THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Pope Francis and one of his pets.

Last year, on the eve of Pope Francis's visit to Chile, the AP released a story that, contrary to what he had been claiming all along for almost three years, Pope Francis was fully aware of a Chilean bishop’s contacts with a notorious priest-abuser when he appointed the bishop to head a Chilean diocese in 2014.

It would be just one of the many lies the pope would be caught at over the next three years as he insisted on the rightness of his decision - not just explicitly exonerating Barros of any fault whatsoever, but insulting those who protested Barros's appointment as stupid patsies taken in by political opponents hostile to Barros, and later calling their protests against Barros 'calumny and lies'. Just a sampling of what the AP revealed in January 2018:

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In January 2015, the Pope provoked outcries when he named Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid to head the Osorno diocese. Bishop Barros had been a close friend of Father Fernando Karadima, a priest convicted on multiple charges of sexual abuse. As public protests against the Barros appointment arose, a group of Chilean bishops wrote to the Pope, urging him to reconsider his choice.

In a January 31, 2015 reply to the Chilean prelates — which has been obtained by the Associated Press — the Pope acknowledged that he was aware of the controversy that would surround the appointment. Going further, the Pontiff told the bishops that during the previous year, his apostolic nuncio in Chile had encouraged Bishop Barros to resign from his duties as bishop for the country’s armed forces, and to take a leave of absence, in order to ease the protests caused by the bishop’s friendship with Karadima.

However Bishop Barros — who has consistently said that he was completely unaware of Karadima’s misconduct — did not resign. Instead he was given the new diocesan assignment in Osorno, in spite of angry public protests. The bishop now says that he was not aware of the Pope’s letter to his fellow bishops.

At the time of the appointment in Osorno, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis was fully briefed on the facts regarding the ties between Bishops Barros and Father Karadima, and was persuaded that the bishop was innocent. The Pontiff said in 2015 that the complaints against Bishop Barros were “unfounded allegations of the leftists,” and expressed regret that public opinion had been “carried away by the garbage everybody says.”

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Now, AP is making a similar revelation about what Bergoglio knew - and how early - about an even closer pet bishop, Mons. Zanchetta The one he called to Rome for a specially created position at the Vatican's Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See, apparently to get Zanchetta out of hot and troubled waters in Argentina in matters that involved both sexual and financial misconduct. Let's see how Tornielli-Ruffini-Gisotti-Monda get Bergoglio out of this thicket of lies.

Ex-deputy to Argentine bishop Zanchetta
says the pope knew of his misdeeds
by Almudena Calatrava, Natacha Pisarenko and Nicole


ORAN, Argentina, January 20, 2019 (AP) — The Vatican received information in 2015 and 2017 that an Argentine bishop close to Pope Francis had taken naked selfies, exhibited “obscene” behavior and had been accused of misconduct with seminarians, his former vicar general told The Associated Press, undermining Vatican claims that allegations of sexual abuse were only made a few months ago.

Francis accepted Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta’s resignation in August 2017, after priests in the remote northern Argentine diocese of Oran complained about his authoritarian rule, and a former vicar, seminary rector and another prelate provided reports to the Vatican alleging abuses of power, inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment of adult seminarians, said the former vicar, the Rev. Juan Jose Manzano.

The scandal over Zanchetta, 54, is the latest to implicate the pope himself as he and the Catholic hierarchy as a whole face an unprecedented crisis of confidence over their mishandling of cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors and misconduct with adults. Francis has summoned church leaders to a summit next month to chart the course forward for the universal church, but his own actions in individual cases are increasingly in the spotlight.

The pope’s decision to allow Zanchetta to resign quietly, and then promote him to a new No. 2 position in one of the Vatican’s most sensitive offices, has raised questions again about whether Francis has been turning a blind eye to the misconduct of his allies or dismissing allegations against them as ideological attacks. [Why 'whether'? There is a well-established pattern by now of Bergoglio's rabid defense of close associates embroiled in sex abuse cases dating back to when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. If anyone but Bergoglio were at the eye of such a cover-up/proactive defense storm, this AP story would have summarized all the other cases that have been brought to light in the past year - the most notorious being that which Der Spiegel highlighted, when Bergoglio had his archdiocese commission and publish a four-volume defense of one of his priests to try and reverse a civilian criminal court's ruling against the protege. But AP refrains from doing so. For all that this is its second expose of Bergoglio on this issue, it still cannot take the devil by the horns and call the horns what they are. As the Argentine papers out it, Bergoglio had his own McCarricks long before McCarrick was publicly exposed at long last.]

Manzano, Zanchetta’s onetime vicar general, or top deputy, said he was one of the diocesan officials who raised the alarm about his boss in 2015 and sent the digital selfies to the Vatican.

In an interview with AP in his St. Cayetano parish in Oran, Manzano said he was one of the three current and former diocesan officials who made a second complaint to the Vatican’s embassy in Buenos Aires in May or June of 2017 “when the situation was much more serious, not just because there had been a question about sexual abuses, but because the diocese was increasingly heading into the abyss.”

“In 2015, we just sent a ‘digital support’ with selfie photos of the previous bishop in obscene or out of place behavior that seemed inappropriate and dangerous,” he told AP in a follow-up email. “It was an alarm that we made to the Holy See via some friendly bishops. The nunciature didn’t intervene directly, but the Holy Father summoned Zanchetta and he justified himself saying that his cellphone had been hacked, and that there were people who were out to damage the image of the pope.”

Francis had named Zanchetta to Oran, a humble city some 1,650 kilometers (1,025 miles) northwest of Buenos Aires in Salta province, in 2013 in one of his first Argentine bishop appointments as pope. He knew Zanchetta well; Zanchetta had been the executive undersecretary of the Argentine bishops conference, which the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio headed for two successive terms, from 2005-2011. [Somewhat like McCarrick and Farrell, in Washington, DC - an association for the same length of time, too.]

And by all indications, they were close. Manzano said Bergoglio had been Zanchetta’s confessor and treated him as a “spiritual son.” [Is a spiritual father who covers up and condones and rewards misdeed a spiritual father at all? Satanically spiritual, perhaps.] All of which could explain why Francis named him to Oran despite complaints about alleged abuses of power when Zanchetta was in charge of economic affairs in his home diocese of Quilmes.

Earlier this month, the Vatican confirmed that the new bishop of Oran had opened a preliminary canonical investigation into Zanchetta for alleged sexual abuse. But Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti stressed in a Jan. 3 statement that the abuse allegations had only emerged at the end of 2018, after Zanchetta’s resignation and nearly a year after Francis created the new position for him as “assessor” of the Vatican’s financial management office. [The Vatican fire brigade must be on permanent call at the Vatican dicastery for communications - and at Casa Santa Marta - to promptly put out all the pants burning from so much lying all the time! By this standard, Jorge Bergoglio ought to be declared a walking fire hazard!]

At the time of his resignation, Zanchetta had only asked Francis to let him leave Oran because he had difficult relations with its priests and was “unable to govern the clergy,” Gisotti said in the statement. “At the time of his resignation there were accusations against him of authoritarianism, but there were no accusations of sexual abuse against him,” the statement said.

Manzano said the Vatican had information about sexually inappropriate behavior starting in 2015, with the naked selfies, and reports of alleged misconduct and harassment in May or June of 2017, though he noted they didn’t constitute formal canonical complaints.

After the 2015 report, Francis summoned Zanchetta to Rome, Manzano said. He returned to Argentina “improved, to the point that no one even investigated how those photos got to Rome.”

But as the months passed, Zanchetta “became more aggressive and took impulsive decisions, manipulating facts, people, influences to reach his goals.” Manzano said Zanchetta started coming to the seminary at all hours, drinking with the seminarians and bringing a seminarian with him whenever he visited a parish, sometimes without asking permission of the rector.

“The rector tried to keep the students in order, being present when the bishop appeared, but the monsignor looked for ways to avoid his attention and to discredit him in front of the young guys,” Manzano told AP in an email. “The bad feeling was aggravated when some of them left the seminary. It was then that the rector investigated and warned of harassment and inappropriate behavior.”

In May or June 2017, Manzano, the rector and another priest presented their concerns to the No. 2 in the Buenos Aires nunciature, Monsignor Vincenzo Turturro, “who moved it forward fabulously,” Manzano said. Manzano said he reported about Zanchetta’s alleged abuses of power with the clergy, while the rector reported about the alleged sexual abuses in the seminary. Manzano said he didn’t know the details of the alleged abuses, but he ruled out any acts of rape.

The pope summoned Zanchetta again in July 2017. Returning home, Zanchetta announced his resignation in a July 29 statement saying he needed immediate treatment for a health problem. [Aha! So Bergoglio was actually complicit on that sudden resignation from Oran - probably suggested and urged it himself!]

Zanchetta spent time in Corrientes before leaving for Spain, where he is believed to have met with one of Francis’s spiritual guides, the Rev. German Arana, a Jesuit to whom Francis had sent another problematic bishop, the Chilean Juan Barros.

Zanchetta largely disappeared from public view until the Vatican, in an official announcement Dec. 19, 2017, said Francis had named him to the new position of “assessor” in APSA, a key administrative department which manages the Holy See’s real estate and financial holdings. While the Vatican’s annual yearbook lists Zanchetta hierarchically as the top deputy to the APSA president, his exact duties were never clear since the job didn’t previously exist.

Zanchetta has not publicly responded to the allegations against him. The Vatican has not provided information when asked, other than to say he is not working while the investigation takes its course. Gisotti, the spokesman, didn’t respond this weekend to a request for comment.

While the Zanchetta case has been cloaked in secrecy, Manzano agreed to speak on-record to AP and a journalist from The Tribune daily of Salta. He sat for an on-camera interview and followed up with an email to explain his own actions and the concerns that sparked them. The other prelates involved were away from Oran and unreachable by telephone.

Manzano defended Francis’s handling of the case, saying the pope himself should be considered a victim of Zanchetta’s “manipulation.”

“There was never any intent to hide anything. There was never any intent of the Holy Father to defend him against anything,” Manzano said. He denied there was any contradiction in the Vatican’s Jan. 3 statement, distinguishing between a report about alleged sexual abuse and a formal complaint. [OK, I understand Manzano may simply want to protect his job - and his chances of rising any farther in the Argentine hierarchy - but isn't it worse for him to imply, as he does here, that Bergoglio is manipulable, and by someone like Zanchetta? Bergoglio is not likely to appreciate that backhand!]

The current bishop of Oran, Bishop Luis Antonio Scozzina, declined to speak to AP on camera, saying he wanted to keep silent until the investigation was in the hands of the Holy See. He has issued a statement urging victims to come forward and provide testimony. But he told AP he didn’t want to create a media circus that might compromise the rights of both victims and accused.

A catechist in the diocese said church leaders had told staff and volunteers not to speak to the media about the allegations at the seminary.

The mother of one seminarian said her son had told her that the allegations of sexual misconduct involving some of his colleagues in the seminary were true. “Unfortunately yes, he told me when I asked him about this,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect her son.

The scandal has taken its toll in Oran, a deeply conservative community near the Bolivian border. Manzano and the others who made the complaints to the Vatican were transferred, but the new bishop has said the transfers were due to pastoral needs, not retaliation. Manzano has said he is happy to be back working as a parish priest.

“I feel a great pain, because as a Christian how can we let these things take place?” asked retiree Hector Jimenez. Teacher Gianina del Valle Chein said the Vatican should have treated Zanchetta like “like any normal person who did something, and not hide him, take him away to somewhere else so that he can keep doing the same thing.”


January 21, 2019
P.S. Marco Tosatti on his blog today provides a brief overview of this pope's record of preferential treatment for bishops and priests who have a checkered past, to say the least. In the interests of journalistic clarity, especially for those who may be reading about this for the first time - and for all those already overwhelmed by the sheer succession and volume of pertinent facts - I have provided parenthetical information to provide the proper context.

A pope with embarrassing friendships
and the protections and favors
he has given these friends
Translated from

January 21, 2019

The least one can say is that the public figure of Papa Bergoglio is embarrassing. Not perhaps so much for his own personality, even if… But for the individuals whom he evidently prefers, protect and defends. Beyond those who actively contributed to his election as pope.

Let’s start with the latter.
o Among them, Cardinal Danneels of Belgium, immortalized next to the new pope in the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica at Bergoglio’s first appearance as pope. Danneels had notoriously covered up for a Belgian bishop who had abused his own nephew for years. And there had been a petition from Belgian lay Catholics requesting that he not be allowed to take part in the 2013 Conclave. But not only was he a key figure in that Conclave. Later, Bergoglio also invited him as one of the pope’s personal appointees to the first ‘family synod’ (what a testimonial for an abuse enabler!).

o Then there were the American cardinals who worked for Bergoglio - starting with McCarrick, and retired Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles [perhaps with the worst known record so far of priest-abuser enablers and pro-active cover-uppers]. Mahony had been ordered to retire from public activities and spend the rest of hhis life in prayer by his successor as Archbishop of Los Angeles, Mons. Jose Gomez, after judicial investigations showed Mahoney had covered up for dozens of priest abusers. Strangely, Gomez so far has not been named cardinal by Bergoglio (perhaps because he belongs to Opus Dei and has no skeletons in his closet).

Just last year, Mahony was named by Bergoglio to represent him at an important event outside the USA, despite Gomez’s ban, but a well-publicized protest from Los Angeles laity kept him home. Still, Mahony is scheduled toaddress the Los Angeles Education Congress in March, a sign of continuing papal favor despite Mahony’s record.

o And then there was – God rest his soul! – the late Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor of London, who was known to have moved an accused serial abuser priest (later found guilty in court) from place to place where he simply went on committing abuses. O’Connor [member of the Sankt Gallen Mafia who had boasted to papal biographer Austin Ivereigh how he and his colleagues had orchestrated Bergoglio’s election] was particularly favored by Bergoglio, who interrupted a Mass being said by Cardinal Mueller (when the latter was still Prefect of the CDF) with an irate telephone call demanding him to refrain from proceeding with an investigation of a sexual abuse case filed against O’Connor by a former woman parishioner.

o Not to mention Cardinal Errazuriz of Chile [who has admitted to years of ignoring accusations made against Chile’s most notorious predator priest, Fernando Karadima, while Errazuriz was Archbishop of Santiago, and whom Bergoglio named to represent Latin America when he first formed his advisory Council of Cardinals back in 2013; Errazuriz was one of 3 cardinals dismissed by the pope from the Council late last year]… I probably have forgotten others.

And you will tell me: The past is past. True, but the problem is that the present – current actuality – does not appear to be different.
o Let us set aside the well-known case of Chilean Bishop Barros whom Bergoglio had insisted on naming a diocesan bishop in Chile despite rightful protests, and all the lies Bergoglio has told about his case.

o Let’s look at the case of Mons. Pineda, who was the righthand man of Cardinal Maradiaga [the ‘vice pope’ of Bergoglio and coordinator of the C9, now reduced to C6] and who was recently [and finally] forced to resign after a letter from seminarians accusing him of sexual abuses was made public. [Yet Pineda’s record was also long known to Bergoglio who had ordered an Argentine bishop in 2017 to investigate for him accusations of financial and sexual misconduct not just by Pineda but in the Archdiocese of Honduras led by Maradiaga.] Pineda had been loving with a male lover in Maradiaga’s own villa in Tegucigalpa. Is it really possible that Maradiaga, finding himself at breakfast with a youthful stranger, never asked Pineda, ‘Who is he?”

o Then, there is Mons. Ricca [manager of Casa Santa Marta and two other Vatican-owned hotels in Rome], whose career in the Vatican diplomatic service was cut short by a public homosexual scandal in Paraguay – but whom Bergoglio nonetheless named ‘prelate’ of the IOR [i.e., its spiritual director, officially, but unofficially Bergoglio’s eyes and ears at the Vatican bank].

o Now we have the case of Mons. Zanchetta, to whom Bergoglio not only provided asylum at the Vatican after abruptly leaving his diocese in Argentina but also created a new position for him at the APSA, which manages the Vatican’s vast real estate and investments patrimony. Despite Zanchetta’s record of financial mismanagement in the two Argentine dioceses he had been assigned to [before which he had been Bergoglio’s secretary at the Argentine bishops’ conference for six years] and, it now turns out, Bergoglio’s knowledge that Zanchetta was embroiled in sexual accusations.

Similar well-publicized accusations have been made against the man Bergoglio recently named to be the new Deputy Secretary of State (Sostituto) [#2 man at the Secretariat], Edgar Pena Parra, a good friend of Mons. Pineda from Honduras, and more especially, of Cardinal Maradiaga. [Those those covering the Vatican - and most commentators on Church affairs - have not made more noise about Parra’s appointment when they should. But this is becomong par for the media course on Bergoglio: they choose to continue covering up for him or glossing over his most egregious misdeeds and lies and/or these have become too frequent and habitual they have decided to simply ignore much of it until circumstances force them to own up.]

But back to the United States and Bergoglio’s pet US bishops.
o Last week, it was reported that Cardinal Farrell, Prefect of the Superdicastery for the Laity, Life and the Family, is being investigated by the Dallas police department for an accusation of sexual abuse while Farrell was Bishop of Dallas. Farrell was McCarrick’s vicar-general [and roommate] in Washington DC for six years, but he has claimed he never even heard rumors of McCarrick’s proclivities.

o Cardinal Wuerl, of course, who had also denied ever having heard even rumors about McCarrick’s sexual misconduct, and has told a series of lies about his own shortcomings in dealing with priestly sex abuse, recently admitted to having said the biggest whopper of all: that he had completely forgotten how in 2004 [when he was only 64 and obviously not suffering from Alzheimer’s] he himself had forwarded to the Nuncio in Washington the report of a financial settlement that had been made with a McCarrick victim. [Wuerl, who succeeded McCarrick as Archbishop of Washington, had been proposed to Bergoglio by McCarrick to replace Cardinal Burke as a US representative in the Congregation for Bishops after Bergoglio chose not to renew Burke’s appointment to that congregation... Moreover, after Wuerl was finally constrained by his negative implication in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report to resign as Archbishop of Washington, Bergoglio accepted the resignation with an effusive letter praising Wuerl for his 'noble' conduct in dealing with priestly sex abuses while keeping him on as Apostolic Administrator of Washington until a new archbishop is named. This was even worse that Bergoglio's preferential treatment for Dario Viganò after the latter sought to instrumentalize Benedict XVI in a false endorsement of Bergoglio as a theologian!]

o Then, there’s Cardinal Tobin of Newark, named a cardinal by Bergoglio at McCarrick’s recommendation, who claims now he never looked into stories of McCarrick’s misconduct when the latter was Archbishop of Newark because he thougt they were ‘incredible’! [Rumors are one thing, but Tobin knew from existing records that the Diocese of Newark, like the Diocese fo Metuchen in New Jersey, where McCarrick had also been bishop, had both made financial settlements with McCarrick victims.] Anyway, this is the Tobin who claimed that the ‘Nighty-night, sweetie’ tweet that leaked out from his cellphone had been addressed to one of his sisters [and who admitted that an Italian actor-model had lived in the archbishop’s residence in Newark for some months until a public disclosure of this fact forced his guest to leave].

With such a clear pattern, it is ridiculous that Cardinal Kasper now claims there is a conspiracy behind all these disclosures of sexual (and financial) misconduct by many of Bergoglio’s pet bishops and cardinals.

And yet, the list – especially where it concerns Bergoglio’s record in Argentina – is far from exhaustive. Why do you think he has never returned to Argentina since he was elected pope [when he has visited almost every country in Latin America]?

What does he fear? That more cases will surface like that of
o Fr. Grassi, sentenced to life in prison by an Argentine court, in whose behalf then Cardinal Bergoglio had commissioned a four-volume defense he sent to the appellate court in behalf of Grassi [the court upheld the verdict, nonetheless]. Something Bergoglio as pope publicly denied to a TV crew [that was filming a 2017 German TV documentary 'The Silence of the Shepherds' on the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis and the role that Pope Francis played in protecting abusive priests when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires] …..

Bergoglio was said to have been Grassi’s ‘spiritual father’, in the same way the pope had been to Zanchetta, and perhaps others we have not cited who have had far from exemplary records of sexual misconduct in Argentina.

o And, most notoriously, there is Bergoglio’s silence since August 26, about McCarrick, what he knew about him and when. About whose record Mons. Viganò said he had informed the pope when he met with him in June 2013, a few months after the Conclave. Despite which Bergoglio went on to make McCarrick his personal representative on many diplomatic missions near and dear to the pope’s heart, as well as his adviser on important appointments regarding US bishops. He won’t [and cannot if he is not to make yet another public lie, this time personally devastating to him] deny Viganò’s claim outright, which implies he did know about McCarrick – so why did he still continue to utilize someone with such a ‘questionable’ record, to say the least?

Since the McCarrick case is not unique in Bergoglio’s record, one must conclude that Bergoglio has a predilection for choosing key men who have a questionable past and skeletons in their closets. Because who would be more obedient and faithful than someone who fears a pope who governs not by the Gospel but by dossiers he can use as a sword of Damocles over his appointees? It is difficult not to suspect this. Yet, Kasper speaks of ‘conspiracy’ against the pope. What nerve!

By chance, we have today Aldo Maria Valli's 8th installment of his blog feature called 'Right Men in the Right Places' ironically citing all those persons who fit in with the Bergoglio ideal of 'Catholic' laymen, priests and bishops...

'Right men in the right places'
Translated from

January 21, 2019

The right man in the right place whom we shall cite first today is a cardinal: Roger Michael Mahony, emeritus Archbishop of Los Angeles, who will be addressing the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, the largest such Catholic congress I the USA, which this year will be on religious education for Catholics, young and adult.

Mahony is scheduled to address intermediate and high school students on religious education, but why are we citing him here? Because, as the reader may recall, six years ago, Mahony was relieved of all public functions after he was found by the American courts to have covered up at least 129 cases of sexual abuses committed by priests in his diocese.

The scandal was such – and the accompanying polemics so devastating – that a nationwide Catholic movement, Catholics United, openly called on Mahony not to attend the 2013 Conclave at which Bergoglio would be elected. Mahony, of course, ignored the protest and attended the Conclave, anyway [as a proud elector, he would openly boast afterwards, of the new pope].

“If a cardinal is deprived of any public function in his diocese, why should he be rewarded with the chance to vote for the next pope?”, the Catholics United petition read. A question which could be made currently relevant this way: “If a pastor has already given proof that he was unable to lead his diocese well, to the point that the diocese itself deprives him of any public role, much less of any decisional responsibility, what authority does he have to address the Cahtolic faithful on religious education?"

One must not forget that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had to pay out at least $9.9 million in reparation for 4 cases of sexual abuse committed by a parish priest, Michael Baker, who admitted his crimes to Mahony, who sent him to a psychologist but still kept him on as a parish priest which enabled Baker to commit more crimes. [And that was just for one priest!]

But at the Los Angeles Education Congress, there will be another presence whom we can consider another right man in the right place. This is Fr. Daniel Horan, a pro-gay activist Franciscan, who has been in the frontline for years in supporting the cause of the so-called LGBTQ community and of radical feminist movements.

An assistant professor of systematic theology and spirituality at the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago [it would have to be there, wouldn't it?], Horan writes for the National Catholic Reporter, and a few years ago when the US Supreme Court nullified the law that prohibited same-sex ‘marriage’ in the USA, Horan wrote that the end of the ban did not affect the foundation of society a single bit but was a ‘step forward towards guaranteeing that all human beings in the United States would receive equal treatment”.
Some Catholic Americans have called Horan ‘a true disgrace for the priesthood’, since he has always been prompt to take anti-Catholic positions and join those who wish to destroy the Catholic Church. [In this respect, what makes him any different from the reigning pope, whose apostasy is far worse because he is the pope???]

I will conclude with our third nominee, who is also a cardinal: Vincent Nichols of the Archdiocese of Westminster (London) who celebrated a Welcome Mass for LGBT Catholics on the Feast of the Lord’s Baptism at the Farm Street church run by the Jesuits, also the headquarters for the LGBT Pastoral Council established by Nichols).

Independent Catholic News reported that in his homily, Nichols said the word ‘family’ includes ‘many diverse models’. Moreover, Nichols claimed that the identity a Christian receives at baptism transcends all his other identities, including his sex. But as a humble ignoramus, I ask the cardinal – Does the Bible not tell us that “God created mankind in his image… male and female he created them” (Gen 1,27)?

Finally, not content with (or perhaps already with a foretaste he would be named a right man in the right place), His Eminence, after the Mass, praised Catholic LGBTQs “not just as persons whom we welcome, but as an identifiable community that has a home in the Church”. [Nichols was an unabashed homosexualist long before James Martin claimed the banner for himself.]

Interesting sidebar from Fr. Hunwicke on how the sexual offenders and enablers in the Church ministry could be punished..

Stigmaticus perfuga:
On branding clerical sex offenders

January 10, 2019

Some readers are unfamiliar with this phrase. It was used by St Edmund Campion in his Rationes Decem [Ten reasons], printed surreptitiously and as surreptitiously put on all the seats to be picked up by Oxford University as it gathered for the Act in June 1581...

It refers to the rumour that John Calvin had been branded after being convicted of homosexual acts. I have no idea whether this is true; I believe the contrary view is that the confusion arose because another inhabitant of Geneva with the same name was thus branded at around the same time. Perhaps an expert could sort this out.

In ancient Rome, runaway slaves, when captured, were branded HFE (Hic Fugitivus Est).

In this country, those convicted of (any) sexual offences against others are required to sign something called the Sex Offenders' Register. This sounds a truly fearful penalty.

But perhaps the branding system would be an even more effective deterrent.

It could be left to the judge or jury to determine whether or not this should be done under a general anaesthetic.

Not really. I'm joking. Who am I to judge?

For some time now, Fr H has been citing brief passages from Blessed John Newman's voluminous writings to comment on current Church affairs. Today it is this...

21 January 2019
From the cardinal's desk


"I am told that some wicked men, not content with their hitherto cruel conduct, are trying to bring in [the] doctrine of inherent infallibility, of which there is not a hint in the definition. Perhaps they would like to go on to call [the Pope] a Vice-God ..."

Preceded yesterday by a longer post:
20 January 2019
The tyranny of the ignorant


Papa Ratzinger tried to establish a correct translation of the word pollon [many] in the Eucharistic Prayer. He was unable to secure compliance from some Episcopal Conferences.

In this reversed-mirror-image pontificate, PF desires a correct translation of me eisenengkes hemas eis peirasmon [lead us not into temptation] to be replaced by a false one. And the Italian Episcopal Conference was not allowed even to have an opinion about whether the old, accurate, translation could be one of the options upon which they voted. They were instructed, from above, as it were, that the only liberty to be allowed to them was between new and erroneous translations.

One crack of an Argentine whip and people, it appears, hardly dare breathe. So much for the proud notion of the 1960s that Bishops are successors of the Apostles rather than mere Vicars of the Roman Pontiff. What price now, Vatican II and all those brave words!

And whatever did happen to the policy of leaving matters to local decision? Only weeks ago, the American bishops were forbidden to discuss the Abuse Crisis ... because the February meeting in the Vatican (with PF sitting there to hear every word that is said and to mark every speaker) will be primed and programmed to decide that "clericalism" is the real problem. It would have been so dangerous to risk any alternative analysis acquiring traction among those several hundred American bishops. Papa knows the answer already, because Papa knows everything.

Our Protestant brethren sometimes forsaw more clearly than Catholics did, where the dangerous papal personality cult could lead us if it ever got into the wrong hands. Fifty years ago, non-Catholics might say things like "Even if the pope were to change the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer, you'd just do as you were told. When he says jump, the only question you people ask is 'Please Sir, how high do we have to jump?'".

"Dearie me No", we would confidently reply in honest innocence. "No pope could possibly dare to go as far as that!!".

No previous pope would have dared to "go as far as that". But, as one of PF's own circle has claimed, PF is free from the constraints of Scripture and Tradition. And it became clear in the debate about 'remarried' divorcees that we now have a Roman Bishop who has no problem whatsoever about setting aside the most explicit recorded words of the Incarnate Second Person of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity. Words sustained by two millennia of Holy Tradition. Truths still authoritatively taught by his immediate predecessor only a decade previously.

And we have a pope whose poor sight lacks the acuity to detect incontinent Sexual Lust when it is staring him right in the face. (Readers of C S Lewis may recollect Fernseed and Elephants.)

The problems of this pontificate have nothing whatsoever to do with Primacy or Infallibility, so wisely defined and so moderately taught by Vatican I. Bergoglianism, as promoted by PF's elite circle, is nothing less than a vulgar and preposterous claim to Divine Omniscience and Divine Omnipotence and Personal Inerrancy.

No wonder PF describes critics and whistle-blowers ... amid much other abuse ... as Judas Iscariot.