THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Marco Tosatti and Antonio Socci have predictably reacted to the 'fake resignation' that has capped the 'fake news' scandal that was Lettergate... But perhaps I like Aldo Maria Valli's 'reaction' best of all -
he published his Introduction to his new book on Benedict XVI (written before Lettergate and published a few days after it), in which he calls him singularly and above all else, 'the pope of Truth'.
His praise of Benedict XVI - and the reasons he cites to support his praise - constitute a distinct sunlit airy contrast to the messy web of dark deceit that has been spun by now to enormous dimensions
by the lord and master of Casa Santa Marta (with profuse apologies to the dear saint whose name is said in vain everytime anyone refers to the Bergoglio Kremlin simply as 'Santa Marta'). Here's
Tosatti first - as his was the shortest and fastest to translate of the 3 articles.

Vigano, Barros and the governing style
of the reigning pope, which comes down to
‘L’Eglise, c’est moi!’
Translated from

March 22, 2018

The Vigano scandal is in some respects worse than that surrounding Mons. Barros, the Chilean bishop promoted by the reigning pope to head the Diocese of Osorno against the winds and tides of opposition from not a few Catholics in the much devastated Church in Chile. But both illustrate the oblique governing style of this Argentine ‘successor of Peter”.

Indeed, the two letters released yesterday – Vigano’s ‘resignation’ and Bergoglio’s ‘reluctant acceptance’ of it – ought to be re-read for what they clearly say about the reign of Bergoglio. [Tosatti proceeds to publish the text of both letters.]

Neither of the two letters makes any reference, not even a veiled one, to errors of misconduct. Neither of the two letters even mentions the man who was most victimized by this squalid episode, Benedict XVI. Who, at the very least, deserved an apology.

He was asked to make a ‘dense and concise’ commentary on the work of persons, among whom were those who had always been publicly hostile to him. [But that is not the point. If it had been just their personal hostility to him as Joseph Ratzinger, he would not have had the outrage he expresses – in his characteristic understated manner – for Huenemann, were it not that the latter had made it his lifework to assault, in general, Catholic teaching on all fronts, and in particular, as preached by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

What does it say of Bergoglio’s advisers who chose the ‘eleven faithful disciples’ who were asked to write about 11 aspects of Bergoglio’s theology, that at least three of them (2 Germans and one Italian) have long been advocating all the taboos the Church has kept through millennia – from women priests and revoking the requirement for priestly celibacy, to same-sex unions, euthanasia and other radical causes dear to Vatican-II progressivists? And surely, Bergoglio knew which men would be asked to be his theological stand-ins, probably approving them with much the same enthusiasm he has been praising the likes of Emma Bonino to high heavens!

By the very choice of such theologians, Bergoglio and his followers are in fact telling the world – since Bergoglio cannot do so directly himself without crossing over the thin technicality that would make him guilty of material heresy – that yes, this pope agrees with these ‘theologians’ in the positions they take against Church teaching, so if they ‘interpret’ Bergoglio’s theology according to their own worldview, then that certainly was a good reason to choose them as his theological surrogates.

Not that those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and minds to think have to be told this at all, but human beings are still so conditioned by hypocrisy as the line of least resistance that everyone pretends they do not know what Bergoglio has been doing to the Church and how fundamentally and irrevocably anti-Catholic he is. Which simply sustains Bergoglio as he goes about realizing the ultimate Satanic fantasy of building his own church on the wreckage he is making out of the one true Church of Christ.]

Back to Benedict [and how Vigano and the Bergoglio Vatican have treated him as nothing more than a tool to be used willynilly for false propaganda]:
- A most courteous letter of refusal from him was made public, even if he marked it ‘personal and confidential’.
- Parts of the letter were used to make him say what he did not say. - A photograph released of his letter was so obviously manipulated to hide the meat of what the letter was about.
- And the Vatican’s much ballyhooed communications chief simply lied when he announced he was reading the entire letter, when in fact he only read those that he cherrypicked to publicize as Benedict XVI’s ‘endorsement’ of Bergoglio.

But there is not a hint at all of this disastrous chain of events in Vigano’s or Bergoglio’s letter. The most ridiculous reaction – allow me this digression – comes from those who say Vigano ‘censored’ the letter to defend Benedict XVI! Defend how? Effrontery knows no limits!

One has to think that the pope was aware of the trap laid out for Benedict XVI. His response to Vigano’s letter [the more one looks at the two letters, the more one thinks both were fabricated, and by the same PR geniuses (maybe Vigano himself wrote both his letter and the pope’s response – that is why we have an exchange of fan letters) who must have thought this would put an end to Lettergate!] does not dissipate this suspicion. Indeed, filled with praises for Vigano as his ‘reply’ is, it makes it all the more plausible to think Bergoglio was in on all this.

One has to think that Vigano’s letter of ‘resignation’, with his singular willingness (strange on the part of someone who is resigning) to continue working at what he does, was written the way Bergoglio would have wanted it to be written. Both letters make this hypothesis plausible.

But if things were indeed as hunky-dory as the two letters make it appear, why then did Vigano ‘resign’? Because of the controversy that ensued? But controversy there will always be, to which one responds, if one is in the right and has nothing to excuse himself for, with clarifications and explanations. [Ummm, rather strange to ask that of a Vatican that has been singularly loath to explain or clarify anything, because calculated ambiguity is precisely what this pope wants to give him some chance of deniability.]

And if errors have been committed, one must man up and admit it. And live with the consequences.

As in the Barros case, this pope is reluctant to admit errors, whether his or those of his trusted associates. Which is not a good sign – it does not show that breadth of spirit one expects of the Successor of Peter. And it connotes a weakness of character, of psychological vulnerability.

The fake resignation following on the fake news about Benedict XVI’s letter simply bear witness to a governance to which one can hardly be sympathetic. So we come to this pope’s oblique style of management.

We have seen that if he does not like the head of an agency or institution and/or the latter is not obsequious and obsequient enough to him, the pope simply goes around him by creating a #2 man who enjoys his full confidence and would serve to keep the #1 man in check. He did this first with the Italian bishops’ conference when Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco was serving out the rest of his second five-year term as CEI president. He did this with Cardinal Sarah at the Congregation for Divine Worship, and to some extent, with Cardinal Mueller when he was still at the CDF. [And don’t be forgetting that he has kept on his own private secretary (who had been his in-house Vatican spy while Bergoglio was in Buenos Aires) in his sinecure at the Congregation for Bishops where, in effect, he looks after the interests of Bergoglio appointees just in case Cardinal Ouellet may not be 100% 'obsequious and obsequient'.

And the creation of the role of ‘counselor’ for Vigano – analogous to that created out of nothing at the APSA for Argentine Bishop Zanchetta – brings this propensity to mind. “So you want Vigano to resign? Fine, now he has resigned, but I’m keeping him in place anyway”, and probably, with more powers than ever, because he has the substantial power of direct relations with the pope without the formal responsibility which (as it has in Lettergate) can hobble him. Telling us in effect, “See how I’ve made fools of you?”

The Church is not a democracy. In the Church, the maximum exercise of true democracy is, as in other institutions, guaranteed by respect for roles and functions. There are laws, there are institutions (such as the Congregations and other offices of the Roman Curia) who, by their work, regulated by laws, guarantee a continuity and uniformity of governance in the Church and for the Church, through the course of time and different popes, and who thereby defend the rights of everyone in the Church, and of the Church herself.

No pope can say, a la Louis XIV, “L’Eglise, c’est moi”. And the personal autocratic style demonstrated in Lettergate and in other cases renders vacuous and empty any proclamations of synodality, etc, trumpeted by the coryphants at Casa Santa Marta.

One last observation: the pope’s letter to Vigano says something about the ‘fusion’ of L’Osservatore Romano. What does it mean? The end to this historical newspaper? [Who knows what Vigano had in mind for it? It appears that through all the consolidation Vigano had been making, the OR alone has continued being outside the jurisdiction of his Secretariat, remaining instead under the Secretariat of State, which, of course, is loath to lose this jurisdiction.]




THE POPE OF TRUTH
Introduction to
'Uno sguardo nella notte:
Ripensando Benedetto XVI'
Translated from

March 22, 2018

I was once asked to describe the most recent pontificates from John XXIII onwards, in one word, one for each pope. What an absurd request, you might say. I agree. Nonetheless, I accepted the challenge. And without stopping to think too much, I answered: “For John XXIII, hope. For Paul VI, suffering. For John Paul I, humility. For John Paul II, courage. And for Benedict XVI, truth.”

When I was asked this, Joseph Ratzinger was still the occupant of Peter’s Chair, so I obviously did not have to describe the [not-yet] pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio in one word. [If this were a classroom situation, I’d be wildly flailing my arms to be asked to speak out: ‘DECEIT’ would be my word. Or DISHONESTY. Or UNTRUTH. The polar opposite at any rate of TRUTH.]

Then Ultime conversazione, Benedict XVI’s post-retirement interview book with Peter Seewald, came out, in which, at a certain point, explaining how he came up with his episcopal motto, Cooperatores Veritatis, the emeritus pope says:

---

For too much time now, the argument of truth has been set aside because it has seemed too ‘big’ for man. No one dares anymore to say, “We possess the truth”, so that even we theologians have increasingly neglected the concept of truth. In the 1970s, those years of struggle, I became ever more aware that if we set truth apart, then what is the object of everything? Truth should always be in the center. It is true we cannot say, “I possess the truth” (because) it is truth that possesses us when it has touched us. And we must seek to be led by this contact.

When I was ordained a bishop, the words from the third Letter of John came to my mind, in which he says that we are all ‘co-workers for the truth”. One can indeed collaborate with Truth, since Truth is a Person. One can be committed to Truth, and seek to have it matter. I thought it was the authentic definition of a theologian’s work – that he who has been touched by Truth, who has seen His face, is now at His service, to work with Him and for Him.

---

So, notwithstanding the numerous texts in which Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope as afterwards, occupied himself with the question of Truth, I think that the reflection above is sufficient to show that coupling the name of Benedict XVI with the word truth is not just possible but mandatory.

Of course, the word truth is highly problematic. Especially in the world today, in which the notion that truth could exist, that it has a name, and that we can encounter it, seems to be held only a few pathetic self-deluders. And from this arise all the difficulties that Benedict XVI’s pontificate had to deal with. Because of this, the gentle Bavarian theologian who became pope had to confront an obstacle course laid out for him, in which every day seemed to bring a new challenge, a new opposition, a new controversy, a new attack.

But it happens that even gentle and shy persons, when put to the test, manage to unsheathe an unsuspected strength, and so it was for Papa Ratzinger. Who, without ever showing agitation, without ever overstepping any line, truly succeeded in being not just a co-worker for the truth, but a witness for the truth. And this is the reason why his many enemies have sought in every way to make things difficult for him, to discredit him, and in many ways, to humiliate him.

In the strategy that was used to wear down Benedict XVI, a central role was played by the so-called pedophilia scandal, which many saw as the ideal blunt weapon to strike at the Pope of truth. Which led to a true persecution, with Joseph Ratzinger as the sacrificial victim. A sequence of events in which we, representatives of the mass media, often behaved like professional hit men.

It is this chain of events that I shall be discussing in the following pages, in which I seek to explain the motivations for the all-out war against Benedict XVI, unveiling the modes of attack, while highlighting the tranquil strength of the Pope of truth, indomitable and refined fighter of that good fight of which the Apostle Paul speaks.

Besides my desire to render homage to the Pope of truth, this book arises from the necessity – of which I am more than convinced – to underscore the timeliness of the great proposition Benedict XVI makes to man in our time. Equally strong, I must say, is yet another desire: to be in his company somehow. Because I miss Benedict XVI.

That is a most touching tribute! I will say again that it is a commentary in itself that Valli chose to mark, as it were, the fifth anniversary of the current pontificate, by publishing a book about the retired pope, the very theme of which strikes at the rotten heart of this pontificate, in which the only 'truth' is whatever it is they tell us is 'true'.



What just blew up with Lettergate?
Not just the 'Vigano case'
but the 'Bergoglio case' as well
Translated from


The clumsy and unprecedented attempt to instrumentalize Benedict XVI – for which neither Bergoglio nor Vigano have apologized – has brought to light the radical rupture between the Argentine pope and the popes who preceded him. It has also made evident the serious crisis of legitimization faced by the incoherent pontificate of this Latin American ‘Successor of Peter’. Having lost his imperial reference points (Obama/Clinton), his pontificate is in great disorder and limping along. There are those in the Roman Curia itself who are starting to be preoccupied about the ulterior damages to the Church that is already prostrate after five years of relentless anti-Catholic bombardment. [Thank you, Mr. Socci. You validate my use of the word I think most appropriate to describe Bergoglio and what he says and does.]
In the commentary that follows, I seek to reconstitute the sensE of the events we now know as Lettergate.

***

Mons. Dario Viganò, the Vatican’s relatively new grand panjandrum for communications, has resigned because of errors he made in trying to use a letter from Benedict XVI as a propaganda tool for Bergoglio. Case resolved? On the contrary! Because from the start it was obvious that this was not just 'a case about Vigano', but above all, ‘a case about Bergoglio'.

The case against Vigano has to do with the dilettantism [I would call it AMATEURISM] whereby the whole operation was managed, with childish expedients and entire paragraphs ‘censored’ from Benedict XVI’s letter (this, in a Vatican that has been pontificating against fake news and partial information). [And who is truly the worst possible and actual pro-active purveyor of fake news and partial information than Bergoglio, with his often-fake because truncated Gospel (a word that literally means 'good news') that he, of course, attributes to Christ? Let’s not even talk about the blasphemy factor here, which magnifies his ‘sin’ exponentially! And yet all but a literal handful of commentators have called him to task at all for falsifying the Word of God in the way he habitually does - which is just one of the many appalling indicators of the three-monkeys syndrome afflicting the media, and thereby public opinion, regarding Bergoglio.]

The case against Bergoglio, much more serious, is the attempt by Bergoglio, through Vigano (who is one of the faithful executors of his will), to obtain an attention-grabbing endorsement from Benedict XVI. In short, he wanted Papa Ratzinger to publicly approve of his, Bergoglio’s ‘revolution’.

So when the emeritus Pope replied to Vigano that he would not be making any such endorsement, and that he did not have the slightest intention to read the booklets of apologia pro Bergoglio – and was moreover indignant that the Vatican should have chosen, to write one of the booklets laudatory of Pope Francis, someone who had in the past virulently attacked not just his pontificate and the preceding one of John Paul II, but Church teaching itself in general - that was a bitter pill to take for those at Casa Santa Marta.

Especially since everyone remembers that recently, Benedict XVI had written a beautiful and substantial Preface to a book by Cardinal Sarah, an endorsement that was enthusiastic.

But to Bergoglio’s emissary, Mons Vigano, Benedict XVI said NO, after the obligatory formulas of courtesy. Bergoglio ought to have acknowledged that NO and ordered Benedict’s letter, which the latter had marked ‘Personal and confidential’, filed away in a drawer.

But it was decided instead to use it for its originally intended purpose. And so, Mons. Vigano told the world that Benedict XVI had given a resounding endorsement of Pope Francis, while attacking his critics and exalting his successor’s ‘theological wisdom’ (though it is known that he reigning pope does not have a doctorate in theology). [That’s not relevant at all. One can be a theologian without ever getting a doctorate. The only thing that matters is whether the content of a person’s theology serves to illuminate and promote an aspect of Church teaching, not to dissent from it and replace it with one’s own ideas.]

Such a reckless operation (to transform a NO into an endorsement, into a YES), could not have been decided by Vigano alone. Only his superior could do that, even if it is true that Bergoglio has always defended him. Therefore in their exchange of letters yesterday, there was neither a criticism of Vigano nor an admission of error by the latter.

Mons. Viganò writes he is resigning only because “much controversy has arisen” [about Lettergate] and that he did not wish to harm Bergoglio’s reforms.

Actually, the Vatican was trying to avoid a true ‘transparency operation’ which would have required the publication as well of Vigano’s January 12 letter to Benedict XVI to solicit his endorsement. The letter would help us understand many things better, both about Francis’s involvement and about the quotebacks lifted by Benedict XVI from Vigano’s letter.

So Vigano’s ‘resignation’, true or false, will not help clear up things about this most disconcerting episode, but only so that ‘everyone please shut up already about Lettergate’.

Because surely the director of all this is Bergoglio himself. That is why in his letter, Vigano does not admit to any mistake, but says he knows he can count on Bergoglio’s esteem, “shown to me even at our latest meeting”. To which Bergoglio replies in effect: “I accept your resignation unwillingly, but only because we have been caught with our hands in the jam jar”. And then proceeds to reward him by saying he must stay and continue his work in the dicastery [for Communication], inventing for him the office of "Counsellor, in order to be able to give his human and professional support to the new prefect.”

Finally, Bergoglio confirms the reform of the Vatican media carried out by Vigano whose work he praises and even his “profound sensus Ecclesiae”. Evidently, he considers it praiseworthy that a NO from Benedict XVI was made to sound as an endorsement of this pope.

He also thinks the 11 booklets written about his theology admirable, though even a trueblue Bergoglian like Luis Badilla, on his para-Vatican website IL SISMOGRAFO, has raised questions about them.

Badilla says that Vigano and the man in charge of LEV, the Vatican publishing house - “considering the gigantic mess made over Benedict XVI’s letter, which was read and widely disseminated with omissions and cuts that are generally unacceptable according to journalistic ethics, and even more insupportable because this was done on a document from the former Bishop of Rome” - are called on to explain not just the manipulation of the letter but another question that is just as delicate.

Badilla asks “how is it possible that LEV" could have included among the theologians called to exalt Papa Bergoglio a name about whom Benedict XVI has expressed himself so strongly?

“How could it have been possible to give a platform to a theologian who founded an organization openly contradicting the papal magisterium? Joseph Ratzinger’s words on the matter are like a millstone, for which the Vatican must bear the consequences."

Of course, Bergoglio sees no negative consequences at all and has merely ignored questions like Badilla’s. Indeed, he only has words of approval and praise for Vigano and his sensus Ecclesiae, and therefore for the whole Lettergate operation.

Which blew up in their faces instead. A very strong blow for the pope from Argentina. No thanks at all to the ‘critical spirit’ of the major Italian newspapers, but rather to the search for the truth by some bloggers [whom I would call, after John the evangelist and Joseph Ratzinger, cooperatores veritatis.]