis.

If this news is confirmed it would be of extreme gravity, and somewhat surreal, seeing as the “expert” summoned to sanction Monsignor Viganò would be precisely Cardinal Coccopalmiero, who is being accused by the former-Nuncio of the United States, of being part of the “homosexual lobby” lording over the Vatican. It cannot be forgotten in any case, that the Cardinal’s Secretary, Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, is involved in a case of homosexual orgy, in which the position of his superior has still to be clarified.

But the underlying problem is another. The Catholic Church, inasmuch as it is a visible community, is endowed with a penal law, which is the law It possesses, to sanction the faithful who have committed violations of the law. It is necessary to distinguish, with regard to this, between sin and crime. Sin concerns a violation of the moral order; a crime concerns the transgression of the Church’s Canon Law, which is of course different from the laws of States. All crimes are sins, but not all sins are crimes.

There are crimes common to civil legislation and that of Canon Law, like the crime of pedophilia, but other offences are such only for Canon Law and not the penal Laws of States. Homosexuality and cohabitation, for example, are not considered crimes for most contemporary States, but remain grave crimes for the clergy that fall into them and as such are sanctioned by Canon Law. A crime, in fact is not every exterior action that violates a law, but only the kind of violation where a sanction is foreseen for non-compliance, according to the principle of nullum crimen, nulla pena sine lege.

The Code of Canon Law, as Padre Giovanni Scalese recently stated in his blog Antiquo Robore, considers not only the abuse of minors a crime, but also other sins against the Sixth Commandment: cohabitation and its scandalous situation, which includes homosexuality (Canon 395 of the New Code). These distinctions don’t appear clear to Pope Francis, who proclaims “zero tolerance” against civil offences, like pedophilia, but invokes “forgiveness” and mercy for the “sins of youth”, such as homosexuality, forgetting the presence of this crime in the laws of the Church.

But then, here is the contradiction: the laws of the Church are being invoked to strike, not immoral clergy, but the one who is denouncing the immorality of the clergy - Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò, who in his Testimony did nothing other than follow the lines of the Church reformers, from St. Peter Damian to St. Bernardino of Siena, the great scourgers of sodomy.

What is the reason for the canonical punishment that would be applied to the courageous Archbishop? Pope Francis might respond, as in the fable of Phaedrus: I am not required to give reasons, I punish Quia nominor leo, because I’m the strongest. But when authority is not exercised in the service of truth, it becomes abuse of power and the victim of the abuse of power acquires a force that nobody can take away from them: the force of the Truth. In this tragic time for the Church, the first thing that, not only Catholics, but the public opinion of the entire world are asking the men of the Church is “to live without falsehood” to use a famous expression by Solzhenitsyn. The time for social dictatorships is over - the truth is destined to impose itself.

Newsweek poll: Pope Francis gets whopping
65% 'No Confidence' vote from Americans
Only 35% of Americans think Francis shouldn't resign

(Newsweek, "Pope Francis Should Resign Amid Church Abuse Scandals,
1 in 4 Americans say: Poll", September 5, 2018)

Only 35% of Americans think Pope Francis shouldn't resign because of the sex abuse scandals according to a YouGov/Economist scientific poll.

41% of President Donald Trump voters wanted Francis to resign, while only 13% of pro-abortion LGBT candidate Hillary Clinton voters thought the Pope should resign.

Francis got a whopping no confidence vote from 65% of Americans according to the poll.

26% thought the Pope should resign. 39% were not sure, while 35% didn't want Francis to resign.


Being frank about Francis
The McCarrick scandal is just one powerful gust in the swirling tempest around this pope
and threatens to capsize both his pontificate and the barque of Peter itself
by Douglas Farrow

September 4, 2018

Fr. Thomas M. Rosica, Vatican press assistant for the anglophone sector, wrote recently these astonishingly frank words:

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Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.

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These words were intended to be both laudatory and prophetic. Francis is the pope who trims the Church’s sails to the winds of the Spirit rather than letting old charts and logs dictate the course. He is the man appointed by God to lead the Church out of its hide-bound clericalism into a new freedom to relate to the modern world, to generate in her a new “openness to what lies ahead,” to issue “a call to go further.”

If, as some say, his methods and manner smack of Peronism, what of it? According to Fr. Rosica, those who dare criticize this divinely appointed ruler should go to confession and henceforth hold their tongues.

Well, since we are being frank, let me say that a finer example of a disordered attachment could scarcely be found. Francis does not appear here as the successor of that Peter whose only mandate is to confess Christ and to safeguard the sacraments of the gospel, thus feeding the flock and strengthening his brethren. He appears rather as Jesus himself appeared – as one so vested with the Spirit as to take authority over scripture and tradition. And this, if taken seriously, is heresy of the rankest kind.

Fr. Rosica’s fawning “clericalism of one,” if I may put it that way, confuses Peter with Christ. Moreover, it reflects a confusion evident in Francis himself, who on hearing this ought to have torn his cassock and ripped up Rosica’s letter of appointment. Perhaps, however, he was too preoccupied with his own effort to persuade us to go further, “to open ourselves up without fear, without rigidity, to be flexible in the Spirit and not mummified in our structures that close us up.”

Now dare I say that, in the context of the present ephebophilia crisis, the words of Francis just quoted, which were used in expression of gratitude to José Tolentino Mendonça, a priest (now bishop) who has not shied from promoting LGBTQ causes, take on a rather sinister sense? One can well imagine such words being used in the grooming or cajoling of young seminarians by the likes of “Uncle Ted.” No doubt that was far from Francis’s mind!

But recall that this is the pontiff who has not merely erred, as his predecessors did, in appointing men of dubious character to high office at the urging of other such men in the bureaucracy. This is the pontiff who has deliberately surrounded himself with such men (whose names, eschewed here, have now been named by one in a position to name them).

It is the pontiff who allegedly lifted what limited sanctions Benedict imposed on McCarrick and apparently took the latter’s advice in making major episcopal appointments. It is the pontiff who, confronted with all that, said that he would speak not one word in reply, yet clearly indicated that critics, however grave their charges, are but sowers of division, a howling “pack of wild dogs” who seek to destroy the peace of a prayerful man.

The McCarrick scandal, let us all admit, is just one powerful gust in the swirling tempest that now surrounds Francis and threatens to capsize both his pontificate and the barque of Peter itself. If the bridge is unresponsive it is not because it is deep in prayer, as the pope pretends. It is because the bridge itself is now riddled with the worms of sexual and financial corruption.

Greed and lust, particularly homosexual lust, is doing to the Church what it is doing elsewhere in human society – destroying its very sense of direction and its capacity to distinguish truth from error, good from evil, the innocent from the guilty, sound judgment from folly. In such a situation keeping our heads down and bailing, bailing, bailing, as Rosica advises, is no solution at all.

What, then, is the solution? To resist clericalism? Yes, and especially this “clericalism of one” that places the pope beyond all criticism and beyond all accountability. That will not be enough, but it will be a start. For the pope may be subject to no earthly authority the equal of his own, but he remains subject to the authority of Christ, of which he is by no means the only repository, nor in most matters the sole interpreter.

Some think that Francis displays signs of a disordered personality, as David doubtless thought of King Saul; but subjective judgments of that sort, though they become more germane in any scheme that makes authority reside in the person rather than in the office, are not the issue here. The point is rather that it is wrong to treat Francis – or any pope – as if, like Saul, he were indeed a sovereign, an absolute sovereign against whom no hand must ever be lifted save, at most, to trim some small piece from the hem of his garment, lest one be found guilty of sinning against the Lord’s anointed.

The first Jesuit pope will likely be the last. At all events, Ignatius’s military model of obedience ought not to be transferred to the papal and institutional structures of the Church. Nor ought anyone to be taken in by the kind of modesty of which Francis has made a show, as if that military model were the very thing he wished to break down by something more spontaneous, more charismatic, more Franciscan (that is, more lay-like). That is just what leads round to the error of papal personalism.

From his bow on the balcony to his “Who am I to judge?” to his recent “You be the judge,” Francis has deflected attention from proper papal authority in order to enhance or protect his personal authority – the very authority so aptly described by Fr. Rosica.

At this point, let us consult the charts. Canon 331 states:

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The bishop of the Roman Church, in whom continues the office given by the Lord uniquely to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, is the head of the college of bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the pastor of the universal Church on earth. By virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.

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That certainly sounds like sovereignty, but what kind of sovereignty? Not the personalistic kind that Rosica favors, nor even the political kind that the people of Israel favored when they demanded that a king be appointed over them, nor yet the military kind favored by Ignatius.

Note well here that the bishop of Rome is the vicar of Christ, not the vicar of God. God has now but one vicar, the God-man himself, who is the Church’s true head and its only proper sovereign and high priest. Peter exercises something of the sovereignty vested by God in Christ, for Christ has in turn vested that something in him and his successors, together with the apostolic college, in the form of magisterial judgment and binding juridical authority in the daily life of the Church.

But Peter is not himself a sovereign, properly speaking; he is merely a steward, with very specific responsibilities. It was and is a mistake, whether by titles or by customs or by laws or by scruples – here we may indeed challenge some of the old charts, which were rightly corrected at the Second Vatican Council – to regard him as if he were something other or more than that.

Yet did we not call the Church the barque of Peter? Yes, but the genitive is not possessive. If we wish to make it possessive, or even appositive, we must refer to the barque of Christ. Recall the occasion when the Twelve were out in a boat with the wind against them, while Jesus also was out – walking on the sea in the tempest. When he joined them and climbed into the boat, both the wind and the sea and the boat itself obeyed him, though they would not obey Peter or the Twelve. There is a lesson there. The Church is the barque of Peter only in the sense that Peter is asked to remain watchful on the bridge. He is certainly not invited to seize the helm and steer the ship on some course of his own, fancying that his sails are trimmed to the Spirit.

So let us, by all means, be frank. But let us have none of Fr. Rosica’s nonsense. If Francis is doing what Rosica says he is doing – and that, I fear, is difficult to deny – then Francis is not performing the duties of his Petrine office at all. Rather he is driving the ship onto the shoals, and it is high time the rest of the Twelve (I mean, of course, the apostolic college) pointed that out, as indeed the more alert members are beginning to do.

This storm will pass, and the air in the Church be fresher for it. The ship will sail on and reach suddenly its destination. But its broken masts and rotten planks must first be replaced or repaired. For that, not only the charts, but also the ship’s plans, must be consulted again.


Doncha just love him?

September 6, 2018

I mean, of course, Reverendissimum ac eminentissimum Dominum, Dominum Blasium Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem CUPICH ...

So neat, so sweetly petite, so invariably kempt with never a hair out of place ... what a credit he is to his Nanny, God bless her! What a perfectly precious poppet he is! Don't you just long to throw your arms around him and give him a great big hug ... I address, of course, my female readers ... And just think that the dreadful Dr Kirk has described him as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer ... these Ordinariate bloggers really are the limit ...

What a revealing explanation poor little Cupich has indeed given of why PF is right to refuse to answer questions about the Vigano Testimony: He's too busy sorting out Ecology and Migration ... and, Lo, right on schedule, last Saturday PF launched an attack on Plastics ... the Plastics of Satan have, one gathers, entered through some crack into the Church ... It all reminds me of a story I heard from an American round about the time of the Viertnam War. A woman is explaining how her husband is truly Boss: "He makes all the important decisions ... international politics ... who should be the next President ... nuclear war ... I just make the small unimportant decisions about things like how we spend the money, where we live, how we bring the children up ..."

Life really is hilarious, isn't it? I know many of you long each day to hear that this pontificate has ended, and of course I'm totally with you really, deep down; but we shall lose an awful lot of laughs when it does end. I have manufactured neat little notices which I pin up whenever I come across an example of some non-reader of Laudato si having fly-tipped rubbish in a beauty spot; or on beaches covered with curial condoms: POPE FRANCIS HAS BEEN INFORMED, or BIG FATHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Perhaps PF should also devote his attention to the interplanetary environment and become ktistes, Founder, of the first colony on Mars (Belgranoville? Antinoopolis Martia?). The first colonists could consist of the surviving prominent clerical homosexuals listed in that gigantic dossier Pope Benedict left for his successor in the Papal Safe ...

"What's that you say, Holy Father? You never saw that dossier? Nobody ever told you there was a safe in your study? And, in any case, someone else had mislaid the key? If you do ever come across the dossier, of course you will take action? You only learned about it from the newspapers? Through absolutely no fault of your own you are surrounded by people who constantly misinform you and brief you badly?"

Of course, of course, of course. We know how it is. Don't worry. Nobody blames you. There there. Don't cry ...

An off-the-beaten track commentary based in large part on the personal testimony of Pius XII's legendary housekeeper-factotum, Mother Paschalina, about events and personages of which she had first-hand knowledge...

Sowers of the current chaos
by PAUL KENGOR

September 5, 2018

For keen insight into some of the malevolent forces at work in the Church right now, an unexpected source is a fascinating book by Father Charles Theodore Murr, titled The Godmother: Madre Pascalina. Published in May 2017, for the centenary of Fatima, it is one of the most interesting yet under-reported Catholic books of recent years.


The impetus was Fr. Murr’s utterly unique relationship with the figure closest to Pope Pius XII: Sister Josephine Lehnert (1894-1983). Mother Pascalina was so close to, so trusted by, and so influential to Pope Pius XII, that wise-guys around the Vatican alternately called her La Popessa and Virgo Potens (Powerful Virgin).

Charles Murr was a young American seminarian in Rome in the 1970s. He had a lifelong special devotion to Pius XII. He knew about the iconic Madre Pascalina. Over dinner one day at Il Scarpone restaurant with his colorful friend Monsignor Mario Marini —a classic boisterous Italian who held an important job at the Vatican Secretariat of State — Charlie learned that the old nun was still alive.

“She’s alive?” he asked with astonishment.

“Very much so,” said Marini, adding: “Not everyone’s as happy about that as you seem to be. No one knows better than La Madre where the bodies are buried.”

As a favor to Charlie, Marini made some moves within the Curia and secured an address and phone number. Charlie picked up a phone and took a chance. The rest is history — this history in this delightful book.

Charlie and Madre Pascalina first met in 1973, quickly becoming close friends. She would become his literal godmother at his ordination, the date of which she suggested: May 13, 1977, Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima. They met frequently until Charlie was sent to Mexico in 1979. He would see her once more in 1983, only weeks before her death.

The things she told him constitute a remarkable heretofore unpublished account of the Church in the twentieth century, from the historical to the theological to the ideological — and perhaps even to the level of diabolical, in some cases. At long last, Charles Murr has shared them.

The book’s accounts of Pope Pius XII, from the person who knew him best, are striking enough. So are the insights regarding nearly every twentieth-century pope and even would-be popes such as the excellent Cardinal Giuseppe Siri and Cardinal Giuseppe Benelli, who both barely missed the papacy in the late 1970s.

There are compelling stories I had never heard before about Padre Pio, about China’s Cardinal Thomas Tien Ken-Sin, and about Cardinal Edouard Gagnon, a dedicated French-Canadian — and future prefect for the Pontifical Commission for the Family — who was greatly frustrated by the failures of Paul VI to react to what Gagnon had documented (at Paul VI’s request) regarding wholesale corruption of the Curia.

There are also intriguing inside tales of the rivalry between Fulton Sheen and Cardinal Francis Spellman, and of the perfectly preserved corpse of Pius IX that Madre Pascalina was there to inspect first, many decades after the pontiff passed.

But getting closer to some of the seeds that were laid for the current chaos in the Church, Charles Murr takes a deep dig into the circumstances around Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli and Giovanni Battista Montini, who assumed the papacy as, respectively, John XXIII and Paul VI. The Madre wasn’t a big fan of either, particularly John XXIII, whom she dismissed as un buffone (“a clown”).

It wasn’t always the popes themselves that Pascalina held responsible for certain troubles — it was often the men they surrounded themselves with and naively listened to and were often misled by. Take Pope Paul VI, whose right-hand man in dealing with murderous communists was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, whose counsel on handling the Soviets and Communist Bloc despots was often downright lousy and counterproductive.

Of course, Casaroli and Paul VI and John XXIII were certainly not Marxists, but they thought they could deal with Marxists, that they could negotiate with them, that they could even accommodate them. Like Pope Francis, these two popes were heavily influenced by key advisers (whom they chose themselves) who were leftist-progressives and who gave them bad advice in dealing with enemies of the Church, sometimes internal enemies.

As to Paul VI, we know about the tragic case of Cardinal Mindszenty as an indicator of his embarrassments in trying to satisfy Moscow. Roncalli likewise had his share.

For Vatican II, according to Madre Pascalina, the one thing that Pope Pius XII had wanted ahead of time — and yes, she says it was Pius XII who had the initial idea for a council — was an unequivocal condemnation of communism. And yet, that was “the one thing that Roncalli absolutely refused to do.” (This adds new insight to my piece last year on Vatican II’s unpublished condemnations of communism.) This refusal, revealed Madre Pascalina to Charlie, was done as a promise to the Soviet government and the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church in the name of ecumenism, and it presaged later such moves by Paul VI.

As for Paul VI, whom many of us admire in key respects, The Godmother surely nailed it when she described him as “not a strong man” who was “always easily manipulated.” He frequently struggled to “see the obvious” and realize just how gravely “the Church had enemies,” even as he came to realize that “the smoke of Satan had entered the Church.”

I personally believe this is very fitting to our situation with our pope today, who I contend is far more naïve than nefarious, duped than duplicitous —but has nonetheless created his own terrible mess by surrounding himself with progressive Church officials who have served him dreadfully.

Indeed, there is so much in this book that is important if not profound to current realities as we watch the crises in the Church unfold, from my home dioceses in Western Pennsylvania to Cardinal McCarrick to the unacceptable happenings at the Vatican under the nose of Pope Francis.

Charles Murr calls attention to some dubious characters, if not outright evildoers, in the latter twentieth-century Church. And that’s where Murr’s eyewitness testimony, based on what he saw in Rome in the 1970s and what Madre Pascalina conveyed to him, is so rich and relevant. What we’re seeing right now are the bitter fruits of the rotten seeds sown by a network of progressives, liberals, and the very “modernist” heresy that Pope Pius X warned about in 1907.

Madre Pascalina told Charlie that Pope Pius XII was convinced, just as St. Pope Pius X was convinced and officially declared, that modernism is “the synthesis of all heresies.” The Madre herself was convinced of this, declaring: “And the disgraziati [wretches] behind modernism were the same disgraziati who, for centuries, had been behind every plot to destroy the Church.” Who were they? She looked heavenward and explained to Charlie: “the Freemasons; the liberals; i progressisti [the progressives] … atheists, Marxists, communists... Whatever the latest masquerade that “Lucifer goes by today…. I often wonder, what name will he go by tomorrow?”

Well, tomorrow in Madre’s time is now today in ours. Fill in the blank with the latest modernist label. And whatever its manifestation, she remarked, “evil is evil.”

Pius XII, said La Madre, wanted to be briefed at all times about the activities of these groups on their various fronts, particularly i communisti in the universities. He smelled them in the 1950s. And for Pope Pius XII, she said, “the worst” of his enemies were “liberals from inside the Church.”

This brings me to maybe the most ignominious villain in Charles Murr’s book: Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio. Murr reports that it was Baggio who appointed so many of the “progressive” prelates who enabled the wreckage we’ve seen in recent decades. Baggio was Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops from 1973-84, which oversees the selection of new bishops. (Cardinal McCarrick, incidentally, was made an auxiliary bishop in New York in 1977 and then bishop in New Jersey in 1981 before becoming archbishop of Newark in 1986.)

Baggio, Charles Murr contends, was not merely a progressive/modernist but a Freemason. He died in March 1993, living the last decade of his life with (in Murr’s words) “Pope John Paul II watching his every move.” The Polish pontiff put the former “Appointer of Bishops” in charge of printing and distributing Vatican City postage stamps. It was a demotion and slap-down, but the damage was done. The seeds for the bitter harvest were in place.

I asked Murr last week whether he saw the hand of the likes of Baggio in the current crisis. “Unquestionably,” he responded. Murr stressed that Baggio dedicated “much time and very particular attention” to potential “archbishop material,” since it was from such persons that cardinals were created.

Baggio spent summer vacations visiting out of the way places in the world; places where he had named the archbishops. He would be their house guest, and when they traveled to Rome on Church business, Baggio made sure they saw him in his prefect’s office in the Congregation for Bishops.

Murr said flatly that Baggio deliberated and exclusively created liberal bishops, and that any orthodox bishop or archbishop who managed to be named during those years occurred only due to dramatic efforts by orthodox members of the Roman Curia to convince Pope John Paul II to override Baggio. These exceptions infuriated Baggio.

As Murr today ponders the misdirection that the Catholic Church has often mistakenly taken these past 50 years, he notes that Madre Pascalina foresaw what would go wrong. While there was plenty of blame to go around, including during the “great disintegration” that included not only the Paul VI years but carried over into many of the John Paul II years, “the principal culprit” was Sebastiano Baggio, who “highhandedly appointed the world’s bishops for those extremely crucial, post-Council years…. He made certain that the new breed of bishops was, in a word, liberal.”

Pope Paul VI failed to deal with Baggio. When Charlie’s good friend, Edouard Gagnon, fulfilled Paul VI’s request to provide an in-depth report on what that “smoke of Satan” inside the Church looked like, Gagnon was practically despondent when the old, ailing Papa Montini made clear that he would choose to punt — that is, to pass along Gagnon’s investigation to the next pope.

The next pope would be John Paul I, who attempted to discipline Sebastiano Baggio. How did that go? That night was not a good one. In one of the most dramatic sections of his book, Fr. Charles Murr writes this of John Paul I and Cardinal Baggio: “The last person to see him [John Paul I] alive,” Gagnon told Murr, “was none other than Sebastiano Baggio. He [Baggio] entered the papal apartments after eight o’clock that night; the last person to speak, to scream, at the pope.” Following Cardinal Benelli’s wise counsel, Pope John Paul I had just removed Baggio from the Congregation for Bishops. The new pope died right after that.

Make of that what you will. I can neither add to that nor confirm.

Of course, Cardinal Baggio was not the only person causing mischief and mayhem. It was a team effort by multiple players of bad faith.

Madre Pascalina called out the liberal Archbishop Jean Jadot as a “colossal mistake” to be papal nuncio to the United States. She believed he would (in Murr’s words) “ruin the body of bishops” in America. He held that position from 1973-80 (again overlapping McCarrick’s appointment as bishop). Agreeing with La Madre was Mario Marini, who called Jadot “a mediocrity” whose “right niche” would have been “dog-catcher in some remote Belgian hamlet.”

Still another Church official who seems to have caused serious problems was Cardinal Annibale Bugnini, through his appalling “liturgy reforms.” Murr likewise casts a light on Bugnini.

Madre Pascalina lamented to Charles Murr that hundreds of thousands of religious had left the Church between 1965 and 1975. But still worse, she grimaced, “you should see the liberal tyrants who remain!”

In all, such were the kind of men in the Church who appointed the kind of men in the Church who have disappointed us so often.

Alas, here’s an interesting distinction underscored by Murr: He says that Cardinal Gagnon explained to him hundreds of times that the enemies of the Church were not out to totally destroy the Church, because the membership and organization of the Church were far too precious; rather, they wanted to control the Church according to their own vision and scheme. They wanted to remold and use it. They wanted it to be their Church remade in their image. [Exactly Jorge Bergoglio's strategy which has apparently 'succeeded' so far because among all the 'enemies of the Church', he happened to have been elected pope.]

Needless to say, this book (and this article) is not a comprehensive accounting of all that has hurt the Roman Catholic Church over recent decades. There were plenty of insidious influences from all sorts of destructive forces. Nonetheless, we should not look past these progressive modernists in the Church. Madre Pascalina saw them coming, and the chaos that would ensue, and Fr. Charles Murr offers this crucial timely reminder of who they were — and are still.

Yet another collective letter to the pope:
Will he even acknowledge getting them?

From the Catholic Herald (UK):

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One week after thousands of Catholic laywomen signed a letter asking Pope Francis to respond to their questions about the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, a group of Catholic laymen have penned their own letter to the pope and American bishops, calling for an investigation into the Church’s role in preventing sexual abuse.

The letter is hosted on the website “Catholic Men United for Christ,” but it is not sponsored by any group or organization. The signatories of the letter pledge to do some form of fasting on each Friday starting Sept. 7, and continuing through 2018....

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This letter reflects the personal initiative of the individual Catholic men signing it. Professional affiliations are listed for identification purposes only. This letter is not sponsored by any group or organization. Signers are encouraged to engage traditional fasts involving food and/or drink, but the exact nature of each signer’s fast is a matter of individual discretion. Signers are encouraged to undertake a difficult but not overly burdensome fast.

September 5, 2018

Dear Holy Father and Bishops of the United States:

As Catholic laymen, we are faithful husbands, fathers, business leaders, lawyers, tradesmen, medical doctors, professors, teachers, artists, and leaders of Catholic lay apostolates. But most fundamentally, we are men in love with Christ and His Church, and it is for this reason that we beseech you to purge the corruption which has so grotesquely disfigured the face of Christ’s Bride.

The present scandals have placed our wives, sisters, brothers, and children in danger. Therefore, echoing the words St. Catherine of Siena addressed to Pope Gregory XI, we beseech you to “sleep no longer, and raise the standard [of Christ] courageously.”

The Church needs purification, and by virtue of your offices as our shepherds, no one is more qualified to bring about this purification than yourselves. We beg you to do so without a moment’s delay.

Taking courage from St. Paul, and knowing that “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rm 5:20), we are appalled by the recent abuses. We have read of the allegations against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick; the grand jury report regarding the Church in Pennsylvania; the horrific abuse in Honduras and Chile; and the rampant reports of clerical homosexual activity, pedophilia, and ephebophilia throughout the global presbytery.

Most recently, we have read Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s testimony alleging that bishops in senior leadership positions within both the Holy See and the United States have covered up sexual abuse, evidencing widespread and systemic corruption throughout the Church’s hierarchy.

Holy Father, we come to you for answers. You personally have been faced with allegations. These allegations have been leveled by a high-ranking church official, Archbishop Viganò. Further, many bishops in the United States have publicly stated that they believe these allegations should be investigated. We implore you to address them. Specifically, we request that you answer the questions posed by our sisters in their letter to you, issued on August 30, 2018.

Moreover, regardless of the veracity of Archbishop Viganò’s allegations, our concerns about corruption remain. Your Holiness, Your Eminences, and Your Excellencies: Amidst widespread global abuse, coverups, and hierarchical failure, what are you doing and what will you do to protect the people of God?

We urge you to answer this simple question because the cost of the episcopal corruption is catastrophic. At present, many families are reluctant to send their sons to seminary. Efforts at evangelization have been crippled. And distrust from donors jeopardizes the Church’s ability to serve the poor, promote environmental stewardship, and carry out works of mercy.

One Catholic mother has said that this crisis will either reinvigorate the Church or cause an exodus. We beg you to encourage reinvigoration through radical purification, realizing that you are at risk of losing credibility in the eyes of millions of Catholics.

Holy Father, we are personally committed to our own purity and the purification of the Church. We are reminded of the words of our Lord in John 8:7: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.” All sin, including our own, weakens the Church. As men, we must all have the strength to seek the Lord’s healing.

For this reason, we will begin with ourselves, examining our own consciences and renewing our own commitment to chastity. We will work to build up our own families, especially our sons, and our own communities.

Further, the signers of this letter commit to serious and difficult fasting for the next seventeen Fridays, beginning this Friday, September 7 through the end of the calendar year. We will not relent. We will embrace suffering as penance for our own sins and the sins of the Church. We desire nothing more than to become saints amidst scandal.

Holy Father and Bishops of the United States, we plead for justice for the victims of abuse. We add our voices to those of the bishops who have called for an investigation of the Church hierarchy, both in our own country and in the Vatican. This investigation should be carried out by faithful lay men and women. Further, we encourage other groups to make their voices heard by writing more letters of this nature.

Finally, we praise our Lord Jesus Christ, who in His abundant mercy founded the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We affirm our hope for the future of the Church. We ask you to be courageous and not afraid. We affirm our affection and gratitude for the holy priests and bishops who have served us faithfully as stewards of the mysteries of Christ.

The Church’s history has seen many seasons. Nevertheless, after the dark season of winter comes spring, and we pray that the difficulties of the present time will be surpassed by the victories to come. Trusting in our Lord Jesus Christ, we have full confidence that the light of the Holy Trinity will break through this present darkness revealing the full beauty of our beloved Church.

We promise our lives, our talents, and our resources for the purification and renewal of the Catholic Church. Relying on the intercession of the Blessed Mother, we will fight for this cause to the very end.

Your sons and brothers in Christ

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Click here to sign the letter:
catholicmenunited.org/#sign
List of signatories so far (6989 as of 2pm today) may be found at
https://catholicmenunited.org/

My deepest apologies for having failed to post the Catholic women's letter in a timely manner:

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This letter reflects the personal initiative of the individual Catholic women signing this letter, and is not sponsored by any group or organization.

August 30, 2018

His Holiness, Pope Francis
Vatican City

Your Holiness:
You have said that you seek “a more incisive female presence in the Church,” and that “women are capable of seeing things with a different angle from [men], with a different eye. Women are able to pose questions that we men are not able to understand.”

We write to you, Holy Father, to pose questions that need answers.

We are Catholic women deeply committed to our faith and profoundly grateful for Church teachings, the Sacraments, and the many good bishops and priests who have blessed our lives.

Our hearts are broken, our faith tested, by the escalating crisis engulfing our beloved Church. We are angry, betrayed and disillusioned. The pain and suffering of the victims never ends, as each news cycle brings more horrific revelations of sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, cover-ups, and deceit—even at the Church’s highest levels.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s recent statement impels us to reach out to you directly for answers. His testimony accuses you, Holy Father, and highly placed cardinals of turning a blind eye to former Cardinal McCarrick’s egregious behavior, and promoting this predator as a global spokesman and spiritual leader. Is this true?

These are devastating allegations. As USCCB President Cardinal Daniel D. DiNardo recently stated, “The questions raised deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence.” We agree.

Several crucial questions raised by Archbishop Viganò’s statement, however, require neither lengthy investigations nor physical evidence. They require only your direct response, Holy Father. When reporters questioned you recently about Archbishop Viganò’s charges, you replied, “I will not say a single word on this.” You told reporters to “read the statement carefully and make your own judgment.

To your hurting flock, Pope Francis, your words are inadequate. They sting, reminiscent of the clericalism you so recently condemned. We need leadership, truth, and transparency. We, your flock, deserve your answers now.

Specifically, we humbly implore you to answer the following questions, as the answers are surely known to you. Archbishop Viganò says that in June 2013 he conveyed to you this message (in essence) about then-Cardinal McCarrick: “He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
- Is this true?
- What did Archbishop Viganò convey to you in June 2013 about then-Cardinal McCarrick?
- When did you learn of any allegations of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct with adults by then-Cardinal McCarrick?
- When did you learn of Pope Benedict’s restrictions on then-Cardinal McCarrick? And did you release then-Cardinal McCarrick from any of Pope Benedict’s restrictions?

Holy Father, in your letter to the People of God on the scandals, you wrote: “An awareness of sin helps us to acknowledge the errors, the crimes and the wounds caused in the past and allows us, in the present, to be more open and committed along a journey of renewed conversion.” That’s why we expect you, our Holy Father, to be honest with us.

Please do not turn from us. You’ve committed yourself to changing clerical ways in the Church. That a cardinal would prey on seminarians is abhorrent. We need to know we can trust you to be honest with us about what happened. The victims who have suffered so greatly need to know they can trust you. Families, who will be the source of the Church’s renewal, need to know we can trust you, and thus trust the Church.

Please do not keep us at arm’s length on these questions. We are faithful daughters of the Church who need the truth so we can help rebuild. We are not second-class Catholics to be brushed off while bishops and cardinals handle matters privately. We have a right to know. We have a right to your answers.

We are wives, mothers, single women, consecrated women, and religious sisters.

We are the mothers and sisters of your priests, seminarians, future priests and religious. We are the Church’s lay leaders, and the mothers of the next generation.

We are professors in your seminaries, and leaders in Catholic chanceries and institutions.

We are theologians, evangelists, missionaries and founders of Catholic apostolates.

We are the people who sacrifice to fund the Church’s good work.

We are the backbone of Catholic parishes, schools, and dioceses.

We are the hands, the feet, and the heart of the Church.

In short, we are the Church, every bit as much as the cardinals and bishops around you.

Holy Father, we are the “incisive presence” the Church needs, and we need your answers.

With love for Christ and the Church,[/DIM/

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Click here to sign the letter:
catholicwomensforum.org/letter-to-pope-francis/#sign
Click here to see all signatories so far (39,773 as of 2:10 pm today):
catholicwomensforum.org/letter-to-pope-francis/

And here's what one American priest has to say about THE CRISIS:

Babylon comes knocking:
What The Church must do now
by Fr. Nathan Reesman

September 6, 2018

These have been sad weeks for Catholics across the globe and especially in the United States, as more and more headlines have spilled forth a seemingly endless stream of failures in the Church’s handling of sexual abuse, of clerical power, and of topics pertaining to sexuality in general.

Our present mega-storm is composed of several tempests all drawn together. First came the revelations about Archbishop McCarrick’s behavior, then the Pennsylvania report, and then the uproar in my own Archdiocese over a retreat for gay priests. The escalation of the debate about the nature and acceptability of same sex attraction, in and outside of the clergy, was taken to new levels.

As if that were not enough, there came the bombshell testimony of Archbishop Vigano describing a web of protection and cover-up surrounding Archbishop McCarrick that ensnared, by name, several prominent prelates, implicating even Pope Francis himself in the sheltering of a known sexual pervert. What we are left with is a mess of epic proportions.

What’s worse has been the explosion of a civil war, out into the open, among some of the bishops, the varying wings of the Catholic and secular press (along conservative and liberal lines predictably enough), over the need for the Pope to give an answer to these claims. Several voices of the laity have added their voices to the same cry for transparency and accountability.

Meanwhile, it appears to us on the outside that Rome fiddles while the Church burns. The Holy Father is said to be calm and serene in the midst of the firestorm, rather like Nero playing his fabled fiddle.

Many of the laity and clergy who have no means of influence feel the sickening sense of helplessness as this drags on with no clear movement toward resolution, and no end in sight. Even if Pope Francis were to resign, as some have demanded, it is not clear what that solves in light of the questions now swirling around so many others in the College of Cardinals and in the hierarchy.

This is what it feels like to be drowning in spiritually violent seas.
- Our teachings on the very important matters of human sexuality have been emptied of any power or coherency.
- Our leadership has zero credibility.
- Our survivors of sexual abuse are still in pain.
- Our laity are feeling ignored and abandoned by the thousands.
- Our Church appears to be tumbling down.
This is a spiritual and moral heartbreak of epic magnitude.

The Cry of the Righteous One Who Waits for Justice
The Scriptures offer key insights on how to understand the causes, the meaning, and the remedy for our current situation. The psalms and the prophets poignantly articulate the cry of the righteous one who cries out to heaven for justice and feels ignored. The righteous one suffers violence and pain at the hands of the wicked and the powerful. These are cries of lament in the face of forces that seem intransigent and well outside of earthly control. Where is God?

The most poignant Scriptural laments express the sad realization that calamities have been occurring at the hands of fellow Israelites. The worst hurts are caused by those within the chosen fold, by the anointed leaders, while the priests and professional prophets (the clergy) stand by.

The same psalms and prophets also speak of confidence in God’s saving power, trusting that in the end the righteous and the innocent will be vindicated, while the wicked will be punished and brought to justice. If it does not happen in this life, then it will happen in the next. These days we, who have no official authority to make changes, find our voice echoed in that of the righteous one who painfully waits God’s justice.

The Destruction of the Temple Was Permitted for a Reason
The Scriptures gradually coalesced around the understanding that the destruction that befell the Israelites, most devastatingly with the Babylonian destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, was the result of the infidelity, hubris, and self-satisfied smugness of the chosen nation itself. God himself permits necessary suffering to come to the people He loves in order to teach them to repent.

Babylon has been knocking at the gates of the Church for a while now under a guise of many faces, brought on by multiple layers of infidelity and hubris. The prophets speak of an abandonment of the covenant. In our day there is the infidelity of decades of gradual watering down of the Scriptural and theological teachings about sexuality, especially the sensitive subject of homosexuality, during which the Church and the wider culture became slowly unmoored from the rock of Divine Revelation.

The prophets condemn the shepherds who prey on their sheep. In our era, over decades, the shepherds preyed on the vulnerable for the twisted sexual gratification of the clergy, fueled by the abuse of clerical power. Such evil rots the Church from the inside out.

The prophets speak of faithless leaders. In our era, over decades, there has been an abject failure of judgment and leadership on the part of the hierarchy who did not act to correct the offenses against doctrine, or the offenses against the vulnerable.

The prophets speak of bad politics and the forming of camps in favor of divergent agendas. In our era there has emerged, over decades, “conservative” versus “liberal” fault lines in the Church, causing earthquakes throughout our seminaries, our parishes, our dioceses, our presbyterate , and even between our recent popes. What gradually became more important than protecting young people was the question “which side of the theological battle are you on?”

Little else can explain how it is possible for Pope Francis to, allegedly, ignore the warnings of the leadership of the prior regime other than the suspicion that a member of the “conservative” theological camp was trying to smear a member of the “liberal” camp, and therefore he was dismissed as a zealot.

Similar arguments have been advanced to explain how Saint John Paul II became blind to the grievous sins of Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ. This type of ideological filtering that leads to tragic misjudgments of facts is occurring these days at all levels of the Church.

The abuses of power by the clergy do not confine themselves only to sexual abuse of minors, teens, and seminarians. It is an abuse of power for clerics and theologians, especially those who make the popular media circuits, to set themselves over and above the revealed tradition of the Church by seeking to make murky our doctrines on sex, sin, and grace. Those who suffer most are those who need clear teachings to sort out the muck of their own moral messes. They are the vulnerable who are led astray by clerics on power trips.

The parallels of our own day with those of the prophets are clear. Therefore we should not be surprised if our current strongholds and structures, like the Temple of old, are allowed to burn down.

The Necessary Transparency of the Gospels
Not only are the psalms and prophets helpful to understanding our situation, but instructive also are the Gospel narratives and the writings of the New Testament. In the ancient Church, whose picture is painted in the divinely inspired writings of the Bible, we are given a model of how to handle the reality of a failure of judgment on the part of the Church’s leaders, namely, the Apostles themselves.

The Apostles, and their close followers, are the ones who told the story of their encounter with the Lord during His life, on the last night of His life, and in the days of His death and resurrection. It is a very unflattering picture of themselves that they paint for all the world to see. There is no attempt to protect their reputation by papering over their own bad judgment and failures.

Their transparency intentionally serves to demonstrate the Savior’s power. God saves, not us. It is His message, not ours. His Sacraments have power not because ministers are holy, but instead because God is holy. His Church is true not because men have kept it going, but rather because God pushes her forward, through storm after storm, allowing with great care all the buffeting that she must endure for her good.

What We Need to Do Now
In the light of the Scriptures, I propose the following remedies for the epic mess in which we currently find ourselves.

First, the Church herself, as an entity, needs to go to Confession. It is true that the majority of the abuse cases roiling the news and the public now occurred a long time ago. However, our attitude about this fact should be the same attitude any good pastor has when someone approaches him in Confession, explaining that it’s been 40 years since his or her last Confession. The answer from our side of the screen is always: “Confess it all, even the things that happened 40 years ago. Then you will know healing and peace.” The Church needs to go to Confession, and we need to confess everything.

Secondly, we need to confess to the civil authorities.We need to request that every attorney general, in every State, and also any international authority with any teeth, conduct a full investigation of every American Archdiocese, and of the Vatican, of how the issue of clerical abuse has been handled. For a complete picture, those same civil authorities also need to be given an accounting of our handling of finances and contributions right down to the local parish level.

Sadly enough, I do not think we are capable of making a full confession without the assistance of an external agent. For the record, I do not trust the secular and anti-Catholic agenda of many of the civic powers that will no doubt have to carry out this embarrassing exercise, but the fact is that if we are honest then we have nothing to fear. If we are dishonest we need to suffer. Did not the Lord freely place himself into the hands of his enemies for the salvation of the world? What else is there to say?

Thirdly, I join my voice to others who have already called for an inclusion of the lay faithful in the process of making priest assignments within dioceses and bishop appointments throughout the world.I also echo the recent calls for the creation of a lay review board for accusations against bishops.There are challenges with this to be sure, for example, who decides which laity are included, but nonetheless there is immense benefit to seeking the wisdom of professional lay leaders in evaluating the suitability for clerical leadership within the Church.

Lay professionals offer a vital extra pair of eyes on the judgments of clerics. One occupational hazard of the priestly vocation comes from the “power of the keys,” or of “binding and loosing” that is of the essence of Holy Orders itself. All bishops and priests exercise this role of discernment and judgment within the confessional. It is the weighing, with hopefully tender heart and sound theology, of the gravity of a person’s sins, as well as their sincerely expressed desire to change, in order to extend absolution.

This duty of priests hearing confessions is unique on the face of this earth. After years and years of it, we run the risk of developing a mistakenly high tolerance for the failures of others, as well as an overly optimistic view of how some situations may change with time. Priests see miracles of grace and transformation all the time in the personal lives of our flocks, and we do accept God’s awesome power to transform even hardened sinners into changed men and women. One can see how an overly optimistic mentality about conversion could have been applied to personnel decisions of priestly assignments, especially when there were no professional laity involved to check our reasoning about difficult cases.

Lastly, the laity and the clergy need to be inspired to take up true, internal reform. This requires embracing the fullness of the Scriptures, the fullness of our teachings especially those pertaining to sexuality, returning to penance and fasting, increasing our prayer, embracing simplicity, assisting the needy, and being ardent in devotion to the Lord Jesus. From such reform movements new lay sodalities grow, and new clerical associations are born. From those groups, new bishops are chosen, new cardinals are named, and authentically reforming popes are elected. This all takes generations. It will come again. I dare say it must come soon.

Only a New Generation Will Move Us Forward
Until the reforms I speak of come about, we find ourselves in the psalms and with the prophets. We find ourselves as well on the long journey out of Egypt, a time of real testing and trial. None of the Egypt generation were allowed to see the Promised Land, including Moses, because of their sins. A new generation had to move forward with God. Similarly, a generation or two were lost in the Babylonian Exile, and the Temple was burned, and the priests were taken captive, before God would again allow them all to return home.

If we end up losing it all, then one must conclude it was time for it to go. Such things are necessary in every era. It is how God purifies His chosen people.

Father Reesman is a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He is the Shared Pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish and of Saint Frances Cabrini Parish, both in West Bend, Wisconsin. He is also the Courage and EnCourage chaplain for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Courage is an apostolate of the Catholic Church that ministers to men and women who experience same sex attraction.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/09/2018 21:10]

The Vatican corrects the pope's Freudian slip
on psychiatry to 'treat homosexuality before 20'
Everything having to do with the current politics of sexual minorities revolves around
the lie that homosexuality is completely normal and only 'unhealthy' if it’s suppressed.
by Jim Russell

September 6, 2018

In many ways, actions speak louder than words. This is especially true when the action is the elimination of certain words.

Such was the case with the Vatican’s recent removal of certain words from the official transcript of Pope Francis’s remarks during his in-flight press conference after his trip to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families on August 26.

Apparently Francis forgot a major taboo when it comes to talking about homosexuality. He used the “p-word”—“psychiatry”—in reference to addressing homosexuality in children. He said, regarding homosexuality: “When it shows itself from childhood, there is a lot that can be done through psychiatry, to see how things are. It is something else if it shows itself after 20 years.”

When the Vatican published its official transcript of the Pope’s remarks, however, the sentence was changed to omit the explicit reference to psychiatric intervention.

According to one report, a Vatican spokeswoman justified omitting this exact quote in the official transcript like this:

When the pope referred to ‘psychiatry,’ it is clear that he was doing it to highlight an example of ‘things that can be done.’ But with that word he didn’t mean to say that it [homosexuality] was a ‘mental illness.’

This seemingly small change strikes at the bedrock of our current culture’s attitude toward homosexuality, both in the secular world and increasingly in the Catholic Church, too: Is homosexuality psychologically normal and healthy, or not?

From a Catholic perspective, the answer is simple: It’s not normal or healthy. It’s unhealthy at the psychological level, as well as the spiritual level.

Say this today, and you will be quickly dismissed as “homophobic.” These statements contradict the opinion of mental health professionals who say homosexuality is completely normal and only “unhealthy” if it’s suppressed.

Everything — everything — having to do with the current politics of “sexual minorities” revolves around this lie; acceptance of it is the difference between being “awake” or not. It’s seen as a great advancement in human development, to say that not only are people “born that way” but that God created people “that way.”

This is a death-dealing falsehood from the Father of Lies. So when the Holy Father himself gets “edited” for the sake of preserving this lie, it is truly diabolical.

While there are many ways that our sexual appetites and attractions—and even our willful choices about love itself—can get distorted, if the sexual inclination hard-wired by God into human nature gets distorted, we’re dealing with something very different from mere temptations to lust or mere unhealthy desires.

We’re dealing with a distortion of God’s plan for the nature of sexuality itself—imprinted as it is on human nature, on every human person God creates. Physical factors might be associated with same-sex desires (e.g., genetic or biological predispositions toward homosexuality, even though these have yet to be demonstrated scientifically), but from the perspective of Catholic teaching the homosexual inclination is a malaise rooted in the human soul.

Keep in mind that God’s creation cannot simply be “unmade” by human weakness or desires. Temptation and sin can and do wound human nature, but the Catholic Church teaches that human nature in itself is not made depraved or corrupted by concupiscence or sin.

The homosexual condition is a psychological deficit that has a psychological genesis. In plain terms it is a “mental illness,” but plain terms aren’t always the best terms, and I understand that. “Mental illness,” for some people, evokes images of someone truly crazed, deeply unstable, etc. But there is a vast spectrum of diagnoses of “mental illness” that ought not to carry such stigma. It’s just that no one is willing to make important distinctions like this in regard to “sexual minorities.”

Until Catholics in great numbers stop pretending that having a homosexual inclination is merely one way of being a healthy, normal human person, and that all the Church requires is “no homosexual sex acts,” the lie will continue to win every time.

Turning the tide — the tsunami — on this is a monumental project, but one at the very heart of addressing our Church’s abuse crisis, our overall chastity crisis, and our massive cultural crisis.

And, if one single symptom of this crisis speaks volumes, it’s the fact that a Pope — a successor of St. Peter — can’t speak the truth on this issue without having that truth elided by “the Vatican” itself.


One of Bergoglio's delusions is that he is subtle and clever when he finds a way to strike out at his critics indirectly, especially during his Casa Santa Marta homilettes. But he is never really subtle or clever, merely opportunistic, using the Gospel of the day in a most self-serving way that is, alas, often inept, and more likely as not to backfire on him. As with his 'wild dogs' homilette on Sept. 3. First, Aldo Maria Valli reports how the Italian news agencies reported it, and contests Bergoglio's self-serving words to what Gregory the Great says in his Pastoral Rule. (Somehow I think, Bergoglio may never have read that all-important 'manual' for pastors.)

To speak or to remain silent?
Comparing Bergoglio’s thoughts
to those of St Gregory the Great
Translated from

Sept 3, 2018

Today, Pope Francis resumed saying daily Mass at the chapel of Casa Santa Marta after a summer break. Following are some excerpts reported of his homily in the Italian media:

ANSA (Italian news agency):

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“Truth is gentle, truth is silent… For people who only seek out scandal, who only seek division,” the only way to follow is that of ‘silence’ and ‘prayer’. Pope Francis underscored this today in his morning homily in the middle of continuing media furor over the Testimony by the former Nuncio to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano.

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AGI (ANOTHER Italian news agency):

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Pope Francis indirectly referred to the accusations made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano in the first Mass he celebrated at Casa Santa Marta after a summer break. He took off from the Gospel in which Jesus, returning to Nazareth, was received with suspicion by his townmates. Francis read JJesus's reaction as an invitation to “reflect on how we act in our daily life when there are misunderstandings" and to understand “how the father of lies, the accuser, the devil, works to destroy the unity of a family, of a people…

“They weren’t persons but a pack of wild dogs who chased Jesus out of Nazareth. They were not rational, they screamed. But Jesus was silent. They led him to the edge of a cliff to ‘hurl him down headlong’. Yet this passage of the Gospel ends with the words, “But he passed through the midst of them and went away” (Lk 4,30). Jesus’s dignity – With his silence he triumphed over that savage mob, and went away”.]

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[The sacrilegious effrontery to compare himself to Jesus in circumstances which are far from analogous!]

Adnkronos (German news agency):

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The desire for ‘scandal’ and ‘division’ can be opposed only by sielence and prayer. Thus, according to SIR [news agency of the Italian bishops’ conference], Pope Francis in his homily at the first morning Mass he celebrated at the chapel of Casa Santa Marta after a summer break. “Truth is gentle, truth is silent”, said the Pope, according to Vatican News, in commenting on the gospel from St Luke, in which Jesus, returning to Nazareth, is received by his townmates with suspicion”.

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L’Osservatore Romano:

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«Silence and prayer… for people who do not have good will, those who only seek scandal, who only seek division, who only seek destruction, even within families”. It is the recommendation made by Pope Francis in the Mass he celebrated on Monday, Sept. 3, at Casa Santa Marta, commenting on the Gospel episode of Jesus being chased out of the synogogue in Nazareth. The Pontiff called on his listeners to ask the Lord for "the grace to discern when we should speak and when we should be silent. This, in our whole life: at work, at home, in society, all our life. This way, we shall imitate Jesus even more… It will be the Lord who will triumph, whether it be, as in this case, with the dignity that Jesus freed himself from those who wanted to hurl himself down, or with the dignity of his triumphal Resurrection, after the Cross.

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Did the pope say those words, thinking of Mons. Vigano, as many commentators concluded? We cannot know. [But we certainly can infer.]

In any case, Sept. 3 happens to be the annual liturgical commemoration of St. Gregory the Great (540-604), the great pope who, despite living through one of the darkest eras in European history, and despite being frail and sickly, defended Christianity like an indomitable warrior.

It therefore seems useful to recall some words which the great saint and Doctor of the Church, patron of all pontiffs, left us on the subject of speaking and silence.

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The ruler should be discreet in keeping silence, profitable in speech; lest he either utter what ought to be suppressed or suppress what he ought to utter. For, as incautious speaking leads into error, so indiscreet silence leaves in error those who might have been instructed. For often improvident rulers, fearing to lose human favour, shrink timidly from speaking freely the things that are right; and, according to the voice of the Truth (John 10:12), serve unto the custody of the flock by no means with the zeal of shepherds, but in the way of hirelings; since they fly when the wolf comes if they hide themselves under silence. (Pastoral Rule, Book 2, Chap. 4)

"Meanwhile it is also necessary for the ruler to keep wary watch, lest the lust of pleasing men assail him; lest, when he studiously penetrates the things that are within, and providently supplies the things that are without, he seeks to be beloved of those that are under him more than truth; lest, while, supported by his good deeds, he seems not to belong to the world, self-love estrange him from his Maker. [Pastoral Rule Book 2, Chap. 8]

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The pope against 'wild dogs'
by Marcello Veneziani
Translated from his blog on

September 5, 2018

No, Holiness, you cannot call your neighbor ‘wild dogs’, especially if you are referring to Catholics, Christians, believers.

‘Dogs’ is the derogatory term that Muslims use to describe Christians and other ‘infidels’. Your predecessors as pope referred to the most heartless of terrorists as ‘men of the Red Brigades’ or ‘Mmn of ISIS’. Never dogs. To descend to that level is unworthy of a Holy Father. As you said, silence and prayer would have been the more dignified response.

Please, let us not prettify what is ugly. We know what vermins are breeding in the intestines of the Curia and other base levels of theChurch. Pedophilia, clerical sex abuses of any kind and the ‘gay lobby’ that Bergoglio himself referred to once upon a time, are only some of the dark corners of the Church. That very sex abuse whose prevalence is disconcerting, a ‘collegiality’ of silence and cover-ups, reciprocal complicity, in all their individual as well as collective and frequent episodes.

But beyond those turbid waters of sexual misdeeds, there are at least two others: One focused on crimes, and the other on the unbridled war to gain roles of clerical authority. They certainly were not ‘born’ under Bergoglio, but they make up the other face of the Church, its corrupted face, misdeeds that have had their highs and lows over the centuries, but especially so after atheism and nihilism had corrupted the faith of even high-placed ministers of God.

One might think of invoking dogs to ‘heal’ the Church, but the ‘Lord’s dogs’ (Domini cani), as the Dominicans, including Thomas Aquinas, called themselves.

How have the Bergoglians reacted to the precise accusations found in Mons. Vigano’s testimony? On the one hand, by denigrating Vigano himself, and on the other, by embarking on the most classic of conspiracy theories.

A terrible double fault, since they both avoid the principal questions:
- Are those accusations founded or not?
- Are there circumstantial and convincing answers to the more precise accsations?
- Can it be demonstrated that the documents Vigano cites in support of his charges are false or dubious, or are they, lamentably, genuine?

Instead, they react with insults and complaints of conspiracies, just like the communist regimes reacted to any dissent or scandal, alleging conspiracies by dark reactionary forces and thus to justify bloody repressions.

We have heard Bergoglians in high office, present in all the media as one voice without the least contradiction, following this unworthy scenario of low politics and ugly government. And we have heard them denounce the supposed entanglement between reactionary conspiracy and sovereignty-asserting politics, as does, for instance, the historian-defender of Bergoglio, Alberto Melloni.

I do not intend to return to the excruciation raised by the McCarrick dossier, nor do I have any private sources to dispute its veracity or lack thereof, but I will focus on this crucial accusation: that someone wants to divide the Church and cast her into secular politics whether it is reactionary or souverainist.

Let us go back to what has happened in the past 50 years or so. Vatican II split the Church into two factions – conservatives and progressivists. Political categories which entered the Church with the ‘spirit of the times’, since that Council had opened the doors to the ‘life breath’ of the era, which meant an opening to the left in Italy.

That rupture continued with Pope Paul VI, became acute with the liquidation of the traditional Mass, with the introduction of the guitar and beat music in Church, with Third-Worldism, up to the Lefebvre ‘schism’. All of it defied by phenomena of popular devotion, as in the case of Padre Pio, a phenomenon of religious populism, a saint called forth by the people.

The progressivists Catholics of Vatican II always felt closer to non-Catholic progressivists than they did to Catholic non-progressivists. A choice which meant that Catholicism became a secondary characteristic to progressivism, on the part of the progressivists. The rupture in the Church goes back to that.

Indeed, reactionary conspiracies and the political choices of the ‘right’ had nothing to do with it. The arrival of Karol the Great, John Paul II, repaired the rupture, because he re-opened the doors to ‘conservatives’ , to Lefebvre, to Padre Pio, to Tradition, and to Europe, without closing them to progressivists and anti-capitalists. He defended the poor, the exploited, the desperate; he criticized the sated but desperate West without losing for the Church her pastoral and spiritual role in the heart of Christian civilization.

The same line was followed by a philosopher Pope like Ratzinger who was always considered conservative, and who was attacked far more rabidly by the media [among whom he had few supporters] than Bergoglio but would never even have thought of calling his detractors ‘wild dogs’.

More importantly, the Church under Benedict XVI was never a divided Church nor did it ever inspire thoughts of schism. But with Bergoglio, a precise social, political and cultural battlefield was chosen (I will not say doctrinal because this pontiff is theologically weak). A battlefield indicated and underscored in language, in actions, in distancing from ritual, from liturgy and from tradition.

This pope has been choosing issues, interlocutors, authors to cite, not to mention territories and people who do not belong to the Church nor to Christian civilization, who owe nothing to the saints, martyrs and Fathers of the Church. The very idea of calling himself Francis, a papal name without precedent, was a deliberate act of rupture.

So with these premises, I find it absurd to turn the situation upside down and accuse ‘conservatives’ of plotting against the pope. - It is Bergoglio who has insistently sought to place them outside the Church, who has insistently sought to alienate them and consider them sinful.
- It is Bergoglio who has split Christianity, who has separated the Church today from her bimillennial tradition, who has preferred to dialog with non-Christians, non-Catholis, non-Europeans, oscillating beyween atheists, Muslims and Protestants, and opening up, even if in contradictory ways, to various ‘marital’ unions outside of the traditional family.

It is not accidental that Bergoglio has become the moral leader of the global left, acclaimed by liberals and radicals, by the progressivist establishment and by Catholic antagonists of every sort. On the subject of ‘welcoming’ immigrants, he has gone far beyond his predecessors, placing himself drastically on the part of the NGOs without ever considering the problems and dangers associated with the massive migration of Muslims to Europe.

I will not say that this pope has placed himself outside Christianity and the Church – as I do not have any authority to say so – and I will not follow the tendency of some traditionalists who would excommunicate the pope, setting themselves up – in some sort of ultra-protestant heresy – as the infallible tribunal of orthodoxy.

But I think that the accusation of dividing the Church and casting her into secular politics should be attributed to Bergolian politics and its exponents, who are three-fourths laymen if not outright secular. I do not favor another papal resignation, and I always wish for miraculous reforms. But I feel the faith burning out and I see the sunset of Christian civilization. Nonetheless, I would say to all believers: Popes come and go, the Church remains. Perhaps beaten up and bad shape, but she remains.
 

I can now conclude that Fr Longenecker has done a Valli - like the RAI star Vaticanista, the Anglican priest turned Catholic has turned 180 degrees from his earlier 100 percent support and applause for Bergoglio to this:

Ten reasons why the Pope's silence is a disaster

September 6, 2018

I was amazed to read that Pope Francis's supporters, Fr Spadaro and Cardinal Napier, have been comparing the Pope’s silence on the Vigano accusations to Our Lord’s silence before Pilate. Cardinal Napier tweeted, and Fr Spadaro re-tweeted:

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Cardinal Napier
@CardinalNapier
How similar the Master and his servant have been in their hour of trial! "But he was silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" Mark 14:61
Throughout the 'Trial by Media' the parallels have been close & repeated!

6:17 PM - Sep 5, 2018

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There are so many problems with this that it is hard to know where to start.

First of all, when you or the person you support is under fire for something of which that person may be guilty it is not a good idea to play the victim….not even a little bit. But to compare the person under fire to Jesus at his trial? No. Just don’t go there.

Moreover, playing the victim card doesn’t work anymore. It’s a worn out ploy. After the blizzard of snowflakes and faux victims we can see through that trick now.

Secondly, if the person in question is a privileged person don’t play the victim card at all. Would you pity Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton if they played the victim card? No. If a person is a powerful and privileged person and you play the victim card it is a big own goal. The pope is one of the most powerful people in the world. He’s right up there with the Queen of England as an international leader and he is therefore on the top of the heap. When the big guys play the victim card it is not only ridiculous, it is a gross insult to all the true victims in the world.

Third, once his supporters have played the Pope as a victim in all this, the result is disastrous for the pope and the papacy. Suddenly we see all his foot washing of prisoners, kissing of disabled people and embracing immigrants as the big show- off fakery some of us thought it was all along. When the pope is in hot water and plays the victim he makes his showy advocacy of victims look like a cheap publicity stunt

Fourth, the pope may be the Vicar of Christ, but he’s not the successor of Jesus. He’s the successor of Peter. When Jesus was on trial, we should remember that there was another person who was also silent and did not stand up for his friend who was the Way , the Truth and the Life. It was Peter. I think maybe Fr Spadaro and Cardinal Napier need to get their Bibles down off the shelf, blow off the dust and read the story again.

Fifth, this needn’t be such a big deal that the Pope has to go all publicly sanctimonious, play the silent suffering savior and hope the storm blows over. If he wants to be like Jesus he should calm the storm. He could deny Vigano’s accusations and produce the paperwork on the whole McCarrick affair, prove Vigano wrong and take positive action to clean up the Vatican and command his bishops around the world to do the same in their dioceses. His silence only prolongs the whole sordid affair.

Sixth, while [some of] Vigano’s testimony may seem leaky (Philip Lawler discusses the evidence here) there is enough background evidence based in Pope Francis’ previous actions to make it credible. I outlined some reasons here. Instead of silence the Pope could easily appoint an external, independent investigator to present a report on the matter. His silence and seemingly passive stance isn’t helping anyone, and most of all it is not helping him. Instead it is moving him closer to the lame duck papacy I predicted here.

Seventh, the pope’s withdrawal into silence is revealing him to be a hypocrite in a very important situation. He has presented himself as a listener, one who gets the smell of the sheep and who comes close to the wounded, the upset, the confused and bewildered–those who are alienated from their own church. Does he not realize that there are a huge number of his sheep in the United States and worldwide who are at the brink of despair over the sex abuse crisis and the bishops’ incompetence and sleazy behavior? These people need to be listened to. They also need to be comforted and led with a strong and compassionate hand. Casting them as the Pharisees and hiding behind a fake humility and the “silence of Jesus on trial” is just about the dumbest thing any spiritual leader could do, and his tin-eared sycophants don’t seem to get it….at all.

Eighth, the silence is unnecessary and destructive for him and his papacy. My own view about Pope Francis is more moderate than some. I don’t want him to resign. We don’t need three popes.

I don’t think he’s a bad man and I’m dubious about some of the worst gossip about him. I do think he’s out of his depth and has surrounded himself with the worst possible advisors and supporters. But the silence is not necessary, and he’s a big enough man to do something positive.

When he realized he had messed up badly in the case of the Chilean bishops’ cover up of sex abuse he back tracked, admitted his mistakes and tried to put things right. So its not like this sort of thing is impossible for him. He could do that in this case if Vigano’s accusations are on target.

Ninth, playing the Jesus victim here is simply over the top. Nobody is trying to crucify Pope Francis. Sure, there are some extremists who want him to resign, but most of us simply want him to be the firm, compassionate and intelligent leader we expect of a pope. We don’t want him to be a victim and we don’t want him dead, but we would like him to answer the accusations of Vigano with a strong, open and understanding answer. We’d like him to then take action. If he is guilty as charged, then to make amends and put things right. If he is not, then to ask independent investigators to make a report with full access to documents, explaining exactly what did happen.

Tenth, playing the victim actually plays into the hands of Henry Sire–the author of The Dictator Pope.
- Sire portrays Pope Francis as an opportunistic, cynical manipulative operator.
- He portrays the pope as a man who plays both sides of the house against each other.
- He portrays the pope as a Jesuitical Jesuit who manipulates the truth according to his own whims and tinkers with people and situations to get his own way.
By putting on a long face and playing the victim, Pope Francis is, unfortunately, helping to make Sire’s devastating thesis seem plausible.


So, here's another turnabout from a commentator I never thought I would ever cite here:

Does Francis know he sounds like an abuser?
by Simcha Fisher
on her blog
September 7, 2018

Shall I tell you the most charitable, least rash explanation I can muster for Pope Francis’ recent words and behavior? It’s that he’s surrounded himself with yes men who are shielding him from understanding the depth and breadth of institutional sex abuse and its cover-up in the Church.

He’s appointed, or left in office, no one but men who tell him that the world is chock full of false accusations, that the whole scandal thing is overblown, that it’s all in our past — oh, and that right now would be a good time to talk about litter in the ocean. The few who will tell him the truth, like Cardinal O’Malley, are so outnumbered that even their dire warnings can be dismissed as local problems.

That’s the charitable answer, and it’s not great. If he’s in a bubble that protects him from seeing the true state of the Church, it’s a comfortable bubble of his own making. The servant of the servants of God is not supposed to be in a bubble.

But the other explanation is worse. Here it is:
I have a number of friends who have escaped abusive marriages. They tell me that Pope Francis is sounding more and more like the men who abused them. He’s sounding like the men who hid that abuse from the world, who taught their victims to blame themselves, who used spiritual pressure to persuade them and their families that it would actually be wrong, sinful, to defend themselves.

Just listen to him. After responding to a question about Vigano’s very serious accusations, he said point blank, “I will not say a single word on this.” Several of the faithful speculated that he may have had this or that logistical reason for putting off responding to that specific question; fine.

But for the rest of the week and more, he kept up an unmistakable theme of calling for silence, equating silence with holiness, and painting himself as a Christlike victim in his silence. Then he says it’s “ugly” to accuse others of sinning.Then he suggests that healing and reconciliation will only come if we take a hard look at our own flaws.

These statements are all true. They all reflect Christian thought. They would be reasonable at any other time in recent history. But coming right in the middle of our ongoing agony, they land as heavily as a fist on a bruise.

To the victims of the Church, and to those who love them, it sounds like he is saying, “Who do you think you are? I don’t have to explain myself to you. You’re the guilty one. You brought this on yourself. If you want to be loved, then know your place. I’m the victim, here, not you. If you know what’s good for you, keep your mouth shut.”

This is how abusers talk. They’re not content with power; they have to keep their victims doubting and blaming themselves constantly, so they don’t become a threat. Whether Francis knows it or not, this is how he sounds.

I know that we hear what gets reported, which isn’t necessarily everything he says. I know that the pope isn’t required to say everything we want him to say. I know that whatever is going on in our own diocese or our own country isn’t the whole of what goes on in the Church. I know that there are eternal truths that need to be told no matter what is going on in the current moment.

But even keeping all these things in mind, it beggars the imagination why the pope keeps talking the way he does. It’s clear he intends to keep on talking, despite his exhortations to be silent. This is what he chooses to say.

The very best possible explanation is that his context is pure bubble, and he simply doesn’t realize that much of the Catholic world is transfixed with horror over the sins of the clergy. He simply isn’t aware that, with his words and with his silence, he’s turning his back on so many suffering priests and bishops, including my own, who tell their flock that they have not been abandoned — only to hear their spiritual father override their efforts with a huge, unmistakable message of “NOBODY CARES.”

Maybe he simply doesn’t realize that his cozy little aphorisms are coming off as a passive aggressive threat, as chilling as an abuser who smiles warmly at the world while secretly showing an open blade to the victim who stands faithfully at his side.

I do remember his gentleness, his compassion, his direct and sincere kindness in the past. I don’t believe that was false. You all know I’m not a reflexive Francis-hater. I don’t have any ideological reason to want to bring him down. I have defended him as long as I could, up until the Chile debacle.

And so I am working as hard as I can not to assume the worst, not to believe that this man who promised so much fresh air is really so intent on slamming doors shut before we find out even worse things hidden inside. But he is not making it easy. I am not saying he is an abuser. But he sounds like one.

Archbishop Viganò’s claims urgently
demand a full investigation
If access to key McCarrick-related documents and witnesses is restricted,
the faithful have the capacity to draw their own conclusions
The Editors

September 7, 2018

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s bombshell “testimony” claiming that Pope Francis knew about allegations of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s sexual misconduct but still chose to make him a trusted adviser has placed the Holy See squarely in the spotlight of the widening Church crisis over the mishandling of clergy sexual abuse.

Archbishop Viganò’s testimony has been framed by some as an unwarranted act of aggression on a sitting pope. No doubt, the very public nature of Archbishop Viganò’s unsubstantiated allegations against Francis and other Vatican officials, whom he identifies by name and claims were complicit in suppressing accusations against McCarrick, is unprecedented in Church history.

Yet the author of the testimony is a retired senior Vatican official with detailed inside knowledge of Rome’s internal workings and an experienced diplomat who served as U.S. papal nuncio from 2011 to 2016.

Now, he has taken the irrevocable step of indicting an ecclesial culture that, until recently, accorded him enormous standing.

Thus far, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, along with more than 30 other bishops, has recognized that the charges leveled in the extraordinary letter of the former apostolic nuncio to the United States must be taken seriously and investigated promptly.

“The questions raised deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence,” said Cardinal DiNardo. “Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusation and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past.”

In the wake of previous revelations that Archbishop McCarrick had been appointed the archbishop of Washington in 2000 and remained in his post for six years, despite repeated efforts by whistleblowers to alert Rome about allegations of his sexual misconduct involving seminarians and priests, the USCCB’s leadership had already committed to plans for an independent investigation.

This work is expected to involve the collaboration of Vatican and U.S. Church leaders, with a prominent role for lay specialists. These preparations took on more urgency amid gruesome headlines prompted by the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which found that 300 priests had been accused of abusing 1,000 children in six dioceses over more than half a century and contended that the bishops in those dioceses at the time proceeded to cover it up.

Now, attention has centered on Archbishop Viganò’s assertion that Pope Francis knew in 2013 that Archbishop McCarrick faced allegations of sexual misconduct, yet lifted sanctions privately imposed by Pope Benedict XVI and granted him a key advisory role.

The Pope has not yet offered a substantive response to the allegations. “I will not say a single word about this,” he said during an in-flight Aug. 26 news conference as he returned from the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, one day after Archbishop Viganò’s testimony was published. “I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.”

The Holy Father’s reluctance to respond to the allegations could stem from a sure knowledge that they are substantially untrue, at least with respect to his own conduct, and a belief that journalistic investigation is the preferred way to establish this factually without violating the confidentiality of sensitive Vatican files.

But without an official investigation authorized by the Pope himself, it’s simply impossible to discredit the claims. Indeed, one key element — that Pope Benedict imposed some sort of restriction on Archbishop McCarrick because of the Vatican’s knowledge of his sexual misconduct with adult seminarians and priests — has been partially validated to the Register by a source close to the pope emeritus.

At the same time, what the source described to the Register seemed to fall substantially short of the canonical “sanctions” that Archbishop Viganò insisted Benedict had mandated for the disgraced archbishop.

Archbishop Viganò’s fiercest media critics have latched onto this point of contention, along with other confusing or apparently contradictory aspects of his testimony, to cast doubt on both the integrity of the messenger and the claims embedded in his letter.

In addition, reporters have pointed to previous charges accusing the former nuncio of obstructing a 2014 investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Archbishop Viganò vehemently denied those charges subsequent to publication of his testimony, and Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens of St. Paul and Minneapolis, who was involved closely with the 2014 investigation, seems to have acknowledged Archbishop Viganò’s key points.

In reality, though, journalistic sleuthing can only go so far, at least in these special circumstances.

An official investigation is urgently needed in order to provide a comprehensive review of all the complicated facts in the story of Archbishop McCarrick’s rise and fall.
- The investigators must be charged with authority to review the Vatican and U.S. nunciature’s archives, where the critical documents validating these claims can be found, according to Archbishop Viganò.
- The investigators also must be given permission to interview every senior Church leader with knowledge of Archbishop McCarrick’s misconduct and Pope Benedict’s response to it.

The most contentious aspect of the former nuncio’s testimony — his assertion that the Pope should resign — is a much more complex matter. Many faithful Catholics are understandably dismayed that the question of a papal resignation has even been raised without clear substantiation of the accusations. Even if an investigation should substantiate the majority of the archbishop’s claims, Church history and tradition are not clear on what should happen next.

What is most critical, at present, is for Pope Francis to move beyond his initial response to Archbishop Viganò’s testimony and offer a substantive message that matches the gravity of charges that have grieved the faithful.

On a practical level, the Pope’s decision to remain silent, combined with a series of “no comments” from Vatican authorities contacted by journalists, has constrained the work of reporters eager to vet Archbishop Viganò’s claims. Even the most resourceful journalistic investigation will fall short without access to relevant documents and critical witnesses.

Cardinal DiNardo is right about the need for an evidence-based investigation. He has sought to meet immediately with Pope Francis in Rome to discuss this grave crisis. [There are reports that Cardinal DiNardo first asked for such a meeting as early as July 20, when the revelations were published about McCarrick, and reiterated it after the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published, but DiNardo's office claims there has been no response from the Vatican.]*

We pray that the meeting takes place, that the resolve of both the Holy Father and the U.S. bishops will be clear, and that a full investigation will be forthcoming.

Only with the Vatican’s cooperation will we see the documents that can prove or disprove Archbishop Viganò’s accusations. And only then will other Church authorities come forward and tell what they know.

Catholics, in the U.S. and in the universal Church, need to know the full truth. And until it is provided, the process of healing the wounds from the clerical crimes of the past and instituting the measures required to prevent their recurrence will be unacceptably impaired.

*

The hunt for Viganò:
Vatican spies tracking him down
By Rev. Michael X., JCL

September 7, 2018

According to sources within the Vatican, the Secretariat of State of the Holy See — under the direction of Pietro Cardinal Parolin — has communicated an instruction to its internal and external security services to use its "intelligence resources" to locate the physical whereabouts of Abp. Viganò.

This request has been communicated not only in order to prevent more unpredictable damage to the image of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the world stage, but also to "prepare the terrain" for the former apostolic nuncio-turned-whistleblower to be prosecuted for alleged multiple crimes against Vatican and Church law.

The urgency with which the location of Abp. Viganò is being sought is all the more palpable since, according to canon 1507 of the Code of Canon Law and other procedural and penal norms of the Holy See and Vatican City State, Abp. Viganò cannot be prosecuted or even punished unless he first be given the opportunity to be officially notified in writing of the specific canonical and Vatican crimes he is alleged to have committed and be given the opportunity to defend himself against them.

As first reported by the very well-informed Roberto de Mattei (Corrispondenza Romana, September 5), criminal counts are said to be in the process of being researched and drafted for a libellus accusatorius (canonical criminal complaint) against Viganò having allegedly committed perjury and for having breached pontifical and other forms of state secrecy in violation of, among other norms, the Instruction Secreta continere on the Pontifical Secret issued on February 4, 1974 by John Cardinal Villot, Secretary of State of the Vatican.

The specific Norms of Secreta being researched for applicability and evidence in support of potential prosecution include:
1. Art. I-4 for Abp. Viganò’s alleged divulgation of extrajudicial denunciations received by him during his service of the Holy See regarding crimes against faith and morals and the Sacrament of Penance, and the process and decision pertaining to the handling of these denunciations regarding Theodore Cardinal McCarrick and other clerics referenced by Viganò in his testimony and in the articles of journalists to whom the archbishop is alleged to have disseminated such classified information;
2. Art. I-7 for his alleged dissemination of Vatican secrets gained by reason of office pertaining to appointments of bishops, specifically regarding the appointment of Cdl. Blase Cupich as archbishop of Chicago, Illinois;
3. Art. I-9 for his alleged divulgation of the electronically encrypted order transmitted by the Secretariat of State to Abp. Viganò regarding the appointment of Bp. Robert McElroy to the see of San Diego, California;
4. Art. I-10 for his breaching of "business or matters which are so grave in nature that they are placed under the Pontifical Secret by the Supreme Pontiff or a Cardinal of the relevant Dicastery."

News of the Vatican deploying its vast international resources to track down and prosecute Abp. Viganò are consistent with his assertions made to Aldo Maria Valli on their final encounter last week: that Viganò had "purchased a plane ticket," that he was "traveling abroad," that he "could not tell [Valli] where," that Valli "should not try to find him," that "his old cellular number will no longer be functioning," and that they "saluted each other one last time."

Viganò, in saying goodbye to Valli, appears to have known exactly what the worst elements of the Vatican and its agents are capable of. Let us hope he has taken every necessary precaution from falling into the hands of those who would wish him ill.


Obviously, Smirak wrote the ff before learning of Bergoglio's own sacrilegious comparisons of his silence on the Vigano charges to Jesus's refusal to engage the mob of Nazarenes who chased him out of the synagogue and wished to hurl him off a cliff.

The innocence of serpents:
Bergoglio's silence is not Jesus's silence
by John Zmirak

September 8, 2018

What’s the worst part of Pope Francis’s response to the exposure of clerical sex abuse and cover-ups?

You might say, “Where to begin?” and point to a dozen different facets of the corruption of the priesthood by our bishops.

The list of scandals against supernatural faith and natural justice could fill up thousands of words. Others such as Paul Rahe and Benjamin Wiker have done yeoman’s work unpacking it all. I don’t need to add very much. Let me just mention one point which offends me to the core.

Not just as a Catholic. Or even as a Christian. If I were a mere agnostic, it still would turn my stomach.

And that’s the claim made by Pope Francis’s defenders that in refusing to answer Abp. Vigano’s charges, the pope is acting like Jesus, when He was hauled up before Herod:

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And Herod, seeing Jesus, was very glad; for he was desirous of a long time to see Him, because he had heard many things of Him; and he hoped to see some sign wrought by Him. And he questioned Him in many words. But He answered him nothing. (Luke 23: 8-9)

---

Quite a potent tactic. It’s a way of painting stonewalling as an imitation of Christ. Father Marcial Maciel used this stratagem, and for a long while it worked. As one accuser came forth after another, he smothered their claims in silence. That gave his monied cronies and guilty enablers a high-minded pretext to hide behind, as many did, for years.

In fact, it’s the starkest blasphemy.

Even fair-minded unbelievers ought to be outraged, if they see Jesus for what He was: an innocent man, hunted to His death by political enemies. To seize on Jesus’s innocence, and His dignified refusal to answer the corrupt tyrant Herod, who would have set Him free in return for some petty miracle … and weaponize it on behalf of a ruler’s arrogant silence…. That is repulsive, on a purely human level. It’s like smooshing together Anne Frank and Josef Goebbels as “casualties of the Second World War.”

Too much you say? Isn’t it equally possible that Pope Francis indeed is innocent, at least of the charge that he knew about and repealed Benedict’s (feeble) sanctions against McCarrick? And did so in return for McCarrick’s support at the Conclave?

We may never know. The documents which prove Vigano’s testimony are under the pope’s control. Unless he’s already ordered that they be shredded, they sit in archives in Rome and in Washington, D.C. at the nunciature. Journalists should be demanding them.
- A U.S. attorney ought to subpoena these files, to see if U.S. bishops violated RICO laws by shuffling sex abusers.
- The Church ought to have to hand them over, waiving its frail diplomatic immunity as the price of ongoing relations with the United States of America.

I don’t know if that will happen. My colleague Austin Ruse has called on President Trump to demand it. All that is politics. Who knows how it will play out?

But we do know the following facts:
- The pope lives in a house (Casa Santa Marta) managed by a priest who consorted with male prostitutes [and openly lived in with his Swiss lover while serving the Nunciature in Paraguay].
- Francis was backed for the papacy by molester Cardinal McCarrick and coverup artist-cardinals Danneels and Wuerl.
- He plucked Danneels from disgrace under Benedict XVI, inviting Danneels to join him when he first addressed Roman crowds, and asking him to speak (at the Synod on the Family) to the bishops of the world.
- Pope Francis has previously lifted penalties on at least one powerful molester in the mold of McCarrick.
- Francis defied cries of victims, and elevated a bishop in Chile who’d actively covered for a molester.
- When the pope’s mockery of the victims blew up in the press, he blamed the local bishops and called one victim to Rome.
- Then he told the young man that God (not the priest who molested him) had “made him gay.”

Think of all this. Think then of Father Maciel.

And think of the innocence of Jesus.

Bergoglio's increasingly sacrilegious and hubristic self-equations to Jesus indicate a condition of pathologic lunacy, don't you think? His followers should be worried. Unless they continue to stand by him whatever he says or does. Althoughy we've already seen quite a few dropouts from the wagon-circlers.

Viganogate: A 2006 letter confirms part of the Nuncio's story
And why has the pope not replied to the USCCB president's
request for an audience to discuss the US situation?
Translated from

September 8, 2018

Viganògate, although its coverage has almost disappeared from the mainstream Italian media which appear fearful of annoying the pope and the Vatican, continues to have fresh developments.


A letter from October 2006, scanned and provided to Catholic News Service [the news agency of the USCCB], confirms in part what Archbishop Vigano denounced in his 11-page testimony regarding the co ver-up – in Rome and in the USA – as well as the complicity that Theodore McCarrick enjoyed in the Church hierarchy about his record as a homosexual predator of seminarians and young priests, becoming in the Be4rgoglio era, the mastermind for US episcopal and cardinalatial appointments .

The letter was written by the then Deputy Secretary of State Leonardo Sandri, now cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches. Sandri refers to a letter written in November 2000 by Fr. Boniface Ramsey to the then Nuncio in the USA, Mons. Gabriel Montalvo, to alert him about sexual abuses committed by McCarrick.

Ramsey told CNS: “I decried McCarrick’s questionable relations with seminarians and the whole business of sleeping with seminarians, etc – all that we now know for sure”. Ramsey taught at the seminary of the Immaculate Conception in New Jersey from 1986-1996.

In the 2006 letter, Sandri asks Ramsey for information about an American priest who had been recommended for a post in the Vatican. “I ask with particular reference to the serious questions about some students at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception that you had been so kind as to bring confidentially to the attention of the then Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo.”

Strangely, Sandri does not mention McCarrick. And Ramsey thinks it is because the charges against the then cardinal “were too sensitive”. He points out: “My letter of November 22, 2000, was about McCarrick, and I made no accusations against any seminarians. I was accusing McCarrick”.

CNS reported: “[Sandri’s] letter of 2006 not only confirms statements made in the past by Fr. Ramsey, but also some elements in the document published by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was the Nuncio to the USA from 2011-2016”.

Therefore, at this point, even the detractors of Viganò are forced to admit that he has not invented his allegations. Indeed, the line followed by the pope’s defenders who have castled themselves within the extraordinary silence of the papal bunker had to change.

As even homosexualist Bergoglian James Martin commented: “The letter was received in 2000 during the pontificate of John Paul II, who a few months later, made McCarrick a cardinal. He served as Archbishop of Washington until 2006, when Benedict XVI was Pope. Let us stop blaming Pope Francis unfairly for McCarrick’s rise to power”.

Some considerations for Martin:
- We have no testimony from anyone who, under John Paul II or Benedict XVI, had directly informed either of them about who McCarrick was and his misconduct. We do have Mons. Viganò’s account of informing Pope Francis about this, and that the pope chose not to reply to his disclosure. This is a crucial and central point in the Viganò testimony.
- Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI (who instead sanctioned McCarrick but apparently, with little effect) were friends of McCarrick.
- Nor did they have him lobby for them to become pope (as McCarrick himself boasted he did for Bergoglio).
- Nor did they send him around the world as their personal representative.
- Nor did they use him as an adviser on which Americans to appoint as bishops or name cardinals. All of which Bergoglio did.

Therefore, it is reasonable to say that Martin’s argument (and the rest of the Bergogliac gang, Jesuit or not) is at the very least deficient, if not simply false.

Let us recall, once more, the kernel of this story. Which is Mons. Viganò’s account of his audience with this pope in June 2013:

---

Immediately after, the Pope asked me in a deceitful way: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naiveté: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”

The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Pope’s purpose in asking me that question: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.

---

Let us point out that the Church in the USA - like the Church in Honduras, Chile and Australia – is in the midst of an unprecedented judicial tempest, as many states have now decided to open investigations into priestly sex abuse as Pennsylvania did.

In the light of this, it seems even more disconcerting that the pope has yet to acknowledge a request for an audience made by the president of the USCCB, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, to discuss the situation in the US Church with regards to clerical sex abuse and episcopal cover-ups.

An extraordinary lack of response. Especially considering that meanwhile, he, Bergoglio, has found time to meet with two friends and proteges of McCarrick – Cardinals Cupich and Wuerl, and to organize, according to some reports, a meeting with Cardinal Coccopalmerio and other canon law experts to study what sanctions may be applied against Mons. Viganò for his disclosures.

And if he did decide to sanction Viganò, it would be a scandalous error. Imagine seeking counsel to punish Viganò for his unwelcome testimony from a cardinal who claims he had no knowledge of the homosexual and drug habits of his own secretary who hosted orgies in his Vatican apartment [said to have been assigned to him by the pope at the request of Coccopalmerio]! If this were a movie, we would accuse the director of exaggerating to discredit the Church!

Vatican continues not to cooperate
with media over Vigano allegations
Despite Pope Francis’s call on journalists to verify Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s allegations,
a key cardinal and other Vatican officials and offices have so far refused to provide information

September 10, 2018

---

UPDATE - Sept. 10, 2018

The Council of Cardinals advising Pope Francis on reform of the Roman Curia issued a statement this evening saying the Vatican is preparing “necessary clarifications” about accusations that the Pope covered up the abuse of Archbishop McCarrick.

The Council said it expressed its “full solidarity” with Pope Francis “in the face of what has happened in the past few weeks.”

---

NB: The Vatican is preparing 'necessary clarifications' - not denials, nor any disclosure of documents that may help uncover the truth or falsity of Vigano's allegations.]

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, appointed prefect of Congregation for Bishops a little over two months before Archbishop Theodore McCarrick was appointed to Washington D.C., has so far been unwilling to speak to the press about Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s testimony.

He joins many other cardinals and Vatican officials unwilling to speak to the media on this issue, despite Pope Francis call on journalists to investigate the allegations made in the testimony.

“The Vatican is shut as hard and as tight as an unshucked oyster,” said the American columnist and author Rod Dreher.

Cardinal Re’s unwillingness to speak is particularly regrettable as he probably knows more than most about the McCarrick case, why and how he came to be archbishop of Washington D.C., and the precise nature of the sanctions or measures imposed on him.

The Italian cardinal was prefect at the time of McCarrick’s nomination, but also, according to Archbishop Viganò’s testimony, was opposed to the appointment.

“At the nunciature in Washington there is a note, written in his hand, in which Cardinal Re disassociates himself from the appointment and states that McCarrick was 14th on the list for Washington,” Archbishop Viganò wrote.

He also pointed out it was through Cardinal Re, in 2009 or 2010, that he had learned Pope Benedict “had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis.”

Before Pope St. John Paul II appointed him to the Congregation for Bishops, Cardinal Re had held the key position of Sostituto (Deputy Secretary of State) for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, responsible for much of the day-to-day running of the Roman Curia and where much sensitive information would have crossed his desk.

Certainly, Cardinal Re’s successor as Sostituto, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, knew about the allegations against McCarrick as Sandri referred to them in a newly discovered letter, dated Oct. 11, 2006.

Published by Catholic News Service Sept. 7, Archbishop Sandri’s letter confirmed what Archbishop Viganò had already written in his testimony: that Dominican Father Boniface Ramsey had notified the Vatican about McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians on Nov. 22, 2000, a day after McCarrick’s appointment to Washington D.C.

But ever since Archbishop Viganò released his testimony on Aug. 25, Cardinal Re has avoided journalists' inquiries, firstly an unidentified man told the Register Aug. 29 from the cardinal’s home phone that “Cardinal Re is not here, he is in the mountains,” and then on Sept. 8 the cardinal told the Register he didn't “feel well” and recommending we “speak to someone else.”

All other attempts by the Register and EWTN’s Rome bureau to obtain documentation or comment from dicastery heads, active or retired cardinals, and the Holy See Press Office have not been successful.

The press office did not respond today to inquiries about what, if any, action would be taken with respect to Archbishop Viganò and his testimony (some announcement, however, may come after this week’s meeting of the C9 Group of Cardinals which ends on Wednesday).

Perhaps the closest indication the Vatican was at least open to cooperating with the media came from a secretary to Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who told EWTN’s News Nightly’s Juliet Linley Sept. 6 that the Holy See was “working to be at the service of truth.” But the official also said his office could “not provide documents.”

A cardinal who was active during Benedict’s pontificate today gave a helpful insight into how Vatican officials see this issue. The cardinal told a Vatican journalist from another news outlet that the sins and scandals of members of the Church should not be made public, and Archbishop Viganò should not have gone to the media with his concerns. “The media does the work of the devil,” the cardinal said, according to the journalist, who recounted the conversation to the Register.

The Vatican's negative attitude toward the media, coupled with a seeming lack of interest on the part of the mainstream media in verifying Archbishop Viganò's allegations (how different the mainstream media's response would have been if all this happened with Benedict as pope, a cardinal told me last week), mean it is unlikely we are going to get to any confirmation of the testimony anytime soon.

The track record supports
the Vigano testimony
By Phil Lawler

Sept 05, 2018

At several points in his bombshell testimony, Archbishop Vigano explained where the corroborating evidence could be found: in files at the Vatican or the offices of the apostolic nuncio. If those files are made public — or even vetted by a reliable, objective investigator — we would all soon know whether the archbishop’s remarkable account is accurate.

But while we wait for the Vatican to open those files (and since we realize we might wait forever), all we can do is compare the claims of Archbishop Vigano with what we do know. The more closely they match, the more plausible the archbishop’s witness appears.

Even someone who is inclined to believe the testimony of Archbishop Vigano (as I am) must acknowledge that on several points, his account of the McCarrick scandal seems — at first glance, at least —inconsistent with known facts. In each case, there is a possible explanation for that inconsistency. Let’s take a look at those problem areas, and see if the explanations match what we know about the people involved.

Inconsistency #1: the “secret sanctions”
Archbishop Vigano reports that Pope Benedict XVI restricted McCarrick’s ministry. But there is no public evidence of any such disciplinary action.
Explanation: Pope Benedict imposed the restrictions secretly.
Is that explanation consistent with Pope Benedict’s track record? Yes.

Earlier in his pontificate, Pope Benedict had restricted Father Marcial Maciel to a life of prayer and penance, but made no announcement of that action. The disciplinary action became public knowledge only after the fact. McCarrick was already retired, so there was no need to remove him from office; he could simply have been ordered to keep a low profile.

Inconsistency #2: McCarrick’s public appearances
In fact, McCarrick did not keep a low profile. He did move out of a seminary, and at least one major appearance was cancelled. But he appeared at many other public events.
Explanation: McCarrick simply ignored the Pope’s directives.
Is that explanation consistent with the former cardinal’s track record? Yes.

In 2004, when the US bishops were engaged in a heated debate about whether politicians who promote abortion should be allowed to receive Communion, Cardinal McCarrick — who had been appointed to chair a special committee on the subject — reported that then-Cardinal Ratzinger had said, in a private letter, that individual bishops should decide the question for their own dioceses.

In fact, the letter from Cardinal Ratzinger had stated quite clearly that pro-abortion politicians should be denied the Eucharist. In 2009, at a burial service for Senator Ted Kennedy, McCarrick read a laudatory letter from the Vatican Secretary of State, deliberately creating the impression that it was a message from Pope Benedict, who in fact had studiously avoided any public comment. Clearly the American prelate was willing to flout the wishes of Pope Benedict.

Inconsistency #3: The lack of enforcement
Although he reports that he told Washington’s Cardinal Wuerl not to allow public appearances by McCarrick, Archbishop Vigano apparently did not enforce any papal sanctions. In fact he himself appeared at public events along with McCarrick.
Explanation: As an archbishop, Vigano did not have the authority to issue orders to a cardinal. And as papal nuncio, he reported to the Vatican Secretary of State. Archbishop Vigano reports that the Secretariat of State protected McCarrick.
Is that explanation consistent with the track record of the Secretariat of State? Yes.

Particularly under Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Secretariat of State was notorious for protecting Father Maciel. Like Maciel, McCarrick was an extremely successful fundraiser, who used his prowess to curry favor with the most powerful Vatican officials. Although Cardinal Sodano had retired by the time McCarrick was reportedly disciplined, he remained influential, and according to Archbishop Vigano his successor, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, took a similar line.

Inconsistency #4: The Pope’s reliance on McCarrick
Archbishop Vigano says that he warned Pope Francis about McCarrick’s corruption. But Pope Francis made the American prelate a trusted counselor.
Explanation: At the time, McCarrick was charged with targeting seminarians, who were legal adults. (Only recently have complaints involving minors emerged.) Pope Francis may not have thought that homosexual activity with adult partners should disqualify a cleric from high office.
Is that explanation consistent with the Pope’s track record? Yes.

In 2013, the Pope appointed Msgr. Battista Ricca to a very sensitive post, making him prelate to the Vatican bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), at a time when the IOR was under heavy criticism. When he was questioned about Msgr. Ricca’s background, which included notorious homosexual escapades, the Pope issued his famous rhetorical question: “Who am I to judge?” The Pope drew a sharp distinction between consensual sexual activities — “They are not crimes, right?” — and sex with minors — “Crimes are something different; the abuse of minors is a crime.”

Is it conceivable that the Vicar of Christ thought that a man who had seduced his seminarians should be freed from restrictions — and not only forgiven, but trusted as an adviser? That is the essence of Archbishop Vigano’s testimony. Unfortunately, the available facts give us no reason to dismiss the charge.


What has Pope Francis covered up?
by Mark Lambert

September 10, 2018

In a new Spectator podcast, and following on from a scathing written assessment from Damian Thompson in which he states:

---

The duplicitous pontiff depicted by Viganò is instantly recognisable as the cynical, backstabbing Bergoglio in Henry Sire’s book The Dictator Pope, which is based on first-hand testimony from Argentina and Rome. Every Catholic should read it.

---

The video of Thompson's interview may be seen on
marklambert.blogspot.com/2018/09/what-has-pope-francis-covered...

Key insights in this interview include revelations about Pope Francis from his home in Argentina. Many have wondered why he has not returned home and speculated that it might be that the world would see he gets a less than cordial welcome. Henry Sire reveals that in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio consistently associated with clergy accused of sexual and financial wrongdoing. Henry Sire suggests this allowed Bergoglio to gain power over such individuals. Of course we see this evident in the men he has surrounded himself with at the Vatican.

Sire also reveals that the first bishop appointed by Bergoglio was a priest who had had an affair and subsequently broken up a marriage. Another was a homosexual who was, none-the-less defended and promoted by Bergoglio. Sire gives further examples from Pope Francis's past.

So what's at the heart of the debate? Sire suggests that attempts to change Church teaching with regard to sexuality is the main thrust of the argument, both with regard to homosexuality, but also with divorce. It seems to me this is a house of cards.

The interlocutors note the way in which the mainstream media has failed to investigate claims made by Vigano and seems happy to buy in to the conspiracy theories.
- Sire explains that the Press have invested heavily in Francis as a "goody" reformer.
- They also are religiously ignorant, especially with respect to the Catholic Church, and
- What information is fed to them comes from a select group of privileged individuals who tend to simply pass on their opinion unedited.

I think this is a really worrying trend in modern society. Across all walks of life, not just religious journalism, we see that the media no longer appear interested in the objective truth of any given situation, perhaps in a world which has succumbed to the dictatorship of relativism almost entirely, the media does not believe there IS any truth to be discovered, merely different perspectives, and so they pursue the perspective which fits best with their agenda.

Ultimately, it is rarely accurate reporting and more often selling you a perspective. We clearly see this with a Pope who has been such a media darling because they have wanted so badly for the leader of the Catholic Church to stop being a contradiction to the secular cultural norms of abortion and contraception, etc, and "modernise", admitting the Church has been wrong all these years and the world has been right. They've seen clear hints of this from Pope Francis and don't care to see that narrative contradicted.

One of the main thesis put forward based on the evidence from Thompson, and confirmed from experience by Sire, is that Pope Francis is a politician first and a spiritual leader second, who's main quirk is that he agrees with you face to face and is affable and then stabs you in the back immediately you turn away.

The discussion turns to talk of the dwindling support for Pope Francis. Vocal papolators have media links and so seem stronger than they actually are. Bishops seems to be turning away from Francis in increasing numbers.

The pair turn their attention to the response (or lack of response) from the Church in England. Sire says he has not been living in England and is not particularly aware of the politics in the English Church. Thompson suggests that the Church has buried its' head in the sand over the issue, this point is hard to dispute. Sire is aware of our Cardinal however. The appraisal of whom is frankly damning.

The conclusion is that if Francis is indeed a Peronist, he will resist any and all pressures to resign.

Who can doubt that in his remarks quoted below, Mons. Gaenswein was articulating what Benedict XVI must be thinking of what is happening in the Church today?
The words are an oblique indictment of the current pontificate in the most civilized way possible - harsh truth spoken without the least bit of nastiness.

Pope Benedict’s top aide broaches
abuse crisis, quotes Cardinal Eijk’s
apocalyptic critique of Francis
by Maike Hickson


September 11, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Emeritus Benedict’s personal secretary and the head of the papal household has commented on the abuse crisis that is rocking the Catholic Church, stating that if the Church does not achieve renewal in its wake, civilization is “at stake.”

“If the Church this time does not achieve a renewing of herself with God's help, the whole project of our civilization is again at stake. For many, it already seems as if the Church of Jesus Christ could never recover from the catastrophe of her sin which right now seems nearly to swallow her,” Archbishop Georg Gänswein said at a gathering in Rome today for a book presentation of The Benedict Option by American author Rod Dreher.

Gänswein spoke about the “satanic” abuse crisis in the Church. At one point, he referred to Cardinal Willem Eijk's statement last May in which he referred to the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s prophecy of a “final trial” for the Church before the second coming of Christ. Importantly, in that same statement, Eijk had publicly called upon Pope Francis to make clarifications with regard to the intercommunion debate in Germany.

Kath.net, the Austrian Catholic news website, published the full speech of Gänswein which he delivered today at the Italian Parliament in Rome.

Last month Archbishop Viganò accused Pope Francis in a detailed 11- page document of covering-up for now ex-Cardinal McCarrick despite being made aware of his sexual abuse of seminarians and priests. The Archbishop called on the Pope to resign. A day after news of the letter broke, Pope Francis told reporters that he was “not going to say a word” about the allegations. One bishop called the Pope’s response a “non-denial.”

Now, numerous priests, bishops, a cardinal, tens of thousands of lay Catholic men and women, as well as respected international mainstream news outlets are calling for Viganò’s claims to be thoroughly investigated.

Archbishop Gänswein made it clear that the Church finds herself in an intensely turbulent situation. In this, he said, “I am obviously not alone.”

---

“In May, also the archbishop of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, admitted that the current crisis reminds him of 'the final trial in the Church,' as the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 675 describes it with the following words: 'Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth'.”

---

Even though Archbishop Gänswein would of course make no mention whatsoever of criticism of Pope Francis, it is very significant that he would even reference the text written by Cardinal Eijk. Cardinal Eijk's text is the most earnest and the most prominent call coming from a cardinal addressed to the Pope, asking him to resolve the doctrinal confusion in the Church, highlighting that this confusion caused by the Pope has an apocalyptic character.

The German prelate also made reference to Pope Benedict's own 2010 remarks on the airplane flight to Fatima in which he spoke about the meaning of the Third Secret of Fatima and mentioning that attacks on the Church would come from "within."

---

"The Lord told us that the Church would constantly be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. […] As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church."

---

Gänswein also noted that “the Church rooted among the people [Volkskirche] and into which we have been born – and which never existed as such in America as it existed in Europe – has long died in this process of the darkening.” He then asks: “Does this sound too dramatic for you?”

Throughout his speech, Gänswein made repeated references to the public statements of Pope Benedict, for example when speaking about the papal trip to the U.S. in 2008. The archbishop said that Benedict in a speech delivered in the U.S. at the time “tried to shake up” the U.S. bishops. He commented: “It seems to have been in vain, as we see today.”

“The lamentation of the Holy Father (Benedict) was not capable of stopping the evil, nor the lip services of a large part of the [U.S.] hierarchy,” he said.

Gänswein also referred back to Pope Benedict's 2012 warning that the spiritual crisis which takes place in the West is the gravest crisis since the decline of the Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century. “The light of the Christian civilization is being extinguished everywhere in the West,” were the words of Pope Benedict.

While speaking of the grave abuse crisis which is now raging in the U.S. and other parts of the world, Gänswein made a comparison with the terrorist event of 11 September 2001 in the U.S. – without wishing, thereby, to diminish the suffering of the victims on that day – saying that "the Catholic Church looks upon her own September 11, even if this catastrophe, unfortunately, does not refer to only one single date, but to many days and years, with innumerable victims.” He later comes back to this topic, speaking about the “satanic '9/11' of the Universal Catholic Church.”

The Archbishop ended his talk with some hopeful remarks.

---

“Even the satanic '9/11' of the Universal Catholic Church can neither weaken nor destroy the truth about the origin of her foundation by the Risen Lord and Conqueror...That is why I honestly have to admit that I perceive this time of a great crisis – which is not anymore hidden to anyone – also as a time of grace” because “the truth will make us free, as Our Lord has assured us.”

---

Fr H has a different take on the above...
On Abp Gaenswein's words

September 12, 2018

I think it would be a genre error to try to read the Archbishop's fine lecture in the hope of discovering coded criticisms of the current regime. I think his intention is to point us back to the Magisterial documents of Benedict XVI, on the understanding that Pope Benedict had very accurately discerned the signs of the times, both with regard to the Church and the World. [And is that not an oblique way of criticizing what is taking place in the Church today??? Obviously, the current Prefect of the Papal Household cannot find anything 'relevant' from Bergoglio's words to say the things that were so prominent in Benedict XVI's magisterium!]

In the current crisis, it is by drinking again from the wisdom of Papa Ratzinger that we shall equip ourselves for the future. This is bang on.

I suppose there is an implication here that we may not get much help or encouragement from documents of this pontificate; and perhaps PF might not feel that G is terribly on-message. But G is, I feel sure, laying down some directional pointers by showing where the resources are which will help us forward beyond the present pontificate. And this is precisely what we need. [There you go!]

I believe we should take the lecture very seriously, particularly the quotations from Benedict.

And I suppose Fr H has not yet gotten around to reading about the most recent Ratzinger Schuelerkreis annual reunion-seminar, which is very much in the vein of Mons. Gaenswein's remarks at the Benedict Option book presentation. [The 'Benedict option' being author Rod Dreher's term for what Joseph Ratzinger, taking after Arnold Toynbee, called 'creative minorities', i.e., Catholics who those who would proactively respond to a civilizational crisis, and whose response would allow that civilization to rebuild itself. Dreher's 'Benedict option', taking inspiration from St. Benedict's virtually singlehanded rescue of Western civilization from complete disaster and oblivion in the 5th century through his 'creative minorities' of monastic communities, promotes the idea that Christians who want to maintain their faith should segregate themselves to some degree from mainstream society and try to live in intentional communities that would constitute the creative minority nuclei of a revival and renaissance of the faith.

Here is a report from Andrea Gagliarducci - probably the only Vaticanista who has been following the annual Schuelerkreis meetings after B16's retirement - about the theme of the 2018 seminar reunion.]

For Benedict XVI, 'the Church
has adapted too much to the world'
An interview with the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis coordinator
by Andrea Gagliarducci
Translated from
ACI-Stampa

VATICAN CITY, Sept. 6, 2018 (ACI-Stampa) - The problem of a Church “that adapts too much to the world” whereas what the Church needs today is a ‘creative minority’ of true Catholics, is at the heart of Benedict XVI’s thinking on the Church today, according to Fr. Stephan Horn, coordinator of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, comprising Joseph Ratzigner’s former doctoral students, who are having their 41st annual reunion-seminar from Sept. 6-9 in Castel Gandolfo.

The theme of this year’s seminar is “Church and State, Church and Society”. Its main resource person is Prof. Udo di Fabio,
An eminent German jurist who was a member of Germany’s Constitutional Court.

As in recent years, the 40 or so members of the Schuelerkreis will be joined this year by the Neue Schuelerkreis, younger followers of Joseph Ratzinger’s thought to which they have dedicated their theological studies.

Fr. Horn, how did you arrive at the theme for this year’s meeting?
As always, the members met last year and voted on a few themes to propose for the following year. The proposals with the most votes were then sent to Benedict XVI. Among the proposals for this year had been one on Christian music, which is a very important matter for him. But the Emeritus decided quickly for the theme “Church and State, Church and society” to explore not just the Church’s relations wit the State but with the society in which we live.

Why do you think he chose this?
Because it is something dear to his heart. In particular, the Emeritus Pope believes that faith is of great value to the State and to society, and that God is the basis for human dignity. Especially today when few Catholics consider that faith is the foundation of our life. Benedict XVI hopes for a new philosophical movement that will consider faith in this way. Not blind faith, but a faith that is in dialog with reason, which can help people not just to believe but also to develop the right human ethic.

How did Benedict XVI come to choose Prof. Di Fabio as resource person?
The first question he asked us after he had chosen the theme was “Who could be our main resource person?” We immediately suggected Prof. Di Fabio, a suggestion he readily accepted because he know his work very well and has great esteem for him.

It seems there is a great continuity in the Schuelerkreis seminar topics these last several years: from the eclipse of God in history to Christian persecution, and now coming to the question of ‘Church and State, Church and Society’, the themes seem to follow a precise course.
But this is all due to Benedict XVI who chooses the themes with precision, who keeps us on a consistent and coherent course.

It seems, too, that the Schuelerkreis has dwelt on the state of the faith in Europe. Does the group feel itself to be particularly European?
We have an African member, Mons. Bartholomey Adokounou, who was secretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, and we have Fr. Joseph Fessio, an American, who, however, has not joined us lately. So, yes, the group is mostly European. [Fr Horn forgets the Korean lady who has been photographed in some of the previous meetings at CastelGandolfo – and is probably the only woman and Asian in the group.] Nonetheless, we have considered more ‘universal’ themes that we have yet to explore. Recently, we considered something on Buddhism, especially since it appears to be taking hold in Europe, and we have also considered relations with the Orthodox Churches.

What would Benedict XVI himself have to say about this year’s topic? What is his political theology?
He does not have a political theology but a theology of politics. He thinks that one cannot directly ‘do’ politics starting from one's faith, because politics ought to consider society, present circumstances and possibilities and the social situation. Faith can give fundamental orientations but it cannot play a direct role in politics.

A problem that came up with liberation theology…
Yes, it did wish to do politics proceeding from the faith, but we have had the problem before. In the First Millennium, Caesaro-papism in the Eastern Church [under the Byzantine Empire] presented this admixture of faith and politics, a tendency that was absorbed by the West. Benedict XVI thinks it does not do any good to the faith for the Church to be too tied up with worldly powers and adapt herself to the current movements in society.

Like Prof. Di Fabio, he thinks that the Church has adapted too much to the world, has yielded to whatever the wave of the moment. He proposes instead Catholicism as a strong creative minority, which he does not see today.

But this is also related to the question of conscience. The dominant thought in Europe seems to be that conscience can be re-evaluated from time to time as one deems best. But that is not Benedict XVI’s way, who thinks that the basis of conscience – the profound ethic of the human being – must remain intact whatever the consequences, because these values represent the true and the good which have their basis in God who is Truth.

A German news agency has reported more about the seminar, but I have to translate the report.

Attention: Mons. Gaenswein speaks -
and we hear an echo of Benedict XVI
Translated from

September 11, 2018

The words said by Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, Prefect of the Pontifical Household and private secretary to Benedict XVI, at the presentation of the Italian edition of Rod Dreher’s book, L’opzione Benedetto, at the Italian Chamber of Deputies press room this week deserves attention.

Gaenswein said that the Church is living through her own ‘9/11’ in the new crisis precipitated by clerical sex abuses and episcopal cover-ups. Though no airplanes flew into St. Peter’s Basilica to destroy it, the Church has been profoundly shaken and damaged.

Dreher’s book [written in 2017 before the current storm] proposes that in order to come out of its crisis of faith, the Church should follow the experience of the Benedictine communities in the 6th century who lived by a guideline that was as simple as it was radical: quaerere Deum – to seek God in prayer, as the monks did, who, in looking up to the Absolute and seriously examining the question of truth, succeeded in the Dark Ages to lay down the bases for Western civilization.

The same proposal had been made by Benedict XVI in his famous September 2007 address at the College des Bernardins in Paris – and it is a choice that obviously implies the abandonment of any attempt to please the world by adopting its subjectivism, moral relativism and indifference towards the question of truth.

The comparison between the sex abuse scandals in the Church and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York is strong but Gaenswein did not hesitate to invoke it [especially since he spoke on the anniversary of that 9/11]. He said that the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and the McCarrick case that made him think of the simile.

Of course, we have not had churches collapse physically, but the message implicit in the scandals “is even more terrible than if it was reported that all the churches in Pennsylvania and the National Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC had been destroyed”.

It was there, at the Washington Cathedral, that in 2008, Benedict XVI spoke to the US bishops of the Church’s ‘profound shame’ for the sex abuse scandals, but as Gaenswein pointed out, that obviously was not enough to ‘stop the evil’.

Joseph Ratzigner always had the issue clearly in mind. In 2010, on his way to Fatima, he said that the most dangerous persecutions faced by the Church were not from the outside but those that come from within the Church herself. And in 2005, just a few weeks before he became Pope, he wrote explicitly in his Meditations for the 2005 Via Crucis at the Roman Colosseum about the ‘filth’ in the Church and the self-celebration of ordained ministers of God who ignore God.

Gaenswein is unsparing in his analysis. As a German, he knows all too well the devastating reality about the Catholic Church in his country. A Church that has ‘long been dead’, characterized today by dramatic numbers illustrating the exodus of Catholics from the flock, and by the fact that among the remaining Catholics, less than 10 percent go to Sunday Mass. What Church is this, indeed? To think that the early Christians defied the emperor and accepted death in reaffirming their right to Sunday Mass.

It was quite eloquent that Gaenswein cited recent words by Cardinal Eijk of Holland:

---

“In May, also the archbishop of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, admitted that the current crisis reminds him of 'the final trial in the Church,' as the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 675 describes it: ‘Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth’.”

---

In this context, Rod Dreher’s proposals are similar to instructions for constructing a sort of ‘Noah’s ark’. The inundation will not be stopped in any way. The Christian West will be – and already is – inundated by the waters of other philosophies, other cultures, other visions, that will also engulf the Church, but a small minority will be saved, not due to any special maneuvering, but through humble, sincere, constant and trusting prayer. Exactly as the contemplatives do in their monasteries and as Benedict XVI is doing after having renounced the active exercise of the pontificate.

How much is there of Joseph Ratzinger in what Gaenswein said? Very likely, much of it, considering the closeness and familiarity between the Emeritus Pope and his secretary. Moreover, Gaenswein would not have spoken as he did if he did not think he had Benedict VXI’s full support.

Indeed, an echo of Benedict XVI is clearly perceptible when Gaenswein says: “For many, everything seems to lead them to believe that the Church of Jesus Christ will never recover from the catastrophe of the sins which threaten to swallow her up”. But, he adds, the Church is not dead, and this is a time of grace because “what will make us free is not any particular effort of ours, but the truth, as the Lord has assured us”.

L'Espresso cover on Sept. 3, 2018: 'CHE PAPA E' - could be translated as 'What a pope!' or 'What kind of pope is this?'. The subheading reads: "Very very popular but does not speak on the most burning
issues. He has started a revolution in the Vatican but the Curia reins him in. Will Francis the Jesuit succeed in renewing the Church?..." Though Magister is the magazine's longtime Vaticanista,
L'Espresso is also the flagship magazine of Eugenio Scalfari's multimedia empire that includes the newspaper La Repubblica.

A pope who often contradicts himself
[In other words, he lies when he thinks he has to,
even if it means contradicting himself]

September 12, 2018

As the days go by, the controversy ignited by the indictment of former nuncio to the United States Carlo Maria Viganò against Pope Francis on account of the scandal of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick is becoming ever more lively.

And it has seen a further flare-up with the explosion of the case of Kim Davis, the Christian county official in Kentucky who was imprisoned for a week in the summer of 2015 for having refused - for reasons of freedom of conscience and of religion - to grant a marriage license to homosexual couples, and was received by Francis on September 24 of that same year at the Vatican nunciature in Washington.

On the Kim Davis case there are at least two more elements to be brought into focus, until now overlooked by the commentators. And both of them shed light on the “mystery” of Francis’s personality.

The first is the answer the pope gave to Terry Moran of ABC News, on the flight back from the United States to Rome, when as yet the meeting he had had with Kim Davis a few days before had not become public knowledge.

The journalist does not mention Davis by name. But he alludes to her unmistakably. Such that Francis has her in mind when he replies. Here is the official transcript of the question-and-answer between the journalist and the pope:

---

Holy Father, do you also support those individuals, including government officials, who say they cannot in good conscience, their own personal conscience, abide by some laws or discharge their duties as government officials, for example in issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples? Do you support those kinds of claims of religious liberty?
I can’t have in mind all cases that can exist about conscientious objection. But, yes, I can say conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right.

Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying 'this right that has merit, this one does not.' It (conscientious objection) is a human right.

It always moved me when I read, and I read it many times, when I read the Chanson de Roland, when the people were all in line and before them was the baptismal font – the baptismal font or the sword. And, they had to choose. They weren’t permitted conscientious objection. It is a right and if we want to make peace we have to respect all rights.

Would that include government officials as well?
It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right. It is a human right.

---

News of the meeting between Francis and Kim Davis did not come out until after the pope’s return to Rome.

“The pope spoke in English,” Davis recounted afterward. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’… It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me… I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

A few days later, however, on October 2, 2015, as the controversy raged, then-director of the Vatican press office Federico Lombardi released a statement in which it was maintained:
- that the meeting with Kim Davis was only one among the “several dozen” courtesy greetings that the pope had given that same day to a great number of persons;
- that the meeting “must not be considered as support for her position in all its particular and complex implications”;
- that “the only ‘audience’ granted by the pope at the nunciature [of Washington] was to one of his old students, with his family.”

Apart from the fact that this “family” received in audience was made up of one of Bergoglio’s old Argentine friends, Yayo Grassi, and his Indonesian male partner, Iwan Bagus, what is most striking about this statement - which was certainly approved by the pope - is that it contradicts or in any case downplays what Francis himself said on the plane in defense of Kim Davis and her right to conscientious objection.

But there’s more. Last August 28, three years later, the New York Times reported on a conversation between Francis and Juan Carlos Cruz, the best-known victim of sexual abuse in Chile, according to whom the pope said about the meeting with Kim Davis:

---

"I did not know who the woman was and he [Msgr. Viganò] snuck her in to say hello to me – and of course they made a whole publicity out of it. And I was horrified and I fired that nuncio.”

---

Viganò replied to these words attributed to the pope on August 30, with a detailed reconstruction of the lead-up to that meeting, to show that Francis “knew very well who Davis was” and that “he and his close associates had approved the audience.”

In his memorandum, Viganò does not cite the words that Francis said on the plane, presented above. But these would be enough to demonstrate the extent to which the pope was fully apprised of the question, so much so as to reiterate, in his response to the journalist from ABC News, some of the passages of the written report that Viganò had delivered to him just before the meeting with Davis and that he has now made public.

Viganò however, at the end of his memorandum, goes so far as to present an aut-aut: “One of the two is lying: Cruz, or the pope?”

But it is plausible that things are not so cut and dried. And it is here that there emerges the second element to be brought into focus, which concerns more closely the personality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

He is a pope, Bergoglio, who personifies contradictions. Of which the Kim Davis case is an example, but not the only one.

The contradiction between what Francis said on the plane on September 28, 2015 and what he had Fr. Lombardi say the following October 2 has already been covered here.

But then there is the contradiction - according to Viganò’s memorandum - between the alarming words of secretary of state Pietro Parolin in urgently calling the then-nuncio to the United States back to Rome: “You must come to Rome immediately, because the pope is infuriated with you,” and the “affectionate and fatherly” manner, full of “constant praise” with which Francis instead spoke to Viganò upon receiving him in audience on October 9.

And then again the contradiction with what Francis had reported to Juan Carlos Cruz: of having seen himself tricked by Viganò and abruptly firing him as a result.

Last September 2 Fr. Lombardi gave a feeble counter-reply - together with Fr. Thomas Rosica, at the time the English-language spokesman for the Vatican press office - to Viganò’s memorandum, in an attempt to defend the statement of three years before.

But the simplest and most likely explanation is that Pope Francis serenely acted on his own all the parts of the drama, no matter if one was in contrast with the other: the words on the plane, the statement of October 2, the anti-Viganò tantrum with Cardinal Parolin, the subsequent kindly audience with Viganò himself, the new anti-Viganò tantrum with the Chilean Cruz…

This is the way Bergoglio is. To each his own. Or better, to each that which the pope maintains it is opportune to give and say in that given moment, according to his personal calculations.

The pope behaves like this very often, above all on the most controversial questions. Another glaring example of this is what happened last winter concerning China. While on the one hand, receiving in audience Cardinal Joseph Zen Zekiun and the secretary “De Propaganda Fide” at the time, Savio Hon Taifai, he said to both of them, expressing surprise, that he had not been informed about what the Vatican diplomates were doing on behalf of the Chinese regime and to the detriment of the “clandestine” Church, and had promised to act in support of their protests, a few days later an official Vatican statement confirmed instead that there was no “disparity of thought and action between the Holy Father and his colleagues in the Roman curia with regard to Chinese issues,” that the secretariat of state kept the pope constantly informed “in a faithful and detailed manner,” and that the statements to the contrary by Cardinal Zen elicited “surprise and regret.”

Or again, look at how Francis behaved with Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the congregation for divine worship. On July 11, 2016, an official Vatican statement attacked the cardinal in a humiliating way, contesting his recommendations in favor of a reorientation of liturgical prayer toward the east and his stated interest in proceeding with a “reform of the reform,” meaning a correction of the deviations of the postconciliar liturgical innovations.

Except that Francis had received Sarah in audience two days earlier. Thanking him and praising him for what he was doing, without the slightest reference to the backstabbing he was about to get. And the previous month of April, during another audience, Francis had urged Sarah to proceed with precisely that “reform of the reform” which he would publicly disown just a little while later.

But the most sensational example of the contradictions personified by Francis is his response to the Lutheran woman who asked him if she could receive communion together with her Catholic husband. Not in separate audiences and speaking to different persons, but in a single statement of a few minutes with the same person, Bergoglio concentrated everything and the contrary of everything. He told her first yes, then no, then I don’t know, and finally do as you believe. The video of that question-and-answer (in Italian, with a transcription in English) is an extraordinary “summa” for penetrating the personality of the current pope:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Dlt6gzB-4&feature=youtu.be

A personality that was forged by going through not a few dark “passages,” as he himself recalled recently, which led him to entrust himself for a few months to a psychoanalyst and which in any case have left in him a still-unresolved interior disquiet.

To overcome which he himself has confessed, for example, that he chose Santa Marta as his residence “for psychiatric reasons” and refuses to read the online writings of his opponents, to safeguard his “mental health.”


Is this pope serious about addressing
the abuse crisis and its causes?
Hes apparently believes that airing bishops’ dirty laundry is not the right thing to do—
and that is a large part of the attitude that got us to this point in the first place.
by Christopher R. Altieri

September 12, 2018

Anyone who is praising the announcement on Wednesday of Pope Francis’s convocation of the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences for a meeting in February [Six months from now! Does anyone at the Vatican have any sense of urgency at all about this?] on clerical sex abuse has not been paying attention.

For one thing, the sexual abuse of minors by clerics is only the peculiarly gruesome tip of an ocean-tipping iceberg; the systematic coverup of abuse is the level just beginning to be brought to the surface.

The depth and extent of rot in clerical culture, high and low, is what we have yet to fathom — and although the Press Office statement that accompanied the announcement — from the “Council of Nine” cardinals — of the February meeting did make mention of “vulnerable adults”, the whole thing reads as pre-packaged and contrived.

For another, the wording of the announcement strongly suggests that the C9 cardinals had to persuade Pope Francis of the need to do something — anything — to address the issue.

“The Holy Father, Francis, having heard the Council of Cardinals, has decided to convoke a reunion with the Presidents of the Episcopal Conferences of the Catholic Church, on the theme of ‘protection of minors,’” the statement reads. That’s the way — in curialese — to tell people you had to twist the boss’s arm to get what you got.

Whatever else it might be, another meeting of episcopal minds to think through and talk about the issue cannot be any real part of a serious address of this very urgently pressing crisis.

Pope Francis, in any case, appears to have a very different view of the Church’s circumstances and their cause. He claimed on Tuesday that the bishops are the victims of a diabolical plot, to which the faithful are at best unwitting accomplices.

“In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and is attacking bishops,” he said on Tuesday morning at Mass in the Casa Santa Marta. “True, we are all sinners, we bishops,” Francis went on to say. “[The Great Accuser] tries to uncover [our] sins, so they are visible, in order to scandalize the people.”

One would think that, after all we’ve been through in the past eight months — not to mention the last 16 years and more — the proposition that people have a right to know the character and conduct of bishops would not be too controversial.

Again, Pope Francis apparently has a different idea.

In one sense, he’s quite right. The devil prowls the earth like a roaring lion, 1 Peter 5:8 tells us, seeking souls to devour. We also know the devil likes the taste of bishop. The problem is that the bishops who have winked at moral turpitude and covered for the wickedness of too many clerics over too many decades have betrayed the trust of the people — including priests — the souls of whom God has entrusted to their care.

Pope Francis appears genuinely to believe that airing bishops’ dirty laundry is not the right thing to do, because God chose them, and doing so will compromise their mission-effectiveness. That is a large part of the attitude that got us to this point in the first place.

“I was part of the problem,” the abuse survivor and victim-advocate, Juan Carlos Cruz, has quoted Francis as having said after the Chilean theatre of the global crisis exploded in his face. If that was a moment of clarity for Pope Francis, it is now apparent that he has recovered from it. The tendency toward trolling and gaslighting the faithful, who are fed up with the corruption, incompetence, tone-deafness, and plain old blindness and deafness of the bishops, is certainly “part of the problem.”

If this assessment is inaccurate, Francis needs to prove it so in deed.

Does the Church have enemies? Yes. Have those enemies used the abuse crisis as a club with which to beat the Church? Yes. They shall continue to do so. The ineluctable fact of the matter is that the hierarchical leaders of the Church are largely responsible for fashioning the weapon and putting it into her enemies’ hands.

The ultimate goal in all this must be moral recrudescence in the whole Church, especially in the ranks of clerical and hierarchical leadership. The cultural crisis in the Church is complicated, however, by the admixture — inevitable, this side of the celestial Jerusalem — of the general ills of the age.

In our age, enlightened and democratic as it is, we do not often hear talk of the sin of prosopolempsia — literally, “face-taking” —which is usually rendered “respect of persons.”

“What,” one might ask, “is wrong with respecting persons?” To be a “respecter of persons” in the possibly sinful sense means, in essence, to deal with people according to their social rank, prestige, or perceived standing in a community, rather than according to the quality of their character.

It might help to think of it as being a respecter of someone’s persona — and it is dangerous, even when the persona to which one is at risk of standing in thrall is that of a bishop, especially the Bishop of Rome.

The great cautionary tale in this regard is Hans Christian Andersen’s short story, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that story, everyone sees what there is — and is not — to see, but only a child without the worldly wit to know the stakes is capable of saying what there is to say. “Be like the child,” is the facile takeaway. It is not wrong, as far as it goes, but it misses the point of what is, again, a cautionary tale.

Do not be like everyone else in the story, from the emperor on down: unable to say, because one is unwilling to admit — because of what the admission would say about oneself — that the emperor is naked as the day he was born.

The indifference of much of media to the allegations of Jorge Bergoglio's misdeeds as Archbishop of Buenos Aires is truly amazing - and persuasively calls to question the journalistic integrity of contemporary media, if such a concept still exists at all.

Some of what Henry Sire reports here from his book has been reported by other sources in recent months, but there is also much that I am reading about for the first time. Bergoglio and his strategists may think that to completely ignore allegations like these would show that they do not worry him at all because
a) none of it is true, or much of it is exaggerated, and he cannot be bothered to even have anyone respond to the allegations in his name (as his Praetorian Guard has been doing about the Vigano testimony) or
b) there is enough truth in the allegations (much of it, after all, is documented, just like much of Vigano's testimony is) that even his defenders cannot bring themselves to refute them (much as they cannot refute much of what Vigano says) in defense of Bergoglio.

Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires:
Some more unanswered questions
by Henry Sire

September 11, 2018

When I wrote The Dictator Pope, I pointed out the failure of the cardinals in 2013 to inform themselves about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio’s record as archbishop of Buenos Aires, for if they had known about it even superficially, they would not have voted for him. The more that is known about that record, the truer this appears.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Cardinal Bergoglio was not merely below the standard usually expected in a papal candidate; he represented, in his close contacts if not in his own personal conduct, a link to some of the most corrupt features of the South American Church. Several examples of this need to be described.

The swindle against the Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida
In my book, I touched on a financial scandal in Buenos Aires that erupted shortly before Bergoglio became archbishop. The revelations made since then about the figure who was at the center of it, Monsignor Roberto Toledo, give it an even more sinister aspect than appeared at the time.

The story is as follows: In 1997, Jorge Bergoglio had been for five years an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, and he had been granted the right of succession to Cardinal Quarracino, who was ailing and who died the following year.

Quarracino had links with a bank, the Banco de Crédito Provincial, owned by the Trusso family, who were regarded as pillars of the Church and were close friends of the cardinal. Quarracino had been instrumental in securing for the BCP the large account of the Argentine military pension fund, the Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida, and in 1997, the latter was asked to make a loan to the archdiocese of Buenos Aires of ten million dollars, underwritten by the BCP.

The meeting to arrange this contract was held at the offices of the archdiocese, but Cardinal Quarracino was too ill to attend; he was represented by his general secretary, Monsignor Roberto Toledo. When the moment came to sign the contract, Monsignor Toledo took the document out of the room on the pretext of taking it to the cardinal, and he shortly brought it back with a signature, which, as later appeared, had in fact been forged by Toledo himself.

Monsignor Toledo was an egregious example of the corrupt clergy whose prominence in the Church is being highlighted ever more by the pontificate of Pope Francis. He was a homosexual and was known to have a male lover, a gym instructor, who served as a channel of the Trussos’ financial influence with the archdiocese.

Within a few weeks of the conclusion of the loan, but for unrelated reasons, the BCP went into bankruptcy; it was revealed to have large debts that it could not pay, and the Sociedad Militar’s money, deposited with the bank, was lost. When the Sociedad tried to recover its loan of ten million dollars from the archdiocese, Cardinal Quarracino denied having ever signed the contract.

The cardinal died shortly afterward, and Archbishop Bergoglio took over as his successor. In his biography The Great Reformer, Austen Ivereigh represents Bergoglio as the man who brought financial probity to the finances of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, but he omits a number of details crucial to the case.

The first is the way Archbishop Bergoglio handled the Sociedad Militar’s claim for the restitution of its ten million dollars. He appointed as the archdiocese’s lawyer to manage the case one of the shadiest figures in the Argentine legal system, Roberto Dromi, a man who has been prosecuted for numerous offenses of corruption. The mere employment of such a man by Archbishop Bergoglio should be a major cause of scandal. Dromi harassed the Sociedad to such an extent over its claim that in the end, the Sociedad was obliged to drop it.

The Trusso family were ruined by the collapse of their bank, and some of them claimed that they had suffered injustice. In 2002, the journalist Olga Wornat interviewed Francisco Trusso and asked him why he did not speak to Bergoglio about the forged signature. He replied: “I have asked for an audience, my wife has asked for an audience. My son. My brother. He won’t receive us[.] … He escapes, he doesn’t want to hear. It must be because his tail is not too clean. He must have signed something”.

Even more significant is Archbishop Bergoglio’s kid-glove handling of Monsignor Toledo. He was first sent back to his hometown without any sanctions. In 2005, he was tried for fraud, but no sentence was ever passed. This treatment falls into the pattern of Bergoglio’s habitual inaction in cases of misdemeanor, but there is a special detail to it: as secretary to Cardinal Quarracino back in 1991, Monsignor Toledo was the man responsible for rescuing Father Bergoglio from the internal exile to which the Jesuits had consigned him and getting him appointed auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires. Ever since, Bergoglio has been interested in preventing the reputation of either Cardinal Quarracino or Monsignor Toledo from being tarnished by the scandals that gathered round them [4].

A macabre postscript to this story emerged in January 2017, when Monsignor Toledo, who had been officiating for eighteen years as a parish priest in his hometown, still unpunished, was accused of murdering a longtime friend of his and forging his will. We are given a glimpse here into the consequences of Bergoglio’s famous clemency, and we begin to get a sense of the personalities to whom he owed his rise in the Church and with whom he consorted while in office.

The Catholic University of Argentina and the IOR
Another incident mentioned in my book relates to the Catholic University of Argentina, of which Bergoglio was chancellor ex officio as archbishop of Buenos Aires. His agent here was Pablo Garrido, who was financial manager of the archdiocese and whom Bergoglio also appointed financial manager of the university (a post from which he was removed in 2017).

The university, which had a rich endowment of 200 million dollars, provided Archbishop Bergoglio with the financial sinews he needed in his attempts to gain influence in the Vatican, whose finances had been left in a disastrous state by the illegal activities of Monsignor Marcinkus and his successor, Monsignor de Bonis.

Between 2005 and 2011, some 40 million dollars were transferred from the Catholic University of Argentina to the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (the Vatican Bank), in a transaction that was supposed to be a deposit but which the IOR has hitherto treated as a donation. (Just this year, the reports are that this misappropriation has begun to be remedied, but only partially.)

Pablo Garrido was responsible for this transfer, against the protests of members of the university who pointed out that the university, as an educational foundation, could not make a donation to a foreign bank. Together with the case of the Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida, this is one of the obscure financial episodes in Archbishop Bergoglio’s administration that deserve to be studied in depth by a qualified researcher.

The episcopal cronies of Bergoglio
Equally revealing is a look at Cardinal Bergoglio’s close associates in the Buenos Aires episcopate. The first to consider is Juan Carlos Maccarone, whom Bergoglio made an auxiliary bishop at the beginning of his tenure, in 1999.

In 2005, Maccarone was dismissed from the episcopate by Pope Benedict after he was filmed having sexual relations with a homosexual prostitute in the sacristy of his cathedral. Yet Cardinal Bergoglio publicly defended him, asserting that the filming was a setup to bring the bishop down because of his left-wing political commitment. Maccarone, it is worth noting, declared that everyone was aware of his homosexual activities and that he had been appointed bishop regardless of them.

Another friend and protégé of Cardinal Bergoglio was Joaquín Mariano Sucunza, whom he consecrated auxiliary bishop in 2000 although he knew that Sucunza had been cited in a divorce case as the lover of a married woman, whose husband accused him of having destroyed their marriage. Bishop Sucunza has continued ever since as auxiliary and was indeed appointed by Pope Francis as temporary administrator of the archdiocese in 2013 after Bergoglio’s own elevation to the papacy.

Protection of sexual abusers
No offense has been more damaging to bishops in recent years than the accusation of not having acted with diligence against priests suspected of sexually abusing children. Several bishops have had their careers destroyed over this issue, not always in cases of obvious culpability.

Pope Francis himself proclaimed a “zero tolerance” policy in this area and supposedly introduced a new reign of transparency. Yet if we look into it, we find that his own past career is studded with episodes deserving fully as much scrutiny as those that have brought other prelates down.

The first case to be noted is that of the priest Rubén Pardo, who was reported to an auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires in 2002 for having invited a fifteen-year-old boy to his house and sexually abused him in bed. The mother of the boy had great difficulty in getting the ecclesiastical authorities to admit the case; she considered that Cardinal Bergoglio was protecting the guilty priest and was indignant at his giving him lodging in a diocesan residence. She complained that when she tried to speak to the cardinal at the archiepiscopal residence, she was ejected by the security staff.
The priest died of AIDS in 2005. In 2013, a Buenos Aires court obliged the Catholic Church to pay the family compensation for the harm they had suffered. The mother’s opinion on the handling of the case was: “Bergoglio’s commitment is just talk.” (Ese es el compromiso de Bergoglio: de la boca para fuera).

Another instructive case is that of Father Julio Grassi, who was convicted in 2009 of sexually abusing a teenage boy. What surprises in this case is the exceptional efforts the Argentine Bishops’ Conference, under the chairmanship of Cardinal Bergoglio, devoted to getting Father Grassi cleared, commissioning a document of 2,600 pages for the purpose. It was submitted to the judges after Grassi’s conviction but before they had given sentence and was described by the attorney Juan Pablo Gallego as “a scandalous instance of lobbying and exerting pressure on the Court.”

Let us not deny the importance of defending innocent people against false accusations, but we are not left with the impression of a prelate with a “zero tolerance” record against sexual abuse.

Perhaps more significant is a remark by Cardinal Bergoglio to Rabbi Abraham Skorka, published in 2010, a year after Father Grassi’s conviction, that cases of clerical sexual abuse “had never arisen” in his diocese [9]. It is an example of the characteristic habit of Jorge Bergoglio of disposing of inconvenient facts by denying their existence.

Another example of this foible is provided by the father of a pupil at the Jesuit school in Buenos Aires where Bergoglio had taught as a young man in the 1960s. Forty years later, when Bergoglio was cardinal-archbishop, that father was told by his son that the chaplain of the school had indecently propositioned him in the confessional. He reported the case to the cardinal and was shocked to find that he took no action, the response of Bergoglio that we find time and again in the face of misconduct of all kinds.

Shortly afterward, the father was astonished to hear Cardinal Bergoglio, replying to a question in a meeting of parents of the school, declare that the problem of sexual abuse and of homosexual clergy was virtually nonexistent in his diocese.

In the light of these facts, the recent revelations about Pope Francis’s complicity in the cover-ups of sexual abuse in the United States fall easily into place. It is entirely in the character of a man who throughout his career had shown complete indifference to accusations of clerical corruption when they came to his notice.

When we consider his promotions of Bishop Maccarone and Bishop Sucunza, it comes as no surprise that he was a friend of Cardinal McCarrick, who, in the years before Bergoglio’s election as pope, had already been disciplined by Pope Benedict for his widespread molestation of boys and young men but who was nevertheless able to play an influential role in Bergoglio’s election.

It is also completely in character that, on becoming pope, he should have taken as his leading allies prelates such as Cardinal Danneels, who was known to have covered up child abuse in Belgium, and Cardinal Wuerl, whose role in the United States proves to have been equally murky.

We come back to the fact that, if the cardinals had had any inkling of the background of Cardinal Bergoglio’s Church in Buenos Aires, they would never have voted for him.
- They might not have foreseen Bergoglio’s cavalier attitude to Catholic doctrine, but what they were looking for was a man who would tackle the knotty problems, which had defeated Benedict XVI, of financial and moral reform in the Vatican and of the widespread plague of clerical sexual abuse.
- If they had been aware of the lack of moral integrity of the clergy with whom Bergoglio had surrounded himself in Buenos Aires, of the financial scandals in his diocese, of his habitual inaction in cases of wrongdoing, of his repeated turning away of people who came to him with complaints, and of his head-in-the-sand attitude toward criticism, it would have been clear to them that this was the last candidate to fit the profile of a reformer.

Apropos the following item: As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." So much for Bergoglio's credibility.

Pope's favorability plummets
among US Catholics
By Grace Sparks
CNN
September 12, 2018



After new sexual abuse allegations against Catholic priests and criticism of Pope Francis's leadership on the issue, his favorability in the US has dropped substantially in a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.

Only half of Americans -- 48% -- say they have a favorable view of the Pope, down from two-thirds who said the same in January 2017 and 72% who said so in December 2013, a few months after he was first elevated to the position.

The poll was conducted before news that the Pope has called an unprecedented meeting of top officials in the church over the sexual abuse scandal, scheduled for February 2019. [

Specifically among US Catholics, his ratings have fallen from 83% favorability a year and a half ago to 63% now -- a 20-point drop.

Among Americans over the age of 45, favorable views have sunk 24 points, from 68% to 44%, while those under the age of 45 have only had a 10-point decrease.

There has been a slightly steeper decline among women (down 20 points, to 51% favorability) than among men (down 15 points, to 45% favorability).

Democrats also lost positive views on the current leader of the Catholic church, from 79% favorability in 2017 to 57% now. Republicans had a smaller drop, due to their lower ratings of Francis to begin with, at only 54% in early 2017 (and 36% now).

The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from Sept. 6 through 9 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

CNN, unlike FoxNews, is ultra-liberal, so good for them that they are reporting this on one of their alltime icons... It follows a Newsweek poll a week ago, as ff:

---

(Newsweek, "Pope Francis Should Resign Amid Church Abuse Scandals,
1 in 4 Americans say: Poll", September 5, 2018)

Only 35% of Americans think Pope Francis shouldn't resign because of the sex abuse scandals according to a YouGov/Economist scientific poll.

41% of President Donald Trump voters wanted Francis to resign, while only 13% of pro-abortion LGBT candidate Hillary Clinton voters thought the Pope should resign.

Francis got a whopping no confidence vote from 65% of Americans according to the poll.

26% thought the Pope should resign. 39% were not sure, while 35% didn't want Francis to resign.

---

Chip, chip, peck, peck, a little here, a bit there - the Bergoglio myth is crumbling, thank God.

The Church and 'the men of the Church'
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by Francesca Romana from

September 12, 2018

The courageous denunciation of ecclesiastical scandals by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has generated the consensus of many, but also the displeasure of others, convinced that everything discrediting the representatives of the Church should be covered up by silence.

This desire to safeguard the Church is understandable when the scandal is an exception. There is the risk in that case of generalizing, by saddling the behavior of a few onto everyone . Quite different is the case when immorality is the rule, or at least is a widespread way of living accepted as the norm. In this case public denunciation is the first step towards the necessary reform of “morals”.

Breaking the silence is part of the duties of a pastor, as St. Gregory the Great admonishes:

---

“What in fact is the fear of a pastor to state the truth, if not the turning of his back on the enemy with his silence? If, instead, he fights in defense of his flock, he builds a bastion for the House of Israel against its enemies. For this the Lord through the mouth of Isaiah admonishes: “Cry, cease not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet” (Isaiah, 58,1).

---

At the origins of a guilty silence there is often the lack of distinction between the Church and the men of the Church, be they the simple laity, bishops, cardinals or Popes.

One of the reasons for this confusion is precisely the prominence of the authorities involved in the scandals. The higher their dignity, the more the tendency to identify them with the Church, attributing good and evil indifferently to the one and the other.

In reality the Good is the sole business of the Church, whereas all the Evil is due to the men who represent Her. For this the Church cannot be defined as sinful, Father Roger T. Calmel O.P. (1920-1998) wrote:

---

She asks forgiveness to the Lord not for the sins She has committed, but for the sins committed by Her children, insofar as they do not listen to Her as Mother.” (Breve apologia della Chiesa di sempre, Editrice Ichtys, Albano Laziale 2007, p. 91).

---

All the members of the Church whether of the teaching or student parts, are men, with their own nature, wounded by original sin. Baptism does not render the faithful faultless, nor do Holy Orders render the members of the Hierarchy holy. The Pope himself can sin and fall into error, except in faith and morals when he has the charism of infallibility. [But Bergoglio's most egregious misdeeds precisely have to do with his words and deeds affecting faith and morals - and his followers could well say that in those respects, he must be considered 'infallible'.]

It must be said, moreover, that the faithful do not constitute the Church, as happens in human societies, created by the members that form them and dissolved as soon as they separate. To say “We are Church” is false, since the belonging of the baptized to the Church, does not derive from their will: it is Christ Himself who invites us to belong to His flock, by repeating to everyone: “You have not chosen me but I have chosen you” (John 15, 16).

The Church founded by Jesus Christ has a Human-Divine constitution: human as it has a material and passive component, made up of all the faithful, part of both the clergy and the laity; supernatural and divine for Her soul. Jesus Christ, Her Head, is Her foundation and the Holy Spirit is Her supernatural propeller.

The Church therefore is not holy because of the holiness of Her members, but it is Her members that are holy thanks to Jesus Christ Who directs Her and the Holy Spirit Who gives life to Her. From them comes all Good, that is, all that is “true, noble, just, pure, lovable, honorable and worthy of praise” (Phil. 4,8). And from the men of the Church comes all the Evil: disorders, scandals, abuse of power, violence, turpitudes and sacrileges.

The Passionist theologian Enrico Zoffoli (1915-1996) who dedicated many fine pages to this theme wrote;

---

"So we have no interest in covering up the faults of bad Christians, of unworthy, cowardly, inept, dishonest and arrogant priests. The intent to defend the cause and mitigate their responsibilities would be ingenuous and useless along with minimizing the consequences of their errors, having recourse to historical contexts and singular situations in order then to explain away and absolve everything” (Chiesa e uomini di Chiesa, Edizioni Segno, Udine 1994, p. 41).

---

Today there is great filth in the Church, as the then Cardinal Ratzinger said during the Via Crucis of Good Friday 2005, which preceded his rise to the papacy. “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him!"

Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò’s testimony is praiseworthy, since, by bringing to light this filth, he renders the work of purification of the Church more urgent.

It must be [made] clear that the conduct of unworthy bishops or priests is not inspired by the dogmas or morals of the Church, but constitutes their betrayal, as it represents a negation of the law of the Gospel.

The world that accuses the Church for Her faults accuses Her of transgressing a moral order: but in the name of what law and doctrine does the world claim to indict the Church? The philosophy of life professed by the modern world is relativism to the degree that there are no absolute truths and the only law of man is to be devoid of [all] laws; the practical consequence is hedonism according to which the only form of possible happiness is the gratification of one’s desires and the satisfaction of one’s instincts.

How can the world, devoid of principles as it is, judge and condemn the Church? The Church has the right and duty to judge the world because She has an absolute and immutable doctrine.

The modern world, child of the principles of the French Revolution, develops with coherence the ideas of the libertine Marquis de Sade (1740-1814): free love, free blasphemy, total freedom to deny and destroy every bastion of Faith and Morals, as in the days of the French Revolution when the Bastille, where Sade was a prisoner, was destroyed. The outcome of all this is the dissolution of morality, which has destroyed the foundations of civil society and over the last two centuries has created the darkest age in history.

The life of the Church is also the history of betrayals, defections, apostasies and insufficient correspondence with Divine Grace. But this tragic weakness always goes along with extraordinary faithfulness: the falls, even the most terrifying, of many members of the Church, are interlaced with the heroism of the virtue seen in many other of Her children.

A river of sanctity gushes out of the side of Christ and runs flowing through the course of the centuries:
- the martyrs who faced the wild animals in the Coliseum;
- the hermits who abandoned the world to live a life of penitence; - the missionaries who go to the ends of the earth;
- the intrepid confessors of the faith who combat schisms and heresies;
- the contemplative religious who sustain the defenders of the Church and Christian civilization with their prayers;
- all those, who, in different ways, have conformed their lives to the Divine one.
St. Theresa of the Child Jesus wanted to gather up all these vocations in one supreme act of love to God.

The saints are different from one another, but what they all share is union with God: and this union, which never flags, makes it so that the Church, prior to being One, Catholic and Apostolic, is first of all perfectly Holy. The holiness of the Church doesn’t depend on the holiness of Her children; it is ontological, given that it is connected to Her very nature.

For the Church to be called holy it is not necessary that all Her children live a saintly life; it is enough that a part, even a small part, thanks to the vital flow of the Holy Spirit, remain heroically faithful to the law of the Gospel during times of trial.


We are all baying in vain at the moon when we insist on getting 'clarity' from Jorge Bergoglio, a man who calls on his flock to 'make a mess' - create chaos, really - because he seems to thrive on chaos, the chaos of his thought and ethics. Nonetheless, Fr Scalese gives it another try...


A time for clarity
Translated from

September 12, 2018

Italia Oggi had an article yesterday by Alessandra Nucci about the developments which have thrown the Church into a turmoil unprecedented in our day.

It is singular in that it takes off from the Vigano Testimony to recall the dossier on the existence of a ‘gay lobby’ in the Curia prepared for Benedict XVI by the three retired cardinals (Herranz, Tomko and De Giorgi) he commissioned to investigate for him. A dossier that Benedict XVI passed on to his successor [at their first meeting in Castel Gandolfo on March 21, 2013, less than two weeks after Bergoglio was elected pope].

The article actually focuses more on the previous pontificate than this one, and recalls its most painful moments: how it became impossible for Benedict XVI to address the students and faculty of Rome’s La Sapienza University; the reaction to the Regensburg lecture; the Williamson case; the profanation of the tombs of the Belgian bishops in Brussels [by civilian investigators looking into records of sex abuse cover-ups]; the de-activation of the ATMs inside the Vatican by the Banco d’Italia; the various stories about the IOR [none of which even came near the magnitude of the 1981 scandal that saw he Church pay out $250 million to bank depositors who lost their money with the crash of the Mafia-backed Banco Ambrosiano with which the IOR had partnered]; and the Vatileaks ‘scandal’. [It reads like a sparse list of truly ‘venial sins’ compared to the unending list of ‘mortal sins’ attributed so far to this pontificate.]

She also adds a couple of events that happened after Benedict XVI’s retirement: a theologian’s [Andrea Grillo] call for him “to leave the Vatican and stay silent forever” after he wrote a Foreword for a book by Cardinal Sarah; and Mons. Dario Vigano’s inept and ill-advised attempt to claim that Benedict XVI had endorsed a series of little books written by no-name theologians to ‘celebrate’ Jorge Bergoglio’s theology.

By recalling all of the above, in addition to developments in the past two months, one realizes that the problem is not confined only to the question posed by Mons. Carlo Maria Vigano, namely, what Pope Francis knew about ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s ‘secret life’ and whether Benedict XVI had, in fact, imposed disciplinary sanctions on McCarrick.

The problem is far vaster and does not just concern this pontificate but also the preceding ones. Pandora’s box has been pried open and nothing can close it now, because any such attempt is doomed to fail.

I will admit that I have never been fanatic about transparency at all costs. I belong to the old school that believes in not washing dirty laundry in public. But having arrived where we now are, I believe it is absolutely necessary to clear up all questions. I do not think silence serves anything at this time, nor attempts to minimize the weight and scope of recent developments, nor maneuvers to divert public attention to other issues (the economy, the environment, the migrant crisis, whatever), nor the attempts to discredit the ‘enemy’ (Mons Carlo Vigano, in this case).

Now is the time to take the bull by the horns and face the problem courageously. Did not Pope Francis write this in Evangelii gaudium?:

---

227. When conflict arises, some people simply look at it and go their way as if nothing happened; they wash their hands of it and get on with their lives. Others embrace it in such a way that they become its prisoners; they lose their bearings, project onto institutions their own confusion and dissatisfaction and thus make unity impossible.

But there is also a third way, and it is the best way to deal with conflict. It is the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process. “Blessed are the peacemakers!” (Mt 5:9).]

---

Well, that is exactly what must be done now. It is not about defending the pope from his ‘enemies’. He may even be the first victim in this situation [Really, Fr S! How????] and therefore, he must be helped to overcome it. It is necessary to clear up things now not just about McCarrick but also about:
- The 2012 Vatileaks
- The report made by Cardinals Herranz, Tomko and Di Giorgi
- Benedict XVI’s renunciation
- The ‘gay lobby’ in the Church
- The Sankt-Gallen Mafia\

These are all matters that await clarification. The dirt can no longer be just swept under the rug. It can no longer be kept hidden by the veil of pontifical secrecy, hoping that it will soon be forgotten, and things can resume as usual.

When we sin, and we wish to be forgiven, we must first humbly acknowledge our sin. The same thing goes for the Church – if the institutional Church wishes to emerge from this situation, then she must lay open the cards. Meanwhile, what is to be done, concretely?

Some bishops have recently proposed a suspension of the scheduled synodal assembly on ‘young people’ and to hold instead a synodal assembly on sexual abuse and the responsibility of the bishops therein. A proposal not to be dismissed offhand – because today bishops appear ‘de-legitimized’ to even deal with the problems of ‘young people’. Why don’t they occupy themselves with their own present predicament? Though I personally think that the problem is too vast and too grave for a synodal assembly to confront.

Perhaps convoking an ecumenical council is called for, because it is only right that all the bishops of the world should be involved in facing the crisis that has engulfed the Church. A council that will neither be doctrinal nor pastoral, but exclusively disciplinary, which will examine all the aspects of the present crisis with a view to restoring what John Paul I called, in his installation homily, ‘the great discipline of the Church”. Extreme evils deserve extreme means.

There can no longer be subterfuges. It is time to face reality unflinchingly, without fear of denouncing evil where it has ensconced itself, doing so with humility and courage, trusting in the grace of God to be able to take the necessary measures to heal the ecclesial body.

It is time to proceed to a true reform of the Church – not ideological, but moral.


Meanwhile, get set for a new round of hefty mudslinging against the Church....

3,677 sex abuse cases
reported in 1946-2014
involving German priests


BERLIN, Sept. 12, 2018 (AP) - A leading German magazine says a report on sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church in Germany details 3,677 abuses cases by Catholic clergy between 1946 and 2014.

Spiegel Online wrote Wednesday the report it obtained – commissioned by the German Bishops Conference and researched by three universities – concludes that more than half of the victims were 13 or younger and most were boys. Every sixth case involved rape and at least 1,670 clergy were involved.

The German Bishops Conference had no immediate comment but said it was preparing a response.

The Catholic Church has been struggling with sex abuse by its clergy for decades.

An investigation earlier this year in the United States found rampant sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by about 300 Catholic priests in Pennsylvania.

I bet the report was immediately scoured for anything that may have involved Joseph and/or George Ratzinger in any way! (Or Gerhard Mueller, or Georg Gaenswein, for that matter.) Surely the AP would have headlined it if they found anything.

The Bergogliacs have to be hurting so baaaad if someone like Fr Reese can tweet
to the world that 'the conservatives are winning' just several days after the
Vigano Testimony was made public. Joseph Shaw at the Latin Mass Society marshals
a handful of tweets from two other Bergogliacs to illustrate the idiotic vacuity
of their non-response responses to Vigano.


Fr Reese on the Vigano crisis:
'The conservatives are winning'

September 9, 2018

This [Fr Reese's reference to some 'labor' problem] must count as one of the most absurd comments on the clerical abuse crisis centred, for now, in the United States.

The attempt to carry on as if nothing at all was happening, always the first recourse of the bureaucrat to a crisis, has at this moment not only failed, even according to a supporter, but become utterly ludicrous.

Of course people are more interested in Archbishop Viganò's statement than in the latest missive from the Bishops' Conference about the dignity of work. Are we supposed to think that this interest is misplaced?

By that time 'team Francis' had already moved on to a kind of damage-limitation which, instead of trying to distract attention from Archbishop Viganò, focused it on what they hoped would prove to be his weaknesses. This, too, has proved a failure, however.



Few people had heard of Viganò before his statement, and no-one has anything invested in his personal reputation or political associations. They just want to know if what he says is true.

The attempted character-assassination of Viganò himself increasingly strikes observers as an example of the whistle-blower suppression strategy which is very much part of the problem Viganò has been trying to expose. What we would expect from an abusive cabal is demands for silence and submission, angry denunciations of those who ask questions, and downplaying of the seriousness of accusations.

What do we find? Well, it has been quite a sight on Twitter to see Massimo Faggioli, Austen Ivereigh and others have to insist repeatedly that they weren't really playing down the seriousness of the systematic sexual abuse of seminarians: cases which range from seduction to rape. If you have to keep saying that kind of thing, it's a sign that your public relations strategy isn't working.



And it really isn't working. We can see that in relation to two important constituencies: the American Catholic bishops, and mainstream conservative American Catholic commentators. Both are more or less closely connected to the Church as an institution, and depend for their positions and future prospects upon the favour of their hierarchical superiors, as well, or more, than upon their popularity with ordinary Catholics. This makes their defection from reflexive defence of the Pope, or at least silence, very significant.

LifeSiteNews has a list of bishops calling for an investigation of Vigano's allegations. There are a few non-Americans, but the rest are from the US. To date it includes twenty-nine American bishops, not counting the non-resident Cardinal Burke.

The United States Conference is a big one (more than 200 bishops), but twenty-nine bishops is still a lot of bishops. They have got to the important point where there is some safety in numbers. I fancy that these bishops are going to find life a bit easier than their colleagues in the coming months when they meet the faithful and ask for money. The process is far from over, and their numbers will grow.

What I mean by 'mainstream' conservative Catholic commentators are those who have been defensive of the Pope, or at least silent, on the major issues of controversy up to the McCarrick/ Pennsylvania Grand Jury/ Viganò tipping-point, and have or have had 'centrist' platforms such as Patheos and Aleteia.

One example is Fr Dwight Longenecker. His approach to the problems raised by Amoris laetitia is a good example of how things used to be. He had clearly decided that direct criticism of Pope Francis' theology was too hot a potato, so instead he criticised it indirectly, by saying that things which people concluded from papal statements were making his life as a priest more difficult. This was, of course, a fair point in itself. (Like me, his first reaction was to attempt a completely orthodox reading of the text.)

Now, however, those old restraints have been thrown off. In his post about why it was a mistake for the Pope to remain silent about the Viganò accusations, Fr Longnecker is moved to say that this silence 'makes his showy advocacy of victims look like a cheap publicity stunt' and is 'revealing him to be a hypocrite'. I beg your pardon, Fr?

We move into different territory with Simcha Fisher. Over the years Fisher has been a ferocious critic of the pro-life movement, alongside her friend Mark Shea, which has put her at odds with many of the people most worried by the direction of Pope Francis's papacy. But in the last week or so she has written a couple of blistering posts about the situation: posts which are also, I must say, extremely interesting. She writes:

---

I have a number of friends who have escaped abusive marriages. They tell me that Pope Francis is sounding more and more like the men who abused them. He’s sounding like the men who hid that abuse from the world, who taught their victims to blame themselves, who used spiritual pressure to persuade them and their families that it would actually be wrong, sinful, to defend themselves.

---

I think Fisher is exactly right. We can't tell from his words and actions that Pope Francis has personally carried out sexual abuse - something no one is suggesting [but there are enough allegations of his open and proactive support for episcopal and clerical sex abusers even back in his Buenos Aires days - is that not just as bad???] - but they do fit the pattern of behaviour abusers use to maintain their power. He seems to have sunk into an abusive modus operandi.

Other people who come into this same category include the pod-caster Patrick Madrid (listen to his recording here for example). Raymond Arroyo of EWTN swallowed the 'red pill' a while ago.

Now Mark Shea, still writing on Patheos, is still echoing the attacks on Viganò served up by John Allen and others. Jimmy Akin appears to be maintaining a grave-like silence on the subject. That is what one would expect. But a lot of their erstwhile colleagues are heading for the lifeboats on the 'good' ship Francis.

There is a third constituency, moreover, which Team Francis seems to be losing, which may end up being more significant than any other. This is American Attorneys-General. I have already mentioned the Grand Jury report into clerical abuse in Pennsylvania; this and other revelations have prompted the Attorney General in one US state after another to announce some kind of investigation of the dioceses in their states: there are now seven such processes beginning.

These investigations may have the right to demand documents and take witness testimony under oath; even if they have lower levels of formal power, they could dig out and put together a great deal of information currently buried or scattered, and they will certainly stimulate new witnesses to come forward. Whereas in the past such investigations might have looked to many Catholics in public life and to Catholic voters as attacks on the Church, now they are being widely welcomed as ways to overcome bishops' lack of accountability. That means that they will probably happen.

If they happen, they are bound to produce more embarrassing material for the hierarchy. Each one will pile up pressure for resignations and a clearing of the Augean stables which many seminaries seem to have become. Each one will give the basic clerical-abuse story a new lease of life.

What is Team Francis going to do about this? It seems their latest idea is to spread the blame.



There is, of course, some truth in this. But blame is not a finite resource. Including earlier Popes in causing the problem does not absolve Pope Francis from making things worse, if that is what he has done, and it makes his refusal to speak about it even more seriously wrong.

It seems now that a lot of resistance over the years, even by good bishops and priests, to dealing in an open and just way to the abuse crisis, has been motivated by the worry that if one scandal came out it would precipitate the exposure of another and another, in a situation where the problem was so pervasive, and so deeply rooted, that the exposure of a great part of it was just too terrifying to contemplate. It would do too much damage to the Church's reputation and institutions.

It seems that many good bishops and other sincere Catholics in the know thought, ten or twenty years ago, that by not washing the dirty linen in public they could gradually weed out the problems and put thing right. They must by now realise that they have failed, and that there is no prospect, certainly under Pope Francis in his current mood, that real progress can be made in this way. The only way things are going to improve is by an indescribably painful process of public exposure. It follows that good people should stop trying to prevent that from happening.

If Team Francis agrees, even if only for partisan reasons, and looks forward to the exposure of more and more disedifying information about the corruption of the Church since Vatican II and perhaps earlier, than the game really is up.

We can look forward to a decade or more of scandalous revelations, and the predictable short-term negative outcomes of those revelations for the Church's ability to preach the Gospel effectively.

In the end, however, it will be better than having these secret sins eating away at the heart of the Church: harming children, corrupting seminarians, distorting the Church's preaching, distorting the choice of bishops, cardinals, and popes, and always threatening to come out anyway.

Yes, let it all come out, even if some of the abusers turn out to be people we like and have trusted. As St Catherine of Siena said:
“We've had enough exhortations to be silent. Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence.” [Shaw is the second blogger I have seen, after Antonio Socci, to quote this gem from the saint who dared counsel the popes of her time.]


SO, the pope gets to talk
to the US episcopal leadership
and what do we get?


The guys yukking it up with Bergoglio across the desk are Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of
Galveston-Houston, who is current president of the USCCB; Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston and the C9 and the Vaticans'
papier-mache Commission for the Protection of Minors; and a Mons. Blansfield.

Why would anyone at ZENIT have posted this photograph to illustrate Bergoglio's meeting with top US bishops to discuss the crisis of faith and confidence now engulfing the Church? I thought ZENIT was a Bergogliac outlet on autopilot!

A sampling of the reactions to the above tweet:



Is someone deliberately sabotaging the Vatican's fairly brand-new Dario-Vigano-consolidated communications juggernaut?
On the other hand, the photo is really iconic of the attitude that the Bergoglio Vatican seems to have to the current
more-than-just-another-crisis!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/09/2018 20:06]

Il Fatto Quotidiano's bombshell preview: "DREAD AT THE VATICAN: All the names in the 'gay lobby' list"

And we thought the report on clerical sex abuses in Germany from 1946-2014 was the next big chapter in this catastrophe!
Now comes what could be 'the mother of all reports' on the homosexualization of the Church in its very heart, the Roman Curia.


Vatican rocked by apparent leak
of 300-page 'gay dossier'
commissioned by Benedict XVI
by Christine Niles


ROME, Sept. 13, 2018 (ChurchMilitant.com) - The Vatican is reeling from news that the 300-page dossier containing names of members of the gay lobby — a dossier some believe led to Pope Benedict's resignation in 2013 — has been leaked to the media.

Il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian journal read by Vatican officials, is confirming it has seen the 300-page dossier. "The report contains a detailed and disturbing picture of the moral and material corruption of the clergy, with names, surnames and circumstances," writes Francesca Fagnani.

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We were ... able to view a document on papal letterhead about the investigation, and here we publish an excerpt: It is a list of prelates and laymen who belong to the so-called gay lobby, which through blackmail and secrets could affect, or have conditioned, positions and careers (theirs, like those of others).

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We will not reveal the names shown in the list, but we can confirm that among the names there are people removed by the Pope, others moved from office, others who still hold important positions in strategic organs for the Vatican, such as Propaganda Fide and even the Secretariat of State.

Among those implicated in the dossier is none other than Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, who has repeatedly claimed he knew nothing of former housemate Abp. Theodore McCarrick's homosexual predation, although they lived together on the same floor of the same house for six years in Washington, D.C.

"Farrell was appointed auxiliary bishop of Washington precisely because it was McCarrick who wanted him as a deputy," Fagnani reports in a September 4 article focusing on a "Farrell dossier." "The two were part of the 'magic circle' of Pope Francis."

[A case] on the auxiliary bishop of Washington, Kevin Joseph Farrell, is said to have been filed at the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith in the Vatican, the Dicastery that is responsible for investigating sexual and other crimes against good morals, which, if not rebutted, would fall squarely on the Pope like a boulder. Farrell [was] appointed directly by Bergoglio to head the Dicastery of the Family.

In response to Il Fatto Quotidiano's queries with regard to the existence of a file on Farrell, the Vatican is refusing to confirm or deny.

"There will be no communication," was the response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "The Vatican therefore does not deny Il Fatto Quotidiano, but chooses the strategy of silence as for McCarrick," Fagani writes.

Pope Benedict's sudden resignation in 2013 is allegedly linked to the 300-page dossier; some media reported that Benedict chose to resign the same day he received the dossier, the result of findings of an investigation commissioned by the Holy Father into clerical corruption and malfeasance.

The investigation, itself, led by Cardinals Julián Herranz, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi, is said to have uncovered sins involving sex and financial corruption. "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments," according to La Repubblica in February 2013.

"The investigation of the three cardinals Herranz-Tomko-De Giorgi has so far remained top secret," Fagnani writes in her report. "However, a small circle of people has had the opportunity to read it, and this already before the Conclave, to give a hand to the Holy Spirit who would then take Bergoglio to the papal throne.[???] To draw up the dossier, tens of priests and high priests were questioned, and documents of all kinds were collected."

"If the public were aware of the content of the final report it would be a disaster for the image of the Church, already devastated in the whole world by sexual scandals," she added.

The hope after Benedict's resignation was that a younger, stronger pope would be elected to help clean up the Church; thus Francis was chosen with the understanding he'd be a man of reform. But under his papacy, some senior clergy believe conditions have worsened, not improved.

Vaticanista Ed Pentin reported in 2017 that, according to a senior member of the curia, "the extent of homosexual practice in the Vatican has 'never been worse,' despite efforts begun by Benedict XVI to root out sexual deviancy from the curia ... ."

Alarm at the homosexual crisis in the Church has reached fever pitch, with the outing of Abp. Theodore McCarrick — the very face of the response to the 2002 sex abuse crisis — as a homosexual predator, followed by the bombshell Pennsylvania grand jury report revealing 301 predator priests in only six U.S. dioceses, compounded further by the shock of Abp. Carlo Maria Vigano's testimony revealing an entrenched "homosexual current" in the Church in the highest ranks, reaching even up to Pope Francis himself.


Obviously the yukkers above had no idea of the FQ bombshell at the time the photo was taken today! Are we having the equivalent of the Titanic hitting
the iceberg and breaking up into pieces? Actually, Georg Gaenswein used a better simile for it - 'the Church's 9/11'!

...Oh dear, it keeps getting worse.

It seems the Pope has accepted the resignation of Mons. Branfield pictured above - if the Zenit caption is right - who was Bishop of
Wheeling-Charleston but forced to resign under accusation of sexual harassment of adults.

Yesterday, an accusation was made public that USCCB president Cardinal Di Nardo allowed a priest who confessed to sex abuse of
a minor to function as a pastor of a parish, despite DiNardo’s assurances to one of the victims that he would no longer have
access to children.

And of course, more accusations are coming out of Boston regarding O'Malley's own toleration if not cover-up of sex-abusive priests
in his archdiocese.

Yet there they all were, earlier today, yukking it up. Someone must have told an absolutely laughter-provoking joke.
A worse image even, than Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

The pope and the abuse crisis
Who are the falsifiers in this situation?
By Marco Tosatti
Editorial
Translated from

Sept. 14, 2018

There’s a very simple question to which an answer must be given and on which this pope’s credibility depends: Did Mons Vigano inform the pope about the McCarrick case on June 23, 2013, as Vigano claims? Millions of Catholics want to know and have a right to know.

Instead, as soon as this question is posed, the usual gang of falsifiers surrounding the pope immediately seek instead to discredit whoever asks it, ascribing ignoble motives for doing so.

“Pope Francis will meet all the presidents of bishops’ conferences around the world from February 21-24, 2019, at the Vatican, to talk about preventing abuses against minors and vulnerable adults”, Vatican News reported yesterday, quoting the deputy director of the Vatican Press Office, Paloma Garcia Ovejera, after a briefing held at the end of the 29th meeting of the pope with his Council of 9 cardinal advisers on curial reform and the governance of the Church.

Then we read an editorial in Avvenire (the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference) written by Stefania Falasca, who suggests that “in order to avoid disorientation by word counterfeiters [in Italian, falsifari della parola – which really means not just counterfeiters of words but of facts] who are assaulting the Church at this time”, it would be ‘healthy to follow the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter. The pope is not a personage. In his ordinary preaching, he does not speak in his personal capacity”.

Falasca states that “symptoms are multiplying of an evil which seems to be spreading like a crisis of collective neurasthenia, where everything becomes subject to denigration and receives a sinister interpretation to the point that it is considered normal and licit to ask for the resignation of the pope as if he were the head of a corporation or of a political party”.

‘Word counterfeiters”. While I read that phrase, I think of McCarrick, of the auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras [recently forced-to-retire archdiocesan vicar to Vice Pope Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga], of Boston and its notorious seminary, and of so many cases of sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups in Chile, Germany the USA, and also Italy (even if, for now, the denunciations in Italy have so far been subdued and anonymous). In a crisis that as many have now conceded, has to do with the ‘pervasive homosexuality’ among priests and bishops, which the institutional Church has so far not addressed.

Indeed, the announcement on the February 2019 meeting at the Vatican does not mention it, nor does the pope in his letter to the Chilean bishops nor in any of his other interventions [notably his August 20 ‘Letter to the People of God’, issued six days after the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report -a letter that the Vatican said was ‘exhaustive’ and would therefore be his ‘last word’ on the abuse issue], nor in any official Vatican statements. Why? What is it that the Bergoglio Vatican does not wish to say? Would we be malicious if we thought that there are ‘word falsifiers’ via deliberate omission in the Vatican? To over who and what?

Falasca is right – that we should follow the ordinary magisterium. But alas, the pope is also a person who, like anyone else, has a credibility that depends on the consistency between what he says and what he does.

That is why it is important for me and for millions of Catholics to know if Mons. Vigano did tell the pope on June 26, 2013, about McCarrick – what he did and what he has been doing [that violated his priestly vows and the Sixth Commandment, as well as private sanctions imposed on him by Benedict XVI for these misdeeds].

Because if Vigano is not lying, then the pope not only chose not to do anything about it - but went on to fully rehabilitate McCarrick, and followed his advice for episcopal promotions and appointments in the USA, rewarding McCarrick’s friends and proteges – then his credibility when he presides at that conference he called for February 2019 will not be what it could be if the Vatican can show that Vigano lied or was mistaken about his allegations on McCarrick.

That is why the Bergoglian defenders – who have not been shy about falsifying words and facts – are automatically in default if instead of finding out if Vigano’s claim to have informed the pope (an event that is fact not opinion) is true or not, they go on blathering instead about conspiracies, attacks on the pope, etc.

In democracies, where there is freedom of expression, one can demand that authorities account for, among other things, whether an event took place or not. [A simple straightforward question, to be answered simply by Yes or No, like the Four Dubia. Something is surely wrong if one cannot answer simple straightforward questions with a Yes or a No.]

But in totalitarian regimes, no! Any request for transparency and truth is immediately labelled as an assault on the ‘Maximum Leader’, on the ‘Father of the Nation”, on the ‘Great Helmsman’, etc. And the regime’s falsifiers immediately set out to discredit whoever dares to question, normally attributing to them any number of ignoble motives. And we have seen all of this in the current situation.

Because, leaving aside the question of a papal resignation, it is the personal and human credibility of Jorge Bergoglio, pope and 266th Successor of Peter, that is at stake. It represents a significant reality for many Catholics, and perhaps for many non-Catholics too who look up to him.

But the regime’s falsifiers have avoided to touch this point at all in their lengthy dissertations and analyses of the Vigano testimony. To which silence, however it may be adorned and prettified to justify it, does not constitute a response. An ape dressed in silk is still an ape.

Then, in some vague way, the pope’s Council of Nine advisers (only 6 present) has informed us that the Holy See is now preparing ‘eventual and necessary clarifications’ over ‘what has been happening in recent weeks’. [As I said in my first response to that announcement, there is no mention of denial or non-denial, rather of ‘clarifications’. Which is an indirect way of saying, “Yes, some of what Mons Vigano claims did take place but we need time to prepare our clarifications”. In other words, Bergoglio cannot answer the main question with a simple Yes or No. He and his defenders need more time (remember the Testimony was published August 26) to formulate their ‘clarifications’.]

Meanwhile, even some of the more exuberant denigrators of Mons. Vigano now admit that “it is evident the ex-Nuncio to the United States has cited dates and documents in his possession (or that he has seen) about which there is no reason to doubt” [They did? Who and when? I missed this!] An important admission.

So, suppose Vigano was also right about his June 26, 2013 audience with the pope? ‘Clarifications’ are central to this question, more than to any other.


Fr Z had a most interesting sidebar to the Vatican announcement that the pope will be meeting the presidents of the world's national bishops' conferences next February... I bet whoever decided on the dates for that meeting must be banging his head on a brick wall now.


Will the pope and his bishops finally acknowledge the 'H' word when they meet to discuss 'the present crisis' in a 3-day period bracketed by the dual feast days of
the author of THE BOOK OF GOMORRAH?

IRONY! Francis calls 2019 bishops' meeting
on the Feast of St. Peter Damian

Sept. 13, 2018

... Pope Francis will convoke a meeting with all the presidents of conferences of bishops across the globe to discuss the issue of the sexual abuse of minors. The meeting is scheduled for 21-24 February 2019.

The cynic in me worries that the focus here on “minors” will obfuscate the real, core issue of most of the cases of abuse and of clerical sin: homosexuality.

However, the Church’s calendar might just remind those who meet about why they are really there.

In the Novus Ordo calendar 21 February is the Feast of St. Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church. In the Traditional calendar 23 February is the Feast of St. Peter Damian.

That means that, as the meeting opens, they will begin work under the aegis of St. Peter Damian and, as they are working, those who celebrate the TLM will invoke Peter Damian. [I wonder if PF knows anything at all about Peter Damian, or at least, about his Liber Gomorrhianus?]

This great Doctor of the Church made many great contributions. However, his works that is most pertinent to The Present Crisis is the Liber Gomorrhaianus [The Book of Gomorrah, written between 1049-54. The LG is a call for reform of the clergy. LG treats the vices of clergy, especially sodomy.

Peter Damian, a zealous reformer of clergy who combated corruption such as simony, called for the removal of bishops from their sees in no uncertain terms. Regarding one such, he wrote:

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Now may the multiform head of the poisonous serpent be crushed, and the commerce of perverse business come to an end. […] For unless the aforesaid church is taken away from the hand of that incestuous adulterer, perjurer and robber, all the hope of the restoration of the world that has been raised among the peoples will be completely drained. Indeed, all turn their eyes to this purpose, all raise their ears to this one voice. And if that bishop, implicated in so many crimes, is restored to the height of the episcopacy, the Apostolic See will be utterly unable to do any further good.

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[Very uncanny! Across two centuries, a Doctor of the Church is saying words that apply to the 'PRESENT CRISIS' in the Church and to her pastors today, including the Bishop of Rome.]

It was a turbulent time of anti-popes. Eventually one of history’s greatest clergy-reforming Popes would in 1049 emerge from the rubble, Bruno von Egisheim, Pope St. Leo IX (all the more reason for the next pontiff to be called “Leo”). It is to Leo that Peter Damian addressed the LG.

The Doctor wrote about this most evil of corrupting vices, the “cancer of sodomitic impurity”, with horrible clarity. He addressed contraception, masturbation, same-sex pederasty and adult homosexual acts, noting that the Church had penalties for them.

Peter Damian said that punishments should be greater for clergy and that the most severe should be applied to clerics who abused children and adolescents: public beatings, imprisonment for months in chains with fasting three days a week till sundown with confinement of monasteries under guard.

While he denounces homosexual acts in stark terms he also writes about his compassion for the sinners and prays for their repentance.

Leo IX praised St. Peter Damian lavishly for the LG.

It is a fact of our human experience that whisteblowers will eventually be attacked and smeared. So too was it with Peter Damian. Detractors denounced him to Leo. However, a later Pope eventually made Peter Damian a cardinal and entrusted him with great duties. He was the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and Velletri from 1060–1072.

The Doctor strongly admonished Popes and Bishops who failed in their duties. In 1059 he denounced cover-ups and wrote with a warning about divine punishment to Nicholas II about unchaste bishops: “What worse thing can one do than to spare lustful bishops when he has the power to correct them?”

In the time that intervenes between now and the February 2019 meeting, we might keep the figure of St. Peter Damian before the eyes of those who will participate.

My addendum: From Benedict XVI's catechesis on St Peter Damian on Sept. 9, 2009:

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The ideal image of "Holy Church" illustrated by Peter Damian does not correspond as he knew well to the reality of his time. For this reason he did not fear to denounce the state of corruption that existed in the monasteries and among the clergy, because, above all, of the practice of the conferral by the lay authorities of ecclesiastical offices; various Bishops and Abbots were behaving as the rulers of their subjects rather than as pastors of souls. Their moral life frequently left much to be desired.

For this reason, in 105, Peter Damian left his monastery with great reluctance and sorrow and accepted, if unwillingly, his appointment as Cardinal Bishop of Ostia. So it was that he entered fully into collaboration with the Popes in the difficult task of Church reform. He saw that to make his own contribution of helping in the work of the Church's renewal contemplation did not suffice. He thus relinquished the beauty of the hermitage and courageously undertook numerous journeys and missions.

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Just to help you keep track of THE PRESENT CRISIS as it continues to metastasize:

A week of controversy, resignations, rumors, meetings — and mirth?
Recapping the dizzying array of stories since Monday, in Rome and elsewhere
by Christopher R. Altieri

September 13, 2018

It has been a doozy of a week in the news out of — and into — Rome, and it isn’t even over. Let’s recap the dizzying array of stories since Monday (many of which have ties to older, long-percolating and still-developing ones):

o Announcements of “unprecedented” meetings; promises of responses from underlings to accusations touching the person of the Holy Father, personal reply to which the Holy Father has deemed beneath his dignity;
o Oblique reference in extemporaneous remarks at morning Mass, to the current circumstances in the Church — a * series * of * remarks *, actually, given on each day the Pope has celebrated Mass (quasi-)publicly in the chapel of the Domus — in which he returns with a regularity one could fairly describe as systematic, to the idea that public accusation of wrongdoing — specifically episcopal wrongdoing — is the work of the devil in collaboration with worldly “elites”, undertaken in order to scandalize “the people” whose default disposition is to “love” their bishops, but who may become accomplices of the devil if they are riled up;
o A leaked document out of Germany, detailing thousands of cases of abuse by clerics over several decades;
o The release of a heavily edited and oft-interpolated transcript of a weeks-old private encounter with Irish Jesuits, in which the Pope admits he did not believe the accusations of clerical and episcopal malfeasance that reached him from Chile, until he had seen them documented by a trusty cleric — an admission that quite possibly gives the lie to his January protestations of ignorance — “You, with goodwill, tell me: there are victims [of Bishop Barros, or of the alleged coverup of Bishop Barros],” he told reporters en route to Rome from Perú in January. “But I have not seen them because they have not come to me,” he continued, in an extension that now forces upon us the question, “Which is it?” — and an assertion that the real problem is “elitism” in the Church — an assertion which, because of the timing of the thing, could appear to mitigate his statements at Mass this week, but actually aggravate the already awful character of his position when read chronologically;
o The announcement that the embattled Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, DC — who was shocked — shocked! — to learn his predecessor, Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick, had sexually assaulted children, and in more than three decades had never heard a whisper of his other perverse proclivities (though nearly everyone except Wuerl and the other leading members of the US hierarchy apparently had), will travel to Rome “in the near future” to convince the pope to accept his resignation, which has been sitting on the pope’s desk for three years;
o The forced resignation of a 57-year-old Brazilian bishop in connection with his arrest — in March of this year — on charges of embezzlement to the tune of more than $600,000;
o Confirmation — after whispers in the Italian press — of a months-old, papally-ordered investigation into financial irregularity at the Sistine Chapel Choir;
o The resignation, five days after he was required to submit his resignation for limits of age, of one US bishop with a reputation for luxury and perverse lasciviousness — Michael J. Bransfield of Wheeling-Charleston (emeritus) — and the announcement of an ecclesiastical investigation into allegations against Bransfield of sexual misconduct with adults (the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which has the Diocese of Wheeling Charleston in ecclesiastical receivership on Papal mandate, informs CWR that the inquest will be “lay-led” — oh, and there is a hotline: 1-833-272-4225).

That, in roughly chronological order, gets us to about noon on Thursday, September 13th, 2018 — the hour at which a meeting of Pope Francis and the leadership of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was scheduled to begin. It’s been rough going for those men, too:
o USCCB President, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston (news broke Wednesday of a seriously mishandled clerical abuse case in his diocese, and partly on his watch);
o USCCB Vice-President José Gomez of Los Angeles (who tried to keep his negligent predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, out of public ministry, but couldn’t, because only the Pope can discipline cardinals);
o USCCB General Secretary, Msgr. Brian Bransfield of Philadelphia (apparently a relative of the emeritus bishop of Wheeling-Charleston). [Thanks for the clarification. I must go back and correct the post that featured the photo of the pope's meeting with the USCCB delegation. I am re-posting the photo below with the corrected caption.]

Cardinal DiNardo, Archbishop Gomez, and Msgr. Bransfield were joined by the President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, OFM Cap., of Boston:
o Cardinal O’Malley has promised to do better, after admitting he ignored a 2015 letter from Fr. Boniface Ramsey, OP, regarding McCarrick, but still has not explained what happened to another 2015 letter from victim-advocate Juan Carlos Cruz,

Cruz’s letter detailed the abuse he suffered at the hands of the disgraced Chilean former celebrity priest, Fernando Karadima, and explained the roles of Cardinals Francisco Errazuriz and Ricardo Ezzati of Santiago de Chile, and the former bishop of Osorno, Juan Barros — one of Karadima’s protégés — in the coverup of Karadima’s predations, a coverup in which other reports also implicated the apostolic nuncio to Chile, Archbishop Ivo Scapolo.

A statement from the USCCB described the meeting with the pope as “lengthy, fruitful and good,” but offered no details and strongly suggested no decisions had been taken. “We look forward to actively continuing our discernment together,” the statement said, “identifying the most effective next steps.”

The USCCB statement also said Francis “listened very deeply, from the heart.” Apparently, Francis could not bring himself to authorize an investigation into the role in the Church of the man, Theodore McCarrick, who is credibly alleged — quite apart from the “testimony” of the former nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò — to have corrupted and abused seminarians and priests, and raped children — and who cannot be trusted not to have agents and sympathizers within the US Church hierarchy and clerical ranks.

The now-embattled USCCB president, Cardinal DiNardo, called for a Vatican investigation into the McCarrick debacle — and presumably into related questions — on August 16th, and repeated his call on August 27th, in concert with the Executive Committee of the Conference. In both statements, Cardinal DiNardo announced his intention to bring the issues to the Holy Father, in person. The Vatican only announced the pope’s meeting with the USCCB leadership two days ago.

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, however, did release this photograph, which was taken at the meeting:
[Really? Did the OR release it too? I thought it was just a doozy of a Zenit whopper! If the OR did, I am absolutely dumbstruck.]


OK, the bishops meeting with the pope are Archbishop Gomez of LA, USCCB vice-president; Cardinal Di Nardo of Galveston-Houston, USCCB president; Cardinal Sean O'Malley of
Boston and the Bergoglio Vatican's pointman on all matters related to sexual abuse of minors; and Mons. Brian Bransfield, USCCB secretary-general, not, as previously
captioned, the recently-retired bishop of Wheeler-Charleston.

One ought to be glad they’re all able to see the lighter side of all this, even if the mirth eludes the rest of us.


Another summary of PRESENT CRISIS developments, with a Washington perspective:

All roads lead to Washington, D.C.
by Kenneth Wolfe

Sept. 14, 2018

For those interested in the latest news, we bring you our summary:
1) Bishop Michael Bransfield resigned and the resignation was accepted. Bransfield served for 24 years at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., most of the time as rector. He was then ordained a bishop, choosing Theodore McCarrick as co-consecrator.

2) Archbishop William Lori, who ran the Archdiocese of Washington (D.C.) throughout the 1990s (holding several high-level positions, including moderator of the curia and auxiliary bishop), will investigate allegations against Bishop Bransfield. During Bransfield's time at the D.C. basilica shrine, Lori had oversight over Bransfield. (For instance, the Washington chancery instructs which bishops -- and even cardinals -- are banned from offering sacraments at the basilica shrine, a practice that still continues).

3) All this follows the scandal of Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, who handpicked his successor in D.C., Donald Wuerl. The two men were the leaders of the movement to give Communion to politicians who openly dissent from Church teachings.

4) Cardinal Donald Wuerl has announced he will be going to the Vatican to discuss his resignation, which implies it will soon be accepted by Pope Francis. Not mentioned yet is Wuerl's membership on the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops, where Pope Francis chose him to replace Cardinal Raymond Burke just nine months into this papacy. Two Americans sit on the extremely prestigious congregation that selects all new bishops -- Cardinal Blase Cupich being the other.

5) The replacement for Cardinal Wuerl will be the next piece in this saga. It is presumed, given his Congregation for Bishops post, Cardinal Wuerl has handpicked his successor.

6) Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, based in Washington, D.C., is himself facing allegations of a priestly transfer and cover-up in his archdiocese.

7) Cardinal DiNardo and three other U.S. Church leaders held a meeting with Pope Francis today to discuss the scandals. As the Associated Press smartly observed regarding the four American representatives: "Among the four was (Bishop) Bransfield's cousin, Monsignor Brian Bransfield, secretary-general of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops."

8) Pope Francis is convening a group of bishops in February to investigate themselves.

The Archdiocese of Washington has, for several years, been a center-left jurisdiction controlled by a tightly connected mafia. Cross the middle to go to the left, like Jesuits in Georgetown, and you are tolerated until Rome speaks. Cross the middle to go to the right as a priest and you are suspended, transferred, removed, retired or even sent out of the country.

Many of the pastors of large parishes have been priest-secretaries to the archbishops or otherwise extremely loyal to whichever cardinal is in charge, despite the open-secret atrocities committed we now know about. This will continue, even under a new archbishop in Washington, unless a massive housecleaning is accomplished, from the chancery on down.

As one who was denied a job several years ago in the Archdiocese of Washington chancery (Deo gratias!), after successful interviews and high-level recommendations, explicitly as a result of a code of mafia-like trust that could not be counted on, this writer guarantees nothing will change until all levels of staff -- priests and laymen -- are, at best, re-examined or, at worst, removed. Otherwise the mafia, with its secrecy and cover-ups, will simply continue under new leadership.

And an analysis of where we are at this point, with the writer playing devil's advocate to help clarify opposing positions:

The Catholic crisis as it now stands
Pope Francis owes the Church some answers
By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

September 13, 2018

The Catholic Church is in a novel position. A senior churchman has accused the pope of knowingly rehabilitating a predator cardinal and publicly demanded the pope’s resignation.

The accusation itself exposes to the public the political and theological divisions in the episcopacy of the Catholic Church, pitting bishop against bishop — and most dangerous of all — Pope Emeritus Benedict against reigning Pope Francis.

The divisions have been a part of Catholic life for decades, but they were litigated openly only by academics, theologians, and the Catholic press. Conflict between bishops happened but in a way that was almost deniable. Attempts to change the fundamental orientation of the Church were disguised as merely legitimate differences of emphasis. Tradition could be in under Benedict. Mercy and renewal, under Francis.

The testimony of Archbishop Cardinal Viganò, demanding the resignation of Francis, with accusations of moral turpitude and doctrinal heterodoxy spreading out to hit a score of senior cardinals, was like a grenade going off between two sleeping camps of inexperienced soldiers.

And when an explosion like this happens, each side understandably panicked, reached for their weapons, and awaited orders. It’s worthwhile to look at how things are aligned now.

Earlier this week, the Vatican announced that it would respond to “allegations Pope Francis covered up” sexual abuse by America’s disgraced and now-degraded former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.] This was strange in that Pope Francis was not accused of covering up exactly, only that he knew of McCarrick’s serial sexual harassment of seminarians when he lifted some kind of restrictions on his activity that were imposed by Pope Benedict and made McCarrick an adviser in reshaping the American episcopate.

Shortly after this confusing announcement, McCarrick’s successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, sent a letter to his priests, saying he would travel to Rome to discuss resignation — his own — with Pope Francis. The heavy implication was that he would allow new leadership to come to the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

It is useful to review the turns this story has taken in the weeks since the accusations were made. The Viganò letter contained a long litany of accusations, setting reporters and commentators scrambling in several directions at once.

Viganò is an uncouth right-winger, part of a vast conspiracy against the Pope: The first line of defense for Pope Francis was that Archbishop Viganò keeps repulsive company, daring to dine with conservatives such as the Italian journalist Marco Tosatti or the American lawyer Tim Busch. The latter has denied consulting with Viganò over his testimony.

Further, commentators speculated that Viganò was motivated by a grudge with Francis over an incident involving Kim Davis. As ambassador, Viganò had arranged for Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue same-sex-marriage licenses, to meet Pope Francis during his trip to America.

Reports at the time emphasized that Viganò had sprung this on Pope Francis against his wishes. Subsequent reporting confirmed that Viganò followed all the procedures for getting Vatican approval for the meeting but that regret over the subsequent media storm in Francis’s circle led to Viganò’s dismissal from his post.

Despite the attempt by some commentators to describe Viganò’s testimony as part of an “operation” or an organized “putsch” against Francis, the letter’s release has not been followed up by any new revelations or documents [to refute Vigano's claims, for which he cites dates and supporting documents]. The appearance of the testimony in small, conservative Catholic publications was evidence in itself of Vigano turning to the first friends on hand, in the absence of real planning.

Did McCarrick even look sanctioned? Not long after Viganò’s letter was published, reporters began to interrogate the public record. Did McCarrick look like a man who had been sanctioned by Benedict as Viganò claimed?

The record was mixed, to say the least. Simple searches on YouTube or in newspaper archives turned up appearances of McCarrick at various Masses and social events during the period in question. McCarrick traveled, and he even appeared near Archbishop Viganò and Pope Benedict in public. This certainly did not look like a life retreated into a prayer cell.

On the other hand, reports also confirmed that Cardinal McCarrick did move out of his retirement living quarters at a seminary and into a renovated parish house. He was forced by the nunciature to cancel his appearance at events with seminarians.

And after Francis was elected, McCarrick did take on a larger profile. Reporters sympathetic to McCarrick had noted the change, saying that while had been “put out to pasture” by Benedict but was “busier than ever” under Francis.

The nature of Benedict’s discipline is important. Confusing and somewhat contradictory statements coming from anonymous sources near Benedict have confirmed that some action was taken against McCarrick, but the precise details could not be recalled. This might strike most readers as odd in the extreme. How could Benedict remember disciplining a cardinal but not recall the details? Shouldn’t it have made an impression on him?

This has led a number of commentators to surmise that Benedict never formally imposed anything on McCarrick other than a personal request, perhaps not much more authoritative than a wish, that McCarrick lie low and mostly keep himself out of the public eye. The implication being that Benedict, for whatever reason, did not take McCarrick’s behavior so seriously.

But one theory that would reconcile all the above facts is that Benedict imposed a form of discipline short of a canonical sanction after a trial but more authoritative than a mere personal request.

Subsequent reporting has indicated that the likeliest form of discipline imposed on McCarrick was not the product of a canonical trial but a “precept,” which, the reporter and canon lawyer Ed Condon explained, “is essentially an authoritative canonical instruction to do or not do something; it often includes direction on where a cleric must live.” The details of such an instruction would be handled by the Congregation of Bishops, the very curial office Viganò says would have the pertinent documentation on McCarrick.

That McCarrick, after the election of Francis, moved back into another seminary is some evidence for Viganò’s claim that a disciplinary measure imposed under Benedict was lifted under Pope Francis. Though it is at least for now conceivable that such measures were simply unknown to new administration in the Vatican.

Notably, media very close to Pope Francis haven’t quite dared to deny the main charge, that McCarrick was in some way rehabilitated by Francis. They have questioned the severity of the sanctions. Reporters with close access to papal advisers have relayed reports that simply downgrade the severity or question the seriousness of Benedict’s disciplinary methods. This is a strategy of mitigating the charge and qualifying it.

Would it be so bad? We didn’t know about the kid: These reports take care to remind readers that once a credible report of abusing a minor reached the Vatican, McCarrick was exposed and his status degraded in public by Francis. After all, it wasn’t until just this summer that McCarrick was alleged to have abused a minor (the first boy he baptized, in fact), and once that report was made, Francis made his sanctions against McCarrick public fact. [The implication in this line of defense is that Bergoglio did not consider McCarrick's advances towards seminarians serious enough to discipline him in any way, but once a plausible case he abused a minor four decades earlier surfaced in New York, he decided McCarrick needed to be sanctioned. An egregious case of Bergoglio's apparently habitual instinct to relativize evil.]

We’ll shoot the hostage. McCarrick was exposed under us. If there is a coverup, it implicates your friend: One theme of this story and the spin surrounding it is that Pope Francis’s defenders have pointed at Pope Bendict XVI or the legacy of Saint John Paul II and implied that conservative critics of Francis shouldn’t be so anxious to turn over rocks. There might be collateral damage.

“Those who conceived and managed this operation with the intention to force Francis off the throne of Peter did not realize that such an attack would have involved his two predecessors,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian and an active defender of Francis.

In fact, many reporters and commentators recently found themselves on the receiving end of sympathetic private appeals, explaining that what was really going on was that Pope Francis was protecting the reputation of his predecessors. It was hard not to detect the whiff of a threat. [Wow! That wins the prize for shameless chutzpah!]

By promising to address accusations of a cover-up, the Vatican seems to be trying to reframe the issue as one of disclosure, rather than rehabilitation. In this, Francis defenders may believe that their best argument that Viganò’s testimony was wrong to say that Pope Francis only recently imposed on McCarrick sanctions similar to ones imposed by his predecessor.

As Andrea Tornielli, the Italian Vaticanist closest to Francis, wrote:

---

Actually though, the sanctions are not similar. Those of Benedict XVI, according to Viganò himself, were personal and secret. Nobody should have known them. Those of Pope Francis were instead made public immediately, so that everyone knew that the old cardinal had been sanctioned after the emergence of a well-founded allegation of abuse of a minor.

---

But the question is not whether sanctions are public or private. The question is whether Francis knew about McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians and lifted the restrictions on McCarrick’s life because he wanted McCarrick’s counsel in reshaping the American episcopate. And who else knew of them? Did Cardinal Weurl?

If some conservatives have miscalculated the damage that could be done to the legacies of Benedict and John Paul II, some of Francis’s defenders may be underestimating the will to discover how men like McCarrick advance to positions of authority in the Church and the will to reform the Church in response.

Further, Team Francis may be underestimating the willingness of those around Benedict to protect him. Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who acts partly as a caretaker to the pope emeritus, has in recent days found himself energetically defending Benedict against his critics and, while doing so, not so subtly taking shots at Pope Francis’s advisers.

Silence before reporters, raving at Mass: Pope Francis’s initial reaction was not to deny any part of the grave accusations against him. Instead he told reporters that they could make a judgment on the nature of the accusations themselves and that he might speak on the matter later. For now, though, he told them, “I will not say one word on this.”

However, as in previous public controversies, Francis has taken to using his homilies as an occasion for issuing undisguised commentary on current events.

In his homily on September 3, he recommended his own chosen strategy for dealing with those who seek scandal. “With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family — silence, prayer” are the appropriate answers, he said. He said silence makes us better imitators of Christ.

His homily the following week is worth quoting at some length:

---

In these times, it seems like the “Great Accuser” has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins so they are visible, in order to scandalize the people. The “Great Accuser,” as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, “roams the earth looking for someone to accuse.”

---

So in two consecutive weeks, the pope has managed to praise nondisclosure in his homilies. The first time he did so while comparing himself to Jesus Christ, and the next week he did so while comparing Viganò to Satan. The only thing that is astonishing about this in this point of the Francis pontificate is the pretense that the pope is still silent.

In all the noise, the question that matters is still this:
- What did Pope Francis and those around him know about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick?
- How much influence did McCarrick have on the pope and his appointments?
- Does Pope Francis overlook the moral turpitude of those prelates he sees as allies (Cardinal Daneels, Cardinal McCarrick) in order to advance what his friends describe as his “larger agenda” for the Church?

If the Church is in the middle of a cold civil war between a Benedict faction and a Francis faction, [I think it is strangely far-fetched for Dougherty to reduce the PRESENT CRISIS to simplistic factionalism, least of all as between pro-Benedict and pro-Francis factions!] the question all laypeople have is whether that factionalism has now become all-consuming, so that even the punishment of flagrant sexual abuse is subordinated to factional concerns. Pope Francis should dignify us with an answer.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/09/2018 18:07]

It turns out that the Italian newspaper Il Foglio published substantial excerpts of Mons. Georg Gaenswein's address at the presentation of Rod Dreher's book THE BENEDICT OPTION in its Italian
version, held at the Italian Parliament building on Sept. 11, 2018. In it, Gaenswein comes up with the striking idea of labelling the PRESENT CRISIS FACING THE CHURCH as the 'Church's 9/11'.
A great simile for the secular world, and one that I hope will stick. But I believe Joseph Ratzinger or Benedict XVI once referred to the over-arching contemporary crisis of the faith as 'the Good
Friday of the Church' - an appropriately excruciating religious metaphor that nonetheless implies the resurrection that must follow... Gaenswein's text is just as remarkable, however, for his
citations of Benedict XVI to make his points. The newspaper labels the text as Gaenswein's 'J'accuse'.

The Church's '9/11'
Many believe that the Church will never recover from the current catastrophe.
The crisis is a crisis of the clergy, and no one knows this better
than the Pope.
by Mons. Georg Gaenswein
Translated from

Sept. 12, 2018


'THE BENEDICT OPTION: A strategy for Christians in a post-Christian world'

I am grateful with all my heart for the invitation that I gladly accepted to present the book by Rod Dreher about which I had already heard so much. Benedict of Norcia, the father of Western monasticism, to whom the book owes its programmatic title, inspired me a lot to be here today.

But I was also very touched and moved by the date on which we are meeting the author here in Rome. Because today is September 11, which in the United States since 2001, has simply been called ‘9/11’ to recall that apocalyptic catastrophe when some members of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda attacked the United States in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania before the eyes of the whole world, using commercial airplanes full of passengers which they had hijacked and rerouted to run into their target buildings.

Moreover, in the whirlwind of news about the Church in recent weeks, as I read through Rod Dreher’s book after the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, I came to see this encounter today as a true and proper act of Divine Providence: today, in fact, the Catholic Church is looking upon its own 9/11, even if, unfortunately, her catastrophe is not associated only with one particular date, but with so many days of so many years, and with innumerable victims.

I ask you not to misunderstand me. I do not mean to compare either the victims or the number of sex abuses committed by ministers of God in the Catholic Church to the nearly 3,000 innocents who lost their lives on 9/11 of 2001 following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

No one has yet attacked the Church of Christ with airplanes laden with passengers. St. Peter’s Basilica is intact and so are the cathedrals of France, Germany, Italy and other places where they continue to be the emblems of many cities in the Western world, from Florence to Chartres, Cologne and Munich.

Nonetheless, the news coming from the USA recently of how many more souls were wounded irremediably and mortally by Catholic priests send us a message that is more terrible than any news, for instance, about the sudden collapse of all the churches in Pennsylvania along with the Basilica and National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.

In saying this, I remember as if it were just yesterday when, on April 16, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI in that very National Shrine tried to shake up the bishops who had gathered there from all over the USA: he spoke of the ‘profound shame’ caused by ‘the sexual abuse of minors by priests’ and “of the enormous pain that your communities have suffered whenever men of the Church betray their priestly obligations and tasks with such gravely immoral conduct”.

Evidently, he spoke in vain, as we see today. The Holy Father’s lament failed to contain the evil, nor did the formal assurances and oral commitments made to him by a great part of the US hierarchy.

Now Rod Dreher is among us, who began his book with these words: “Nobody saw the flood coming – a veritable universal deluge”. In his acknowledgments, he expresses particular thanks to Benedict XVI. And it seems to me that he wrote great parts of the book almost in a silent dialog with the emeritus Pope, working over the latter’s prophetic and analytical words, as when he says:

---

“In 2012, the then Pontiff said that the spiritual crisis assailing the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman empire at the end of the fifth century. The light of Christianity is dying out in all of the West”.

---

So allow me to accompany this presentation of L’Opzione Benedetto by Rod Dreher with words uttered by Pope Benedict during his Petrine ministry, words that have remained unforgettable for me, and which in the course of reading this book, came to mind naturally.

For instance, what he said to newsmen on the plane going to Fatima on May 11, 2010:

---

The Lord told us the Church would always be suffering, in different ways, to the end of the world… As to any novelty that we might discover today [in the Third Secret of Our Lady’s message in Fatima], there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and on the Church come not only from outside the Church, but the Church’s suffering comes from within the Church herself, from the sin that exists in the Church. Even this, we have always known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies outside, but is born from sin in the Church.

---

At that time, he had been pope for five years. Just a little over five years before that – on March 25, 2005 – during the Via Crucis at the Roman Colosseum, with John Paul II already in his final days, Cardinal Ratzinger’s words of meditation included the following:

---

What can the third fall of Jesus under the Cross say to us? We have considered the fall of man in general, and the falling of many Christians away from Christ and into a godless secularism. Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church?...

---

[Mons Gaenswein only quotes the start of the meditation, but it is worth recalling the rest of it:

---

How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts!
How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there!
How often is his Word twisted and misused!
What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words!
How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him!
How much pride, how much self-complacency!
What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall!
All this is present in his Passion.
His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart.
We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison – Lord, save us (cf. Mt 8: 25).

---

Earlier, John Paul II had taught us that the truly inclusive ecumenism is the ecumenism of martyrs, among whom, in our anguish, we can invoke St Edith Stein along with Dietrich Bonheoffer as our intercessors in heaven.

But in the meantime, we know that there also exists an ecumenism of difficulties and mondanization, and an ecumenism of disbelief and a common flight from God and from the Church, running through all the Christian churches. It is an ecumenism of the general eclipse of God. And so, what we are experiencing today is just the ridge of an epochal change that Dreher prophetically presented when he published his book last year in the USA.

He saw the great flood coming. But he also firmly believes that eclipsing God does not mean that God is no longer there, only that many no longer know God because so many shadows have been interposed that hide him from view.

Today, these are the shadows of sins, of misdeeds, and of crimes committed within the Church which serve to obscure God’s luminous presence. That Church of the people in whose bosom many of us were born – which was never found in America as it was in Europe – has been dead for some time with the advance of this darkening. Do you think I sound too dramatic?...

Lately however, there are days when I feel I am back in my childhood days – in the furnace of my father’s smithy in the Black Forest, with the seemingly endless sound of hammer on anvil – but this time, with my father no longer there, he in whose hands I entrusted myself as I entrust myself to God. I am certainly not alone in feeling this.

Last May, even Willem Jacobus Eijk, Cardinal Archbishop of Utrecht, admitted that, looking at the present crisis of the Church, he thought about ‘the final trial that the Church must undergo’ before the second coming of Christ – as described in Paragraph 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church – a trial that would ”shake the faith of may believers”. The Catechism goes on to say that “The persecution that accompanies the pilgrimage of the Church through this earth will reveal the ‘mystery of iniquity’”.

Rod Dreher has the familiarity, as of an exorcist, with this mysterium iniquitatis, as demonstrated by his journalistic reconstruction of the recent months in the life of the Church, in which perhaps more than any other journalist, he has highlighted the disclosures of the scandal surrounding the ex-Archbishop of Newark and Washington.

Yet Dreher is not an investigatige journalist. Nor even a visionary. Rather, he is a serious analyst who has followed the condition of the Church and the world in a vigilant and critical manner, while still maintaining a child’s loving look at the world.

And so, he did not write an apocalyptic novel like the famous Lord of the World with which in 1906, the English priest Robert Hugh Benson shook the English-speaking world. Dreher’s book is more like a practical manual for constructing an ark – because he knows that there is no dike that can hold back the great deluge – a deluge that not just lately is about to inundate the old Christian West to which Dreher’s own America belongs.

There are clearly three differences between Dreher and Benson. In the first place, as a true American, Dreher is more practical than that somewhat bizarre Briton from Cambridge in the era that preceded the First World War. And as a citizen of Louisiana, Dreher is, one might say, hurricane-proof.

Thirdly, of course, he is not a religious, but a layman who seeks to win more souls to the Kingdom of God which Jesus has announced for us, an effort Dreher has undertaken not because he was called on to do do it, but on the wings of his own personal enthusiasm and will. In this sense, he is a man who corresponds totally to the wish and taste of Pope Francis [???] because no one else in Rome knows better than the pope that the crisis in the Church is at heart a crisis of the clergy. [What would seem to be GG's obligatory bow to his Curial boss actually sounds like a dig at someone who is really in denial about the nature of this crisis.] And that therefore, the hour has sounded for strong and decisive laymen, especially in the new means of communication, for independent Christians as embodied by Rod Dreher, to take action.

In recent days, especially within the Church, one has repeatedly heard the concept of an earthquake that is shaking the Church and threatening its collapse, in which, as I earlier stated, the Church is experiencing her own 9/11.

And I will say to you that Benedict XVI, from the moment he renounced the papacy, has thought of himself as an old monk who, after February 28, 2013, feels it his duty to dedicate himself to praying for Holy Mother Church, for his successor and for the Petrine ministry instituted by Christ himself.

And so, with regard to Dreher’s work, that old monk at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery behind St. Peter’s Basilica would look back to an address that he gave as pope at the College des Bernardins in Paris on September 12, 2008 – ten years ago tomorrow – before the cultural and intellectual elite of France. I wish to cute some passages of that address:

---

Amid the great cultural upheaval resulting from migrations of peoples and the emerging new political configurations, the monasteries were the places where the treasures of ancient culture survived, and where at the same time a new culture slowly took shape out of the old.

But how did it happen? What motivated men to come together to these places? What did they want? How did they live?

First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straightaway that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum (to seek God).

Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.

It is sometimes said that they were “eschatologically” oriented. But this is not to be understood in a temporal sense, as if they were looking ahead to the end of the world or to their own death, but in an existential sense: they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional...

Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times. A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest
possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences.

What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.

---

Thus, Benedict XVI on September 12, 2008, about the true option incarnated by Benedict of Norcia.

Therefore, of Dreher’s book, all I have to say is that it does not contain a ready answer. You will not find in it a failproof prescription nor an all-purpose key that will open all those doors which had once been open but which have now been closed. But between its covers you will find an authentic example of what Benedict XVI said ten years ago about the Benedictine spirit in the sixth century. It is a true quaerere Deum. A search for the true God of Jacob and Isaac who, in Jesus Christ, showed us his true face.

But for decades now – not just in Europe but around the world – we are living through mass migration of peoples that will never end....
If this time, the Church with God’s aid will be unable to renew itself, neither will we be able to renew our civilization.

For many, everything seems to make us think that today, the Church of Christ will be unable to recover from the catastrophe of the sins that threaten to engulf her. It is at this time that Rod Dreher off Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has chosen to present his book not far from the tomb of the Apostles. In the midst of the eclipse of God in most of the world, he comes among us to say, “The Church is not dead – she is asleep and resting”.

He also seems to be telling us that ‘the Church is young’, with the same joy and freedom as Benedict XVI did when he said this during the Mass inaugurating his Petrine ministry on April 24, 2005. Recalling the suffering and death of John Paul II, of whom he had been a co-worker for so many years, he addressed each of us in St. Peter’s Square to say:

---

During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen.

---

Not even the Satanic 9/11 of the Church can weaken or destroy this truth about the foundation of the universal Catholic Church through the Risen and Tirumphant Christ. That is why I must say, in all sincerity, that I perceive this time of great crisis, that is now evident to everyone, as a time of grace above all – because we shall be ‘made free’ not by any particular effort of ours but by the truth, as the Lord has assured us.

With this hope, I look at Rod Dreher’s recent reconstructions for the ‘purification of memory’ asked of us by St John Paul II, and with much gratitude, I read The Benedict Option as a source of marvelous inspiration in many ways. In recent weeks, I would say almost nothing else has given me such consolation.

The Catholic Church is breaking apart
Pope Francis, Cardinal Wuerl, Theodore McCarrick,
and the crisis of a church divided
by JONATHAN V. LAST
Digital Editor

Sept. 14, 2018

Consider what we know, and what has been alleged, about Pope Francis, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

For several decades, Father, Bishop, Archbishop, and eventually Cardinal McCarrick preyed sexually on the priests and seminarians serving under his authority. There are credible allegations he abused boys as young as 11. To the extent that this behavior was a secret within the American church, it was very badly kept.

Between 2005 and 2007, three dioceses in New Jersey paid out large cash settlements to keep allegations of abuse by McCarrick quiet. As Bishop Steven Lopes said in a homily first reported by First Things, “I was a seminarian when Theodore McCarrick was named archbishop of Newark. And he would visit the seminary often, and we all knew.”

McCarrick ended his career as cardinal of the Washington, D.C., archdiocese and was succeeded by Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who arrived having just served as bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl’s former diocese has been in the news recently after the release of a grand jury report by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office outlining decades of abuse by priests in the state.

As Wuerl arrived in Washington in 2006, McCarrick retired to the Redemptoris Mater seminary and was later ejected and sent to the Institute of the Incarnate Word seminary, both of which lay within Wuerl’s jurisdiction.

In or about 2009, Pope Benedict XVI placed McCarrick under some sort of sanction. (The exact nature of the sanction is still unknown, but it seems to have been something like house arrest. It is also unclear when, exactly, Benedict first learned about McCarrick or how much time passed before he acted.) Yet somehow Wuerl insists that he knew nothing about any of this until June 2018, when the McCarrick firestorm exploded into public view.

Wuerl’s defense is that he is not an evil man who looked the other way about the behavior of a known sexual predator, but merely an incompetent dolt. And Wuerl seems to think that being guilty of gross incompetence should entitle him to keep his job. A responsible leader of good character would have walked away in disgrace the moment he learned of these scandals.

Wuerl’s first public comment on the McCarrick story was to say, “I don’t think this is some massive, massive crisis.”

On literally the same day that the Pennsylvania grand jury report was released, Wuerl’s diocese launched a barrage of defensive propaganda in the form of a new website, “The Wuerl Record.” It was quickly taken down when it became clear that it was hurting the cardinal’s reputation rather than helping it.

Then Wuerl called for “a season of healing” with special Masses in his archdiocese. The best that can be said of Wuerl is that his crisis PR handling has bolstered the incompetence defense.

It was only after a month of trying to cling to his job that Wuerl said he plans to fly to Rome to discuss his future with Pope Francis. Francis has yet to say or do anything about Wuerl despite the fact that, as do all cardinals over the age of 75, Wuerl had a letter of resignation on file with the Vatican. Francis could have disposed of him in an afternoon without having to do anything more complicated than accept a pre-existing letter. [Wuerl made a quick under-the-radar trip to Rome to meet with the pope last week - but he still had the job!]

Those are the facts we know. None of them are in dispute.

Then there are the allegations: On August 25, 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published a letter in which he claimed that he had been party to several attempts to make the Vatican aware of McCarrick’s abuses over the years; that he had personally discussed them with Wuerl; and that Pope Francis — knowing full well all of the above —rescinded the house-arrest order of his predecessor, made McCarrick his “trusted counselor,” and, at McCarrick’s behest, began elevating certain bishops — such as Blase Cupich and Joseph William Tobin — to positions of power in the American church.

If true, this would mean that we have one cardinal who was a sanctioned sexual predator, (at least) one cardinal who turned a blind eye to this man’s crimes as they were happening within his jurisdiction, and a pope who didn’t just look the other way but took affirmative steps to help both the criminal and his enabler.

And if all of that is true, well, then what? The potential answers to this question aren’t very nice. They include: schism, the destruction of the papacy, and a long war for the soul of the Catholic church. Because the story of Theodore McCarrick isn’t just a story about sexual abuse. It’s about institutions and power.

The abuse itself is terrible, of course. We should say that out loud, because while the details are unspeakable they must be spoken of. Without the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, we would know much less about the evil inside the church. (It is also instructive to note that authorities within the church opposed the release of this report.)

But individual priest-abusers aren’t catastrophic to the church in any structural way. Predators will always be among us. It is a human pathology from which not even priests are immune. But the remedy for predation is straightforward: Whenever and wherever such men are discovered, they should be rooted out and punished.

The institutional damage is done not by the abusers but by the structures that cover for them, excuse them, and advance them. Viewed in that way, the damage done to the Catholic church by Cardinal Wuerl—and every other bishop who knew about McCarrick and stayed silent—is several orders of magnitude greater than that done by McCarrick himself.

By way of analogy, consider the dirty cop. About once a week we see evidence of police officers behaving in ways that range from the imprudent to the illegal. It has no doubt been this way since Hammurabi deputized the first lawman. But while individuals might be harmed by rogue cops, the system of law enforcement isn’t jeopardized by police misbehavior. The damage to the system comes when the other mechanisms of law enforcement protect, rather than prosecute, bad cops. If that happens often enough, citizens can eventually decide that the system is broken and take to the ballot box to reform it. The laity have no such recourse with the church.

The Catholic church is unlike any other earthly institution. It is strictly hierarchical, with its ultimate power derived from the son of God. The [earthly] head of the church — the successor of Peter — is elected to a lifetime appointment by his peers, and his authority over them is total.

He can allow them to carry on sexual affairs in broad daylight, as Francis did with Father Krzysztof Charamsa, a priest who worked for years in the Vatican curia while living openly with his gay lover. Or he can drive them from the church, as Francis did with Father Charamsa after the priest made his situation public in the Italian media in 2015. He can make either of these choices — or any choice in between — for any reason he likes. Or none at all. Such is the supreme power of the vicar of Christ.

Yet the pope’s immediate subordinates — the cardinals and bishops —function like feudal lords in their own right.
- The bishop can preach in contravention of the teachings of the church, as Cardinal Walter Kasper does on the subject of marriage and infidelity.
- He can forbid the offering of both species of the Eucharist, as Bishops John Richard Keating and Paul Loverde once did in Northern Virginia.
- He can punish and reward priests under his care either because of merit or caprice — because the deacons and priests all swear a vow of obedience to the bishop (or cardinal) himself.

All of which is the long way of saying that there is no mechanism for a man such as Donald Wuerl to be dealt with by his peers. The bishop of Madison can fulminate against Wuerl all he wants to, as Bishop Robert Morlino did in late August. His fellow bishops have no power over him. The only man Wuerl is accountable to is the pope. And the structure of the church has no remedy when a pope is foolish or wicked.

In the weeks after the Viganò letter was published, Francis preached a homily in which he declared, “with people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction” the best response is “silence” and “prayer.” If this sounds like Francis believes the real villains in this mess are Archbishop Viganò and people who want to know what the bishops knew, and when they knew it, well, yes.

In another homily on September 11, Francis went further, saying that not only was Viganò the real villain, but the bishops were the real victims: They were being persecuted by the devil:

“In these times, it seems like the Great Accuser has been unchained and is attacking bishops,” Francis preached. And Satan “tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people.” (The Father of Lies — as he is referred to in the Bible — has not traditionally been regarded as the revealer of sins in Catholic thought, but this pope has never been known for having a supple mind.)

Francis then offered counsel for his poor, suffering brother bishops: “The Great Accuser, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, ‘roams the earth looking for someone to accuse.’ A bishop’s strength against the Great Accuser is prayer.”

Other parts of the church hierarchy also seem to view themselves as victims. In late August, Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig decided to try to get to the bottom of the Viganò story by asking McCarrick himself. She went to the church-owned property where the former cardinal now resides and knocked on the door. Whoever the representative of the church — God’s vessel for Truth and Light —lives there declined to answer. Instead, he called the Post to complain about her.

So what is to be done if the vicar of Christ is a fool who sides with bishops who enabled or hid abusers? Or is a wicked man who sides with the actual abusers themselves? That’s an excellent question and we’ll get to it. The more immediate question is: Why would he do that? And the answer is simple: power.

The pontificate of Francis can, perhaps, best be understood as a political project. His election at the conclave in 2013 was —unbeknownst to the world at the time — the result of a campaign planned out in advance by four radical cardinals who saw then-cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the perfect vehicle for the revolution they wanted to launch within the church.

(The story of how Cardinals Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Walter Kasper, Godfried Danneels, and Karl Lehmann formed “Team Bergoglio” is detailed in Austen Ivereigh’s worshipful biography of Francis, and even though the cardinals subsequently denied the account, their protestations are supremely unconvincing.)

As the Catholic News Agency reported at the time, this politicking wasn’t simply a matter of bad taste: The apostolic constitution, Universi Dominici gregis, expressly prohibits cardinals from forming pacts, agreements, promises, or commitments of any kind. Oh well.

During his time on Peter’s throne, Francis has worked to dismantle many orthodox positions in an attempt to radically reorient the church toward — by total coincidence — the long-held preferences of those four radical cardinals.

For instance: He has criticized Catholics for being “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception. He has derided Catholic women for having too many children and behaving “like rabbits.” He sent a papal blessing to the lesbian author of the Italian version of Heather Has Two Mommies—a tract for children extolling the virtues of same-sex parenting.

All of this is in addition to his bizarre insistence that “never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake” and that the benefits of free-market growth have “never been confirmed by the facts.” (In case people didn’t get the message, Francis posed for pictures with a crucifix made of a hammer and a sickle.)

Yet as bad as free market capitalism is, the pope insists “the most serious of the evils that afflict the world these days are youth unemployment and the loneliness of the old.” Which is a . . . curious view of our fallen world.

The most outré of the pope’s initiatives, however, have been his efforts to dismantle the restrictions on admittance of divorced and remarried Catholics to communion. For this, Francis convened a synod, attempted to ram through a change to Catholic teaching, and, when that failed, proclaimed via an apostolic exhortation that priests were free to use their discretion on the matter.

To non-Catholics, this may not sound like a big deal, but it is: Communion for the divorced and remarried is the first theological step to doing away with the concept of adultery. If such a change is accomplished, the Catholic church would eventually be forced to change all of its teachings on marriage, sexuality, and the family: Divorce, pre-, and -extra-marital sex would all then be sanctioned by the church. And so — crucially — would.homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Now maybe you like these things and maybe you don’t. Some Christian denominations embrace them. But the Catholic church has never sanctioned any of them and the entire revolutionary project of changing the church’s teaching on family and sexuality necessarily begins with communion for the divorced and remarried.

This project and the pope’s apostolic exhortation were serious enough that several cardinals sent the Holy Father a formal document, known as Dubia, asking if he truly intended to change Catholic teaching in a heretical manner, or if he had just made an honest mistake. Francis simply ignored them.

Which is his way. In his only conversation with reporters about the Viganò testimony, Francis declined to address the charge that he had known about McCarrick. Viganò’s letter, Francis said, “speaks for itself.” When it wasn’t clear what the Holy Father meant by this — Was Viganò’s account true? Was Viganò a mountebank? — Francis continued, saying, “It’s an act of trust. I won’t say a word about it.”

The pope’s favorite American cardinal is Blase Cupich, who heads the archdiocese of Chicago and has been the most persistent cheerleader for the Francis project in America. He has said quite a few words. Asked about the Viganò letter by a reporter, Cupich said it was a “rabbit hole” and “The pope has a bigger agenda. . . . he’s got to get on with other things” such as “talking about the environment and protecting migrants.”

This was not a gaffe. A few days later, Cupich met with a group of seminarians who very much wanted to talk about the priest-abuse problem, the Holy Father, and this dark night of the church. Cupich told the group, “I feel very much at peace at this moment. I am sleeping okay.” Then came this, per the account in the Chicago Sun-Times:

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The source said Cupich also told the group that, while the church’s “agenda” certainly involves protecting kids from harm, “we have a bigger agenda than to be distracted by all of this,” including helping the homeless and sick.

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Which brings us, finally, to the question of what this “agenda” actually is.

It is difficult to disentangle the hundreds of cases of abuse in the church from the subject of homosexuality. No one wants to say, or even to insinuate, that homosexuality and abusiveness are one and the same, or that all, or most, or even a large proportion of gay men are abusers. Those statements are objectively false.

At the same time, the math is pitiless: According to our best data, a mammoth CDC study done in 2013, 1.6 percent of Americans identify as gay. Yet 80 percent of the abuse cases involve priests abusing other males. You can include all the caveats you like — maybe there’s selection bias, maybe the percentage of homosexuals in the priesthood is many times higher than 1.6 percent, maybe not all male-on-male abuse is perpetrated by men who would identify as gay. But the correlation is still high enough that it is impossible to ignore.

And despite the fact that everyone wants to insist that abuse by priests has nothing to do with homosexuality, it’s strange that the people who most want to open the church sacramentally to homosexuality are the ones strenuously ignoring the abuse. Priests such as Cardinal Cupich are certainly acting like they think there’s a linkage and that if the church were to crack down on abuse and the bishops who enabled it, it would somehow endanger their project.

And it’s not confined to the United States. In Chile, too, Catholic bishops have presided over a sickening culture of abuse and coverup. Confronted with charges of abuse, Francis stood by the Chilean bishop Juan Barros Madrid, saying of the allegations, “The day someone brings me proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. But there is not one single piece of evidence. It is all slander. Is that clear?” This, despite the fact that Francis had been warned about Barros and there was a mountain of evidence against him. Barros was on Team Francis, which is what counted most.

In July, a group of 50 seminarians in Honduras presented Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga with a letter and corroborating evidence alleging a ring of homosexual abuse at the country’s largest seminary. Maradiaga’s response, per the reporting of Edward Pentin, was to accuse the seminarians of being “gossipers.” You can think of Maradiaga as the Donald Wuerl of Tegucigalpa. He is also one of Francis’s closest advisers.

Whether or not it’s coincidence, the American bishops in the most jeopardy now— McCarrick, Wuerl, Cupich, Tobin [Last fails to include Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who is the highest-ranking American in the Church hierarchy] — are also the ones closest to Francis and most supportive of his desire to revolutionize the church.

There was a general sense among Catholics following the pontificate of John Paul II that the church had been jolted by an influx of orthodox young priests. In time, the thinking went, these men would climb and, eventually, they would stock the positions of power throughout the church. Thus the church would remain, at least for the medium-term, an orthodox institution.

But the election of Francis changed all of that. Even though the radical elements within the church were a small and aging minority, the progressives realized that the only person who really matters is the pope. That’s why they organized to get Francis elected. Since then they have understood that if Francis and his faction can find just a few score of like-minded priests to elevate, they can ensure that the current pope’s successor will share his ideological preferences.

The College of Cardinals is supposed to have 120 voting members; currently there are 124 members eligible to participate in the next conclave. That’s more than the cap should allow. Why? Because 75 of them — including Cupich and Tobin — have been appointed by Francis. Unlike his predecessor, Francis understands power.

And because there are so few high-level progressives in the church, Francis understands that losing any of these men could endanger his succession, which could endanger his larger project. His confederates, in turn, understand that losing Francis himself at this moment could sink it entirely.

The chances of the church’s losing Francis, however, are slim. You cannot impeach a pope. And barring an unexpected return to our Heavenly Father, Francis will remain pope for the foreseeable future. Which leaves four possible pathways, none of which is attractive.

Some conservative Catholics, such as Princeton’s Robert P. George, have suggested that Francis ought to resign — especially if the Viganò letter is corroborated. This is an attractive idea and would align with the cause of justice. Anyone in the church hierarchy who knew, or should have known, about specific abusers in their midst should, at the least, be removed from any position of responsibility. They simply cannot be trusted. If you were to extend this view all the way to the bishop of Rome, there is a certain cleanliness to its logic — a sense that maybe the church could make a clean break and begin to make things right anew.

But it might be a cure worse than the disease.

In the last 600 years, only one pope has abdicated: Benedict XVI, the man who immediately preceded Francis. Two abdications in a millennium are an aberration. But two abdications in a row would have the practical effect of breaking the modern papacy. From here forward, all popes would be expected to resign their office rather than die in harness.

This expectation of resignation would, in turn, create incentives for the pope’s theological adversaries to fight and wound him, in the not-unreasonable hope that if they could make him unpopular, he could be shuffled out of the palace and they could try their luck with a new pontiff. Before you know it, you’d have polling data and opposition research and the papacy would become an expressly political office. No Catholic should yearn for this outcome.

The second option is capitulation. Catholics could shrug and give up. They could let Cardinal Wuerl live his best life and then slink off to a graceful retirement; they could make peace with Cardinal Cupich’s view that the church exists, first and foremost, to deal with global warming, or the minimum wage, or whatever else is trending on Vox.com. They could toe the dirt and accept sacramental same-sex marriages, even if it destroys the theology of the body. After all, times change. Religions change. And if you really trust in the Lord, then no change could come to His church without its being the will of the Father.

The third option is schism. There has been loose talk about schism since the early days of Francis’s pontificate. The conversation became less whimsical at the time of the synod and the dubia. It will become deadly serious if Viganò’s accusations are corroborated and Francis shelters in place. Even so, it remains one of those low-probability, extinction-level events that every Catholic should pray does not come to pass. [Again, I must point out that I have yet to read from anyone who offers the schism option any description of what they think it would be: Who will be breaking away from what? The genuine faithful will never break away from the one true Church of Christ and will not recognize any 'replacement' such as the church of Bergoglio in any way. Yet who will lead them if Bergoglio and his followers and potential like-minded successor(s) hold the reins of power- they certainly will not break away from the institutional Church because they would be powerless without her infrastructure. ]

The fourth option is resistance. We are only at the current moment because the forces that conspired to elevate Francis refused, for decades, to leave the church, even though their desires were at odds with its teachings.

Despite the fact that the Catholic church rejected their preferences as false, the South American liberation theologists, the German cardinals who wanted to redefine marriage, and the American progressives who never met a social justice cause they didn’t like all hung on. Eventually they organized.

And after a generation of orthodox papacy, during which time most American Catholics forgot that there even was a radical side of the faith, they worked together to elect Francis. Organization works, if you’re willing to play the long game and play for keeps.

So Catholics could starve bishops such as Wuerl, Cupich, and Tobin of funds. Not a dime for any church in any diocese headed by a bishop who refuses to root out abusers and their enablers.

The bishops who do care about these things could start organizing for the next conclave now, identifying potential candidates and laying the groundwork for the election of the next pope.

Then, when the pendulum eventually swings back — be it next year or 40 years from now — orthodox Catholics could take from these years a very sobering lesson about power. And with neither malice nor mercy drive men such as Cupich, Tobin, and Wuerl into the sea and purge the church of anyone who believes that climate change is a more pressing matter than the abuse of Catholics by the clergy.

None of these pathways is attractive; each leads to a church that is at best impoverished and at worst crippled.

Then again, the church survived Caligula, the bubonic plague, the Third Reich, the Gather hymnal, and the autoharp. It will survive McCarrick, Wuerl, and Francis, too.

But crucibles are rarely pleasant experiences for those inside them and a great many souls may be lost in the transition.

Those men will have much to answer for.

Correction, September 14, 2018, 3:05 p.m.: The article originally stated that a bishop "can forbid the offering of both species of the Eucharist, as Bishop Michael Burbidge does in Northern Virginia." Bishop Burbidge does allow both species of the Eucharist, it was his predecessors, Bishops John Richard Keating and Paul Loverde, who forbid the offering of both species of the Eucharist. According to a statement from the Arlington Diocese: "Reverend Thomas Ferguson, Vicar General and Moderator of the Curia with the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, [says that] Bishop Paul Loverde changed the policy to allow both species of the Eucharist to be allowed at Mass. The policy changed sometime between 1999 and 2004."

Also, the article originally stated that Bishop Steven Lopes said “I was a seminarian when Theodore McCarrick was named archbishop of Newark. And he would visit the seminary often, and we all knew." in the an interview with First Things. He made those remarks in a homily that was first reported by First Things.

We regret the errors.

For such a seminal event in the history of ideas, very few photos are available online from the lecture itself, and researching the photos online simply gave me back the few photos I have managed to get over the years and have used in the past 12 years. Not one of which even provides the name of the University
Rector who hosted the lecture (seated to the right of B16). The impassive man to his left is, of course, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then serving out his last days as Secretary of State. After the German visit, Cardinal Bertone took over as Secretary of State on September 15.


Few in the media and the blogosphere appear to have remembered the anniversary of the Regensburg lecture on Sept. 12. (I can understand why even Mons Georg Gaenswein made no reference to it in his Sept. 11 presentation of Rod Dreher's THE BENEDICT OPTION, despite using the 9/11 terrrorist attack as his metaphor for the present crisis facing the Church. Because the larger question was quaerere Deum, a search which, of course, ultimately involves faith and reason working together. But when he spoke of mass migrations as 'a reality that will go on forever', he chose instead to point out that this is a consciousness Pope Francis has sought to instill in the minds of the faithful.)

The following blogpost brings up Regensburg to underscore the substance of Fr Schall'S latest book, ON ISLAM, which I am ashamed to say I had been meaning to post about, but it somehow kept being pushed to the background by all the abuse-focused stories... Indeed, I myself am a few days late this year to mark the anniversary of the Regensburg lecture, so this post must do for now.


12 years after Regensburg:
Why we should learn about Islam
By Dr. Jared Staudt

On September 12, 2006, almost five years to the day from 9/11, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a watershed lecture at the University of Regensburg.

He argued that Islam and the modern West hold a significant tenant in common: a voluntarism that puts will above reason. For classic Islamic thinkers this meant that Allah was not bound by any restraints of reason, including the principle of non-contradiction, and for modern philosophers it led to a division between faith and reason and eventually to relativism.

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church has called consistently for dialogue with Islam (see the Council’s declaration, Nostra Aetate).



Fr. James Schall, in his recent book On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018 (Ignatius, 2018) notes the difficultly of such dialogue, building upon the claims of Benedict’s address at Regensburg and the clash of cultures that has been unfolding since 9/11.

Schall notes two fundamental difficulties that impede effective dialogue.
- First, the Church has never released an authoritative statement on the theological claims of Islam, even though they arose in close conjunction to Christianity and Judaism, and
- Second, Westerners tend to interpret Islam through their own lens of reason, freedom, and rights rather than by entering into Islam’s own self-understanding.

Dialogue is about conversation centered on sharing ideas in hope of fostering greater cooperation. Schall points out the difficulty of such a conversation with Muslim leaders given the fact that
- We do not share a common revelation — Muslims reject the Trinity and the divinity of Christ — and,
- Unlike the Church, there is no central authority in Islam.
- Even more crucially, it is difficult to find common ground in the natural law.

Major strands of the Islamic theological tradition eschew the philosophical study of nature by attributing the causality of all things to the direct will of Allah (which led some Islamic philosophes to posit the double truth theory). Therefore, it is hard to establish a philosophical bridge of common terms to address basic issues such as human rights.

The most basic human right according to the Church is religious freedom, but Schall convincingly argues that full religious freedom does not exist in many Islamic countries, which only tolerate Christians to different degrees, under the constant threat of persecution.

These incompatible concepts of religious freedom reveal even deeper divisions, such as two radically different understandings of common words such as martyrdom.
- The Christian view of martyrdom acknowledges those who die by suffering violence from others who seek to restrict their faith. - Some Muslims would honor terrorists and suicide bombers as martyrs, because they died seeking to spread Islam.

Fr. Schall reflects on the absurdity of having to make the argument against the claim that murder is holy. He also notes that we cannot stop suicide bombers without engaging the theology that motivates their action.

Rather than responding to such attacks with Western-inspired platitudes, Schall encourages us to scrutinize the views of these radical groups. We cannot evaluate their claim that they follow the Koran and the life of Mohammed faithfully if we are ignorant of the Islamic tradition.

Schall also speaks at length of the amazing expansion of Islam following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD. The original Christian heartland of Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain were quickly overrun, with conquest of Christian Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and Southeastern Europe following.

Although many Christian lands were converted through conquest, Schall, following Belloc, speaks of Islamic lands as nearly inconvertible by Christians. Although these lands have proved quite impervious to missionary efforts, I should note my own experience of friends and acquaintances who have quietly converted to Catholicism from Islam, though at the risk of their own life.

Furthermore, I have been following a growing occurrence of Muslims have dreams of Jesus and Mary, which have led them to learn more about the Christian faith.

Schall also encourages us to learn more about Islam and highly recommends Fr. Samir Khalil Samir’s 111 Questions on Islam. Fr. Samir is an Egyptian Jesuit and expert in the Islamic tradition.

Islam is in the news frequently and many conflicting claims are made about it. Increasing our religious literacy will help us to make sense of the news for ourselves and prepare us for dialogue, both with Muslims and confused Westerners.

The desire to understand Islam in the West began in earnest with the request of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, for the first translation of the Koran into Latin, completed in 1143. Aquinas also wrote his Summa Contra Gentiles to help his fellow friars to enter dialogue on the Christian faith with Muslims. Schall encourages us through study and honesty to move beyond the platitudes that dominate responses to terrorism.

Many Catholic thinkers and leaders are afraid to address the challenges of dialogue with Islam, for fear of offending others or even inciting additional violence (as occurred after the Regensburg Lecture, for instance).

However, Schall’s collected reflections should inspire us to seek the truth in our dialogue and to assess honestly the threat of Islamic terrorism throughout the world. I have been learning about Islam for over 20 years and found fresh ideas in the book.

Schall demonstrates the philosophical, political, and theological precision needed not only in learning more about Islam, but also for assessing the Church in our own society.

Dialogue also requires a proper understanding of one’s own tradition. Christians need to return to a stronger relationship of faith and reason in order to purify the stagnancy of the Church and society.

Staudt works in the Office of Evangelization and Family Life Ministries of the Archdiocese of Denver. He earned his BA and MA in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN and his PhD in Systematic Theology from Ave Maria University in Florida.

Samuel Gregg reviewed Fr. Schall's book in a timely manner when it came out last August:

James V. Schall dissects
the West via Islam
by SAMUEL GREGG

aUGUST 6, 2018

In the wake of the furor which followed Benedict XVI’s September 2006 Regensburg address, perhaps the best book-length analysis of what will surely go down as one of the 21st century’s most important speeches was authored by the former Georgetown professor of political philosophy, Father James V. Schall SJ.

In contrast to the superficial coverage by those Western commentators who plainly resented Benedict’s naming of the elephant in the room (i.e., that contemporary Muslim terrorism may owe something to Islam’s conception of God), Schall’s examination of the Regensburg address placed it in the wider context of a set of religious and philosophical challenges that many Westerners still can’t bring themselves to address.

Over the past sixteen years, Schall has written numerous articles on this more general topic, the most important of which have been gathered together in his latest book, On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018. In one sense, the title is somewhat misleading. For this is really a book about the West and how its inability to think (let alone speak) clearly about the primary causes of Muslim terrorism reflects some significant intellectual pathologies presently plaguing Western intellectual life.

As the text’s subtitle indicates, these essays proceed chronologically. They begin with a 2003 article about Hilaire Belloc’s views about Islam, and end with a 2018 piece in which Schall presents some reflections about the Koran itself. Between these two essays are sandwiched 24 articles in which Schall explores questions ranging from how the physicist-priest, the late Stanley Jaki, regarded the natural sciences’ place in Islam, to how the secular mind grapples with Muslim terrorism.

Many of these essays were occasioned by specific acts of jihadist terrorism. These make for very depressing reading. They highlight not only a firm consistency of purpose on the part of Muslim terrorists, but also the equally unswerving failure by many Western secular and religious intellectuals to acknowledge Muslim terrorism’s religious roots.

To that extent, Schall’s primary critique is less directed at Islam —which he treats in a scrupulously fair manner by taking the Koran and the long-standing dominant schools of Islamic theology to mean what they say — than it is at those Westerners who prefer to bury their heads in the proverbial sand rather than violate any number of politically-correct pieties.

Schall details how, in terrorist incident after terrorist incident, the perpetrators understood themselves to be acting in ways entirely consistent with Muslim theology, history, and practice. That suggests there are no solutions to Muslim terrorism which don’t put theological issues at the forefront of the discussion.

Schall emphasizes that this is a subject in which a return to first principles and some fundamental theological questions cannot be avoided. There are few signs, however, of a willingness in either the Muslim or Western worlds to go down this path.

The core problem, according to Schall, is the “voluntarist metaphysics” which informs the choices made by Muslim terrorists. In general terms, theological voluntarism is the idea that God’s essence is some form of will (voluntas) whose decisions cannot be explained in terms of reason. A voluntarist thus believes, Schall writes, that “What is behind all reality is a will that can always be otherwise. It is not bound to any one truth.”

This means that God isn’t limited by any distinction between good or evil. What’s evil one day (such as cutting the throat of an 85 year-old priest, Jacques Hamel, as he celebrated Mass in his parish in July 2016) might be good the next day. As a consequence, Schall states, “We affirm that evil should not be done. But sometimes it should be done. In that case, evil becomes good.” Such thinking also makes any conception of natural law impossible.

The most basic principle of sound reasoning, Schall reminds his readers, is that “A thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same way in the same circumstances.”

Reason, in short, cannot contradict reason, human or divine — unless, of course, the essence of God is pure Will, in which case divine and human reason are inherently unstable, if not polite fictions. And if that’s that’s true, then God himself cannot be a Being who embodies Divine Reason.

It was on these theological foundations, Schall argues, that those Muslim scholars of the school which came to dominate Sunni Islam —the Ash’arites — reconciled evident inconsistencies in the book which they believe Allah himself wrote to manifest his mind. In Schall’s view,

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The solution that such thinkers came up with, when spelled out, was remarkable. They did not deny that contradictions existed. They said that Allah could will one thing in Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday. The latest affirmation is always the binding one, but it can change tomorrow.

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[That sounds, almost comically, like Jorge Bergoglio's Peron-like self-contradictions!]

All this is predicated upon a voluntarist view of God and an associated denial of any connection between divine or human reason and the Koran. That permitted the Ash’arite school to claim that Allah could, if he wished, let the wicked enter paradise and punish the virtuous.

Theological voluntarism is by no means an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. You can find traces of it in, for instance, the thought of the medieval Catholic theologian Duns Scotus.

Voluntarist tendencies also lie just beneath the surface of claims such as that tweeted in 2017 by one of Schall’s fellow Jesuits who happens to be a Vatican consultor when he asserted, as Schall recalls, that “two plus two equals four in science, but in theology the sum could equal five.”

The only way that a Christian could hold such a position would be to assume
- that God doesn’t really embody the Divine Reason that Christians call Logos (despite this being affirmed in the very first verse of the Greek version of the Gospel of John);
- that all truth is not in fact one (meaning that the search for coherence is pointless); and
- that God can in fact will truth and untruth at the same time (which implies that God is a liar).

Nor, as Schall demonstrates, is voluntarism only a religious and theological problem. It’s the default position of most Western secular philosophers. The thorough-going positivist, for example, ultimately maintains that whatever the state wills is the law. What reason tells us to be just is essentially irrelevant. Hence, the same positivist has difficulty explaining why a law that, say, allows some people to commit outrages against others is, as a matter of reason, unjust.

Likewise those who deny the idea of natural law — again, the vast majority of Western secularists and more than a few Christian moral theologians — don’t believe that humans are bound by any truths written into our reason itself.

They will say that we must follow axioms like “maximize utility,” “be nice to others,” or “uphold respect-tolerance-diversity.” But the nature of these maxims is such that they can be used to justify one course of action, and its complete opposite an hour later. What’s useful yesterday, for instance, may not be so useful tomorrow.

So do whatever seems useful to you at any given moment! In such a world, nothing is stable. Everything and everyone is subject to a type of “presentism” which is happy to cast aside traditions, institutions, constitutions, and any other incubator of wisdom and hard-won knowledge of unchanging truth that might get in the way of what’s perceived to be important right now.

It’s also the case that in a secular voluntarist understanding of the world, humans are viewed as subject only to their own will — not reason and truth. It follows that we can no longer reason together about what is the right course of action. Instead we end up deferring to whoever can muster the strongest collective will, whether it’s through tame democratic majorities or the barrel of a gun. In either case, it is might that makes what is right.

Western religious and secular thinkers who adhere consciously or otherwise to these views are woefully ill-equipped to deal with one very salient fact: that, as Schall comments, the Koran

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in the eyes of many Muslims, means just what it says. It is a religion that continually seeks, whether it be gradually or quickly, to conquer the world for Allah by whatever means are at hand in a given century or a given place.

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Refusal to acknowledge these facts helps to account for the insistence of many of the same Westerners that, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, Muslim terrorism is essentially caused by economic poverty. This assertion certainly fits their penchant for materialist explanations for everything under the sun. But it also exemplifies how they literally cannot see what is happening in front of them.

Thus, Schall observes, when Muslim terrorists

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frankly explain what they are doing — namely, following what it says in their book — they are ignored because, while the explanation fits with the terrorists’ understanding of reality, it does not fit with what most people in the West insist on holding.

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Such mindsets are of no assistance to those millions of Muslims who have no desire to hurt anyone, who want to live in harmony with their non-Muslim neighbors, and who have been murdered in the thousands by Muslim terrorists.

Nor are these Western outlooks likely to encourage those believing Muslims perhaps willing to re-engage the question of reason’s relationship to revelation in Islam.

Equally unhelpful is the type of interfaith “dialogue” that declines to consider what Schall describes as those “basic theological and philosophical questions that simply will not go away until they are resolved in truth.”

However we proceed, Schall is clear on two points.

First, pious Muslims who want to stop the violence must address head-on the question of the voluntarism driving the violence of some of their fellow-Muslims and the related issue of voluntarism’s place in Islamic theology. No doubt, that’s a difficult discussion.

Among other things, it would involve reopening long-settled theological disputes and require presently-forbidden analysis of the Koran and its sources to be undertaken by believing Muslims in the Islamic world. Yet unless those central topics are addressed by Muslims, everything else is mere tinkering at the edges.

But, Schall adds, something analogous needs to happen in the West. Many Western Christians and secularists have to face up to the blindness generated by their own implicitly voluntarist conceptions of God and/or man. Failure to do so will only render them ever more ineffectual when it comes to understanding why intelligent and devout young men, some of whom have wives and children that they love, are willing to immolate themselves — and, in some instances, their wives and children — in order to slaughter others.

As a Christian, James Schall is a man of hope. Hope, however, is very different from wishful thinking. That’s why Schall can conclude by saying that “any prospect seems lacking of a coherent facing of the overall moral, political, and religious problems that the existence of Islam causes in the world, both to itself and to others.”

Yes, those believing Muslims who want to head-off the violence of their co-religionists have formidable, perhaps impossible, obstacles to overcome. But the greater challenge may in fact be for the West: a civilization that, as a consequence of its ongoing revolt against both logos and the Logos, has rendered itself intellectually helpless and morally impotent against a fierce, relentless and ruthless enemy bent upon securing its submission.

Today it takes courage to say such things. Father Schall is a courageous man. We are all in his debt.


As a footnote to this post, let me reprint the initial New York Times report of the Regensburg lecture by its then Vaticanista, Ian Fisher, who would soon change the tone and weight of his reporting about the lecture to open Muslim-baiting at the expense of Benedict XVI... One must appreciate, however, the choice of the photograph used to illustrate the story.


Pope says West is divorced from faith,
adding a blunt footnote on jihad
By IAN FISHER

SEPT. 13, 2006


Pope Benedict distributing communion Tuesday to some of the 250,000 people who attended the Mass he celebrated in Regensburg, Germany.

REGENSBURG, Germany, Sept. 12 — Pope Benedict XVI weighed in Tuesday on the delicate issue of rapport between Islam and the West: He said that violence, embodied in the Muslim idea of jihad, or holy war, is contrary to reason and God’s plan, while the West was so beholden to reason that Islam could not understand it.

Nonetheless, in a complex treatise delivered at the university here where he once taught, he suggested reason as a common ground for a “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

In all, the speech seemed to reflect the Vatican’s struggle over how to confront Islam and terrorism, as the 79-year-old pope pursues what is often considered a more provocative, hard-nosed and skeptical approach to Islam than his predecessor, John Paul II.

As such, it distilled many of Benedict’s longstanding concerns, about the crisis of faith among Christians and about Islam and its relationship to violence.

And he used language open to interpretations that could inflame Muslims, at a time of high tension among religions and three months before he makes a trip to Turkey.

He began his speech, which ran over half an hour, by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in a conversation with a “learned Persian” on Christianity and Islam — “and the truth of both.”

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread the sword by the faith he preached,” the pope quoted the emperor, in a speech to 1,500 students and faculty.

He went on to say that violent conversion to Islam was contrary to reason and thus “contrary to God’s nature.”

But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.

This, he said, has closed off the West from a full understanding of reality, making it also impossible to talk with cultures for whom faith is fundamental.

“The world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion from the divine, from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions,” he said. “A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”

Several experts on the Catholic Church and Islam agreed that the speech — in which Benedict made clear he was quoting other sources on Islam — did not appear to be a major statement on, or condemnation of, Islam. The chief concern, they said, was the West’s exclusion of religion from the realm of reason.

Still, they said that the strong words he used in describing Islam, even that of the 14th century, ran the risk of offense.

Renzo Guolo, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Padua, who often writes about the church and Islam, said he was struck by the suggestion of Islam as distant from reason.

“This is maybe the strongest criticism because he doesn’t speak of fundamentalist Islam but of Islam generally,” he said, “Not all Islam, thank God, is fundamentalist.”

The Rev. Daniel A. Madigan, rector of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said the central point was that “if we are really going into a serious dialogue with Muslims we need to take faith seriously.” But, he said of the quote from the emperor, “You clearly take a risk using an example like that.”

Marco Politi, the Vatican expert for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, said that “the text reveals his deep mistrust regarding the aggressive side of Islam.” [And pray, who outside Islam does not distrust the aggressive side of Islam???? Does Politi himself not distrust it?]

“Certainly he closes the door to an idea which was very dear to John Paul II — the idea that Christians, Jews and Muslims have the same God and have to pray together to the same God,” he said. [Did John Paul II mean that literally? Certainly the Christian God - which is a Triune God - is neither the Jews' Yahweh nor the Muslims' Allah, who do not have a Son nor a Holy Spirit. The most we can say is that all three monotheistic religions believe in 'a God' who is the Supreme Being, to which each faith then gives specific attributes.]

The speech was a central moment in Benedict’s six-day trip home to visit Bavaria, where he grew up, became a priest, a prominent theologian and, finally, a cardinal.

Earlier in the day, at an outdoor Mass here attended by some 250,000 people, he expressed similar concerns as in the speech, urging believers to stand up against the “hatred and fanaticism” that he said were tarnishing the image of God.

Again, this critique seemed aimed as much at secular Western society as at any other threat.

“Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God’s image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe,” the pope said.

“Only this can free us from being afraid of God — which is ultimately at the root of modern atheism,” he said. “Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life.”

The speech at the university was the only significant secular event in a schedule packed with Masses, evening prayers and other religious occasions aimed at Catholics in Germany, where regular Mass attendance has fallen to under 15 percent.

That low number is connected directly to many of Benedict’s long-expressed concerns about Islam. He often urges people not to forget the Christian roots of a Europe with fewer practicing Christians and more Muslim immigrants, over four million here in Germany alone.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the chief Vatican spokesman, said that Benedict’s comments were not meant as any statement on Islam, but only as a small example, at the beginning of four tightly packed pages of text, of his argument of the dangers of the separation of reason and religion.

“I believe that everyone understands, even inside Islam, there are many different positions, and there are many positions that aren’t violent,” Father Lombardi said. “Here, certainly, the pope doesn’t want to give a lesson, let’s say, an interpretation of Islam, as violent.

“He is saying, in the case of a violent interpretation of religion, we are in a contradiction with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” he said.

In the weeks after John Paul’s death in April 2005, Islam and how to confront terrorism seemed key issues in the selection of a new pope. As a candidate, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who took the name Benedict after his election, embodied the more skeptical school inside the Vatican.

Unlike John Paul, Cardinal Ratzinger did not approve of joint prayers with Muslims and was skeptical of the value of inter-religious dialogue, with a faith of many shadings and few representative leaders to speak with.

In 2004, he caused a stir by opposing membership in the European Union for Turkey, saying that it “always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe.” He has not repeated this opinion since he became pope, and he is scheduled to visit there in November.

Once he became pope, Benedict’s new approach was apparent quickly: In his first trip outside Italy, he met with Muslim leaders in Cologne, Germany, and politely but clearly told them they had the responsibility to teach their children against terrorism, which he called “the darkness of a new barbarism.” He said Catholics and Muslims had the obligation to meet and to overcome differences.

At the end of that summer, he devoted an annual weekend of study with former graduate students to Islam. In that meeting, and since, he has reportedly expressed skepticism about Islam’s openness to change, given its view of the Koran as the unchangeable word of God.

Correction: Sept. 15, 2006
Because of a transcription error, an article on Wednesday about a speech by Pope Benedict XVI in Germany, in which he addressed the concept of Muslim holy war, rendered incorrectly a phrase from a quotation by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. The correct quotation reads, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” — not “to spread the sword by the faith he preached.”

Another belated anniversary marker:
Eleven years ago, on Sept. 14, 2007, Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, promulgated in July, went into effect,
and once again, after 38 years of having been arbitrarily suppressed, though never formally, with the overnight imposition of the
Novus Ordo Mass, the traditional Latin 'Mass of the Ages' was restored to full legitimacy in the Church as the Exyraordinary Form
of the Mass... In 2017, on the tenth anniversary of SP, I had a post brimful of SP commemorations on MAINLY ABOUT BENEDICT...
http://www.freeforumzone.com/d/8527207/BENEDICT-XVI-NEWS-PAPAL-TEXTS-PHOTOS-AND-COMMENTARY/discussione.aspx/585

'I DO NOT KNOW HIM: From Iscariotism to Apostasy', Buenos Aires, 2017, by Antonio Caponnetto

A few days ago, Father Z acknowledged receiving a copy of the above book, for which he reprinted the publisher's blurb on the book jacket, as follows (my translation):

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The title of this book is one of those well-known but inconvenient replies, with which – according to all four evengelists – St Peter denied Our Lord on the day that he was seized by the Jews.

It is applied here to Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in March 2013. This is the situation in which we find ourselves immersed, here and now. No longer does Iscariotism seem adequate to understand the evil which makes us tremble. This is no longer just about a traitorous kiss and 30 pieces of silver.

There is more. He who now functions as Peter in the Church displays in himself all those features that I do not recognize in Christ. Whoever knows Christ cannot be indifferent before this strange Peter who daily deserves – after every new commotion he produces from his inexhaustible repertoire – Jesus’s irrevocable cry, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’

This is the focus of my limited attempt of trying to reflect on the dramatic transition we are suffering, which – although it has antecedents which one would not deny – has now reached a peak that is also an abyss.

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CHURCH MILITANT had occasion to talk to the book author recently.

Argentine biographer claims 'a lot of evidence' shows
Cardinal Bergoglio covered up for homosexuals and pedophiles
by Juliana Freitag

September 13, 2018

In thelight of the staggering revelations of Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò, currently hunted by the Holy See's intelligence services for asking Pope Francis to resign for the cover-up of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's homosexual predation, Church Militant reached out to Dr. Antonio Caponnetto, an accomplished Catholic historian and doctor in philosophy from Buenos Aires — and one who knows more about Pope Francis when he was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio than anyone else.

Caponnetto is a prolific researcher and lecturer who has written extensively about liberation theology in South America, but is mostly known for his book La Iglesia Traicionada (The Church Betrayed), a first-hand account of living under the reign of Cardinal Bergoglio when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. The book was published in 2010, three years before Bergoglio became Pope Francis, and has been quoted in a book by Italian Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei as well as by Henry Sire in his bombshell book The Dictator Pope. [But obviously unknown to, or ignored by, the cardinals who were persuaded by the Sankt-Gallen Mafia to vote for Bergoglio.]

Caponnetto then wrote a second book about Pope Francis in 2017 entitled No lo conozco: Del Iscariotismo a la Apostasía (I Don't Know Him: From Iscariotism to Apostasy), in which he consolidated his knowledge of Pope Francis's modus operandi, this time evaluating the pontificate.

In a 2017 interview, Caponnetto spoke about the process of writing La Iglesia Traicionada, thus: "What went through my soul … was an immense pain, a lacerating urge to scream from the rooftops, after realizing that the pastor was actually a wolf. And now we suffer the looting of doctrine, the theft of orthodoxy, the stealing of the truth."

To Church Militant, Dr. Caponnetto said, "I have written two books about Bergoglio. I have also written many articles and given many lectures. My first book was a warning. But, as it often happens, I wasn't heard. I was persecuted and offended. Then, finally, the facts proved me right. It's all very sad, but that's how things happened."

La Iglesia Traicionada confirms the problems in the current papacy: Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio's ambiguous behavior has always pushed heterodoxy and confused the faithful. Here are a few telling extracts from the book:

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Bergoglio needs to prove that he is a humble, modest ... man. A neighborhood kid who can chat about football and tango (which he does, abundantly), the farthest from a Christian Prince as possible. [He acts] in accordance with the times and the tastes ... not with the magisterial attitude of a master of truth by ministry. He values doubt and hesitation.

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Still on Pope Francis' "obsession" with his own image:

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Bergoglio recklessly plays the "low-profile" game. ... His self-worship in showing off as an ordinary man is a manifestation of pride, not for the nature of what is flaunted, but for the vice of ostentation. This is one of Bergoglio's psychological obsessions: Why would one who possesses true humility give consent to the publication of pages and pages of praise to his virtue?

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Dr. Caponnetto also mentions several of Bergoglio's liaisons with enemies of the Catholic Church: "A first example is ... Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. This woman and her entire family were activists of Marxist terrorism in Paraguay. Careaga was among the founders of the group 'Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo' ... whose real mission was international Marxist guerrilla warfare. But for Bergoglio, this 'sympathiser of Communism' (careaga) in his own words, is 'an extraordinary woman,' who 'taught me so much about politics.'"

Another radical leftist also charmed Pope Francis in Italy: Emma Bonino, a George Soros associate and human rights activist who performed over 10,000 abortions with a bicycle pump device, has been called "one of Italy's forgotten greats" by the Pontiff.

La Iglesia Traicionada also says "several sources, one of which I've verified directly and whose claims have never been refuted, have revealed that Bergoglio agreed to the legalization of the so-called homosexual 'civil union' as an alleged lesser evil preferable to the greater evil of 'same-sex marriage.'"

In Italy, with the complicit silence of the Pope, homosexual civil unions were sanctioned in 2016, despite the relentless effort of the Catholic laity to stop the extremely unpopular bill. The Catholic committee Difendiamo i nostri figli ("We stand for our children") gathered two million people in Rome to sprotest against the law.

Many tried to make sense of Pope Francis' complete silence on the issue, while the most vocal prelate was Abp. Nunzio Galantino, at the time secretary of the Italian Bishops' Conference, to which he had been assigned early on by Bergoglio as his 'eyes and ears' when Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco was still CEI president.

Galantino's dubious statements implied that the position of Difendiamo i nostri figli was "too radical," and overall his declarations were all been interpreted as support for the bill. H

Pope Francis has been equally ambiguous about abortion and euthanasia, but he is always alarmingly clear when it comes to his heterodox positions. He speaks openly of his admiration for Martin Luther, even calling the Reformation "an event of the Holy Spirit."

Asked about the veracity of Abp. Viganò's allegations, Dr. Caponnetto's offered his final comments to Church Militant:

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What Abp. Viganò said about Bergoglio is the absolute truth. There's a lot of evidence that proves that Pope Francis covers up for homosexuals, degenerates and pedophiles. I don't know if this crisis will put an end to Bergoglio's infamous management. If God allows, it will. I also agree that he should resign, definitely. Everything he says and does inflicts evil upon the Church.

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One certainly hopes Caponnetto has laid down that 'lot of evidence' clearly and objectively in his book! And if he did, will any Vaticanista or other journalist even bother to read it (much less, to report it if it is indeed plausible evidence)? Has CHURCH MILITANT, for instance, assigned a serious book reviewer to read both of Caponnetto's books? One would think the Vaticanistas would all be offering their services to review the books if only to get copies to read.

Apparently, the pope was in Palermo, Sicily, today, still spreading his new three-monkeys’ gospel that ‘clericalism’ is at the root of the current crisis in the Church. Before we go on to those accounts, the following post by Fr Scalese on Friday is very apropos. He questions whether the pope – and his acolytes like Cardinal Cupich – know what clericalism is, or are they giving it a new definition? In any case, their goal is obviously to keep the public from even thinking of the ‘h’ word – homosexuality – in connection with the PRESENT CRISIS. The way Bergoglio carries on about it, one can only conclude that he is using a word whose real meaning he has not bothered to check, as a euphemism for ‘homosexuality’ which somehow he cannot bring himself to utter!

Clericalism, anyone?
Translated from


In his Testimony, ARchbishop Viganò, speaking of Cardinal Cupich, wrote: quote][dim=`0pt] Extolling his particular expertise in the matter, having been President of the Committee on Protection of Children and Young People of the USCCB, he asserted that the main problem in the crisis of sexual abuse by clergy is not homosexuality, and that affirming this is only a way of diverting attention from the real problem which is clericalism.