I apologize to Socci - it skipped my mind that he had written a book criticizing the Bergoglio Pontificate back in 2016 when it was barely three years old - a book
the pope himself informed him in a handwritten note that he had read and thanked him for [La profezia finale: Lettera a Papa Francesco sulla Chiesa in tempo
di guerra (The final prophecy: Letter to Pope Francis on the Church in a time of war). [One of those PR gestures Bergoglio is so good at - like his goodwill telephone
call to the dying Mario Palmaro, co-author with Alessandro Gnocchi of the first book ever to criticize Pope Bergoglio, Questo Papa non ci piace (We do not like this
pope), published just months after he became pope.]
Five years of Bergoglio:
Notes on a shipwreck
Translated from
March 13, 2018
To evaluate the five years of the Argentine pope, one must use the criterion of Jesus himself: “Every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit… So by their fruits you will know them”
(Mt 7, 17-20).
What have been the fruits of Bergoglism? I would be happy to say ‘good fruits’, but unfortunately, that is not so. They are the worst fruits! Above all, there is the collapse of religious practice everywhere, but especially in the most Bergoglian of continents, his native South America, and in the most Bergoglian of episcopates, that of Germany.
One can even cite specific cases, using two of the major architects of Bergoglio’s electoral victory in the 2013 Conclave; Cardinal Danneels (ex-Primate of Belgium) and Cardinal Maradiaga (still Primate of Honduras). We see that the Church, in Danneels’s Belgium and in Maradiaga’s Honduras, is going under. Suffice it to say that in Honduras, the percentage of those who call themselves Catholic has fallen from 76 to 47% in just 20 years. And in the diocese of Brussels-Maline, at the time Danneels retired as Archbishop, there were only four seminarians in a city of more than a million inhabitants.
[Isn’t that just emblematic though for the capital of the European Union, which has been scandalously anti-Christian for almost all of its existence?]
Moreover, to understand that the line promoted by these two cardinals and embodied by Bergoglio is the worst possible for the Church, just consider that in Argentina itself, the number of seminarians in that vast nation fell from 1500 to 827 during the years Bergoglio was archbishop (1999-2013). Is that not a spiritual catastrophe?
In contrast, for instance, in 2014-2015 alone, vocations are up by 17.4% and the number of Christians have been growing in Africa, Cardinal Sarah’s home continent, the number of baptized Catholics rose by 19.4% from 186 million to 226 million in that time period.
It is not by chance that the African bishops distinguished themselves in Bergoglio’s two ‘family synods’ by their open criticism of the Bergoglian’revolution’: they expressed thesemselves against any opening towards homsexuality and on communion for unqualified remarried divorcees. Moreover, the African bishops have for years strongly opposed mass migrations from Africa which Bergoglio passionately advocates and supports.
But it is not just statistics that show a balance sheet in the red for this pontificate.
There is something most serious that cannot be measured: it is the general disorientation of Catolics in the face of Bergoglio’s fearsome doctrinal and pastoral lurches.
I have written two books
[??? Did I miss one book?] on the disasters of this pontificate and I certainly cannot summarize such a catacalysm in a few lines. In practice,
this Argentine pope has abandoned the path laid down by his predecessors[to carry out the spiritual mission that is the primary task of the pope as successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, not any secular agenda] and has made the 'Obama agenda' his own (he became pope while Obama was US president). And And these are the major items on the agenda: promotion of mass migrations to the West, the Church’s unconditional surrender on all ethical and moral issues, the embarce of Islam, and eco-catastrophism.
The church of Bergoglio, having sacrificed the announcement of Christ as the only Savior in favor of the politics of Obama-styled ‘human rights’, "has superimposed itself with other organizational, ideological and political presences which have nothing to do with the Tradition of the Church at all,” historian Ernesto della Loggia has observed, “starting obviously with the major international organizations like the United Nations and all its agencies”.
Also superimposed on the church of Bergoglio, says the historian, “are secular progressivist elements… and the overwhelming public presence at the Vatican of some very rich and very influential people from the world of global philanthropy (I do not know what else to call them) like Soros or Zuckerberg or Bezos, who have now become true and proper prophets for the media, the latter themselves not just alienated from but outright hostile to Catholic Christianity”.
This assimilation with worldly power explains the Bergoglian compulsion to daily ‘bombard’ Catholics faithful to Christ as ‘fundamentalists’ (and annihilating flourishing religious communities like the FFI), while elevating people like Emma Bonino, Giorgio Napolitano and Marco Pannella as ‘heroes’ to be emulated.
It is in the context of this assimilation with worldly power that other disconcerting facts must be read, such as the virtual canonization of Martin Luther (and the project to further destroy the Catholic Mass, a project dreamt by Luther), or the Vatican surrender to the Chinese Communist regime (abandoning, in effect, all the Chinese Catholics who have been persecuted, as this Vatican has abandoned those Christians persecuted in Islamic regimes).
On Bergoglio’s failure at Curial reform, even the most zealous of Bergoglians agree.
Today, confusion at the Vatican is total, and there is disconcertment even at the despotic methods this pope practices. But far more serious is
the spiritual disorientation he has caused among the people of God who feel they have been abandoned and betrayed by their very pastors.
Discomfiture and alarm are growing even among those cardinals who helped elect Bergoglio, to the point that one of them – among the most important ones
[Cardinal Sandri, an Argentine who a close associate of John Paul II and became one of his trusted surrogates in the final months of his illness] – was reported to have said to Bergoglio,
“We elected you to make reforms, not to destroy everything!” [A report, BTW, that no one has denied.]
If we use the criterion of fidelity to Scripture and to the constant magisterium of the Church, which is the primary duty of every pope, then Bergoglo’s pontificate is probably the most disastrous in the bimillennial history of the Church.
Meanwhile, Fr. De Souza, one of the most disillusioned of the early Bergoglio enthusiasts, files another anniversary story pointing out five great paradoxes between what Bergoglio says and what he really does.
Five big surprises from Francis’s papacy
by Fr Raymond de Souza, SJ
March 14, 2018
How to mark the fifth anniversary of a pontificate that is a high-octane news generator, where hardly a fortnight goes by without an unexpected turn of events? Perhaps it’s instructive to go back to March 2013, and see how the surprises came early. Herewith five surprises on the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis.
The media interviews
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires kept the media at a distance, confessing that “interviews are not my forte”. Yet there he was three days after his election at the customary meeting of a new pope with the news media, and he was clearly at ease. He spoke animatedly and, in an early sign of what was to come later, departed freely from his text. It was an almost instantaneous transformation.
Far from keeping his distance, Francis has employed media interviews as his principal method of addressing his flock and the world. In the summer of 2013, his first encyclical was released –
Lumen Fidei – a joint effort with Benedict XVI.
It was never to be spoken of again. The real teaching in 2013 was from the papal plane – “Who am I to judge?” – and in a long interview with Fr Antonio Spadaro. And it has been that way ever since.
A poor Church
It was in the meeting with journalists where the Holy Father explained why he chose the name “Francis”, in honour of il Poverello: “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” He indicated that he would not only preach about the Christian obligation toward the poor, but would live it, seeking out the poor and suffering, both in Rome and abroad. It would become the most admirable part of his pontificate. This was not a departure from his practice in Buenos Aires, but an extension of it.
The surprise was that Francis would not only bring his experience as a “bishop of the slums” to Rome, but also the impact of his only significant experience outside his native Argentina, his time in Germany.
The pope from the poor and for the poor is also the pope, as it were, of the German Church, whether it be advancing the “Kasper proposal” on divorce and remarriage, or rewarding them for their recalcitrance on liturgical translations. The pope is for the poor and with the poor, but the pontificate follows the agenda of the bishops who are rich and have the preoccupations of the rich.
The Jesuits
Before being poor or rich, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is above all a Jesuit of 60 years in the Society. The day after his election he called the general curia of the Jesuits in Rome and asked a flummoxed receptionist whether he could speak to the Father General. But it was not how he called the Jesuits that was startling, but that he called at all.
So divisive was Fr Bergoglio in Argentina while provincial that after his term the Jesuits tried to get rid of him, first in external exile (Germany) and then internal (Córdoba). After he was made a bishop, he was not welcome in Jesuit houses in Argentina and did not visit the generalate when in Rome. From 1992 until the day after his election as pope, Francis lived an estrangement from his own religious family.
That he would now lavish attention upon them, meeting them regularly in Rome and on his foreign visits is a true surprise. And about the Jesuits never is heard a discouraging word. While the Holy Father speaks in withering tones about all kinds of priests, he reserves for his fellow Jesuits only fraternal affirmations.
Tenderness
In his inaugural homily on March 19, Pope Francis declared: “We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness!” He would echo that in Evangelii Gaudium, where he would define the Incarnation as “revolution of tenderness”
(88).
The famously sour-looking bishop in Buenos Aires now visibly delights in children, in the elderly and in the sick, whom he embraces with tenderness.
Yet no pope – or even bishop – so frequently condemns with harsh judgments those he finds lacking, in the Church and in the world. Public humiliations of his most senior collaborators in the Roman Curia are now a pattern.
Diplomats over doctrine
Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga revealed that within days of his election, the Holy Father had decided to appoint Pietro Parolin, a veteran papal diplomat, as his new Secretary of State. Another early decision was to remove Cardinal Mauro Piacenza from the Congregation for the Clergy in favour of the head of the Vatican’s academy for priest diplomats, Beniamino Stella. In the traditional Vatican balance between doctrine and diplomacy, the former – personified by Cardinal Gerhard Müller – have been utterly routed.
In the face of the crisis in Ireland, Pope Benedict XVI appointed his trustworthy aide at the CDF, Charles Brown, as nuncio in Dublin. The diplomatic corps did not care for such a prestigious post being given to an outsider, and
when his five years were up last year, Pope Francis sent him to Albania.
The diplomats are in charge. A pope from the peripheries has become the great champion of the diplomatic corps. Surprises never cease.
For some reason, I am unable to 'cut and paste' what is, in effect, Ross Douthat's 5th anniversary piece on Pope Francis, which can be read on this link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opinion/pope-francis-vatican-disaster.html
Characteristically, Douthat is painfully scrupulous to be as objective as he can (to the point of hedging too much, I think), so the essay - lifted from his forthcoming book on this pontificate, which he himself describes in the first paragraph of this essay as 'not entirely favorable' to the pope - is a mixed bag of praise, though never unqualified, and criticism which is trenchant but never conclusive or closed.
Douthat's idea of objectivity can best be gleaned from the title of the article: "Pope Francis is beloved. His papacy might be a disaster" (to which my quibble is, how is Douthat so certain of his unqualified affirmation that this pope is 'beloved', which implies a consensus I am not sure is there at all? Whereas he uses the subjunctive 'might be a disaster' about the man's papacy?)
And in how he ends this essay:
"It is wise for Francis's Catholic critics to temper our [underlining mine] prose, always, by acknowledging the possibility that we are misled or missing something, and that this story could end with this popular pope proven to be visionary and heroic.
But to choose a path that might have only two destinations - hero or heretic is also an act of presumption, even for a pope. Especially for a pope."
1)After just five years, isn't the evidence overwhelming enough about Bergoglio's anti-Catholicism for any Catholic in his right mind to think "we may be misled or missing something"?
2) How can any pope who is so anti-Catholic - and who has himself said he will perhaps be remembered as "one who split the Church" (maybe Douthat does not recount that line in his book?) - ever be "proven to be visionary and heroic" except to the secular world?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/03/2018 14:32]