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 N
ew 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.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/09/2018 08:10]