Sorry, all along I thought I had posted this item in a timely manner...
‘For his Jesuit superior, Bergoglio
was not fit to be made a bishop
An interview with Marcantonio Colonna, author of ‘The Dictator Pope’,
a book that shows Bergoglio’s clear-eyed ascent to power
by Francesco Borgonuovo
Translated from
December 9, 2017
Half the world has by now been made aware of this modest book that the Western media have been juggling the past few days as if it were too hot to handle. In fact, the Italian media have clearly been very guarded. Because it is a scorcher, starting with its title.
The author is ‘Marcantonio Colonna’, a pseudonym adopted from someone who was very real – he was a Viceroy of Italy in the 16th century and was among the heroes of the Battle of Lepanto. The sparse ‘author info’ we are given simply says that the author “graduated from Oxford, and has a profound experience in historical research and its related fields. He has lived in Rome since the start of the Bergoglio Pontificate, and his book is the result of lose contacts with many persons who work in the Vatican, including cardinals and the other principal personages who are cited in the course of the narrative”.
La Verità has succeeded, through e-mail, to reach Colonna who answered some of our questions on his book which has stirred up such interest.
Why did you decide to write this book and why use a pseudonym?
In essence I must say that
the image which the pope has enjoyed in the past five years is one of the most stupefying hoaxes in contemporary history. Everyone who works in the Vatican know the great abyss between that image and reality, and it should not come as a surprise that someone sooner or later would speak the truth.
I wrote the book using the pseudonym of a great military champion of the Church in the 16th century, because anyone who reads the book will see that in no way do I intend it as an attack against the Church. In fact,
my intention is for the Church not to make another error similar to what resulted n Bergoglio’s election. Namely, to have elected as pope a little known cardinal who has shown himself to be completely different from what he had seemed.
And it was necessary for me to use a pseudonym because as I show in the book, Pope Francis avenges himself without pity on those who oppose him. We saw that with the priests who worked at the CDF whom the pope dismissed without cause or due process in October 2016 because he had been told they were critical of him in private.
So why do you say Bergoglio is a dictator?
The word ‘dictator’ means a sovereign who exercises his own personal will in defiance of laws and of justice. Which is something very different from the legal authority that traditionaly belongs to the head of the Catholic Church. I would once again cite Cardinal Mueller who recounts that when he asked the pope to explain why his three staff members were fired without cause, the pope answered:
“I am the pope and I do not have to explain myself to anybody”. [So he's not answerable even to the faithful whom he was elected to lead!] This is not at all the way popes before Bergoglio exercised their authority.
However, in calling Bergoglio a dictator, I also wished to underscore the very close parallels in his style and that of Juan Peron, who was the dictator of Argentina during Bergoglio’s growing-up years. His influence is crucial in explaining Bergoglio’s style. As I say in the book,
he is the ecclesiastical transposition of Juan Peron.
In the book, you recount an episode that is little known about Bergoglio’s past, which involves the Jesuit Fr. Kolvenbach. What is it all about? And how did you come to learn of it?
In 1991, when Jorge Bergoglio was to be named a bishop, it was necessary to get a report from the Superior General of his order,
who was Fr. Kolvenbach at that time. His reply, based on the opinions given to him by other Jesuits who knew Bergoglio, was that
the man was unfit to be named a bishop. The report said Bergoglio lacked psychological balance, that he was a devious character, and that he had been a divisive figure when he was the Jesuit Provincial of Argentina.
This report was sent to the members of the Congregation or Bishops at the time, and it was known to a number of high-ranking prelates in the Church.
[Though obviously no one remembered any of it at all – or if any did, they chose to ignore it - at the time of the 2013 Conclave and the St. Gallen mafia's campaign to get Bergoglio elected.] But Bergoglio, of course, as soon as he became pope, did all he could to keep this fact hidden. And the copy deposited in the order’s archives in Rome simply disappeared.
How did you gather the material for your book?
Many newsmen have commented that my book contains little that is new, and in effect, much of it is based on articles which have been published in the past almost five years since Bergoglio became pope, such as, for example, those by Sandro Magister. What I did was to put all the available material together.
[As many have also acknowledged, seeing the burden of proof assembled together in a book makes a far stronger and indelible impression than one's generally short-term memory of events about Bergoglio which pile up day after day to illustrate and underscore consistent character flaws or shortcomings.]
Nonetheless, I think my book provides an important contribution in Chapter 2 devoted to Bergoglio's past record in Argentina, where he was known as an astute politician and manipulator in the best Peronist tradition. Even here, there is little new for Argentines, but the facts I bring out [from documented Argentine sources] are little known to the rest of the world, if only because of the language barrier. So I was a vehicle for translating them.
As for the revelations in the book about resistance to Bergoglian reforms in the Vatican and the reign of fear that currently exists there, these are familiar to those who work at the Vatican, but it was necessary that someone come out publicly with what is well-known but not publicized.
Through what process did Bergoglio become pope?
Chapter 1 describes the activity of the group of cardinals that one of them [Cardinal Danneels of Belgium] called the 'St. Gallen Mafia' to guarantee the election of Bergoglio at the 2013 conclave. Danneels was so proud of the role they played that he gave out all the names of his colleagues to the authors of a biography published about him in 2015. He apparently ignored the fact that what he disclosed was a serious violation of canon law which prohibits any 'conspiracy' to influence the result of a papal conclave.
[Though unfortunately, the law does not facilitate its own implementation.]
These cardinals had been meeting for years in secret
[in St. Gallen, Switzerland, close to the Italian border] during the years when John Paul II's illness worsened and a new conclave was foreseeable. Their goal was to prevent the election of Joseph Ratzinger, and in 2005, the candidate that they found suitable for their purpose was Bergoglio
[who indeed turned out to be the only challenger to Ratzinger after the first ballot had screened out all other candidates from further consideration]. So when Benedict XVI unexpectedly renounced the pontificate in 2013, they used the opportunity to renew the initiative that had failed eight years earlier.
What do you think of Bergoglio's reforms?
My third chapter is entitled "Reform? What reform?". I describe in detail how reform is completely blocked by powerful curial figures with whom this pope has deliberately allied himself.
- In the first place, curial reform has been frustrated – especially the attempt to reduce the inordinate powers of the Secretariat of State which has now become, under Cardinal Parolibn, more powerful than ever before.
- Two, this pope has not kept his promise to act forcefully against sex-offender priests. There are well-known cases of priests and prelates protected by prominent figures in the Bergoglian Curia.
- Third, the complete inversion of the financial reforms that were intended at the time Cardinal Pell set up the new Secretariat for the Economy. He was obstructed by a small group of cardinals who have no wish to give up the financial controls they hold, and did succeed in defying him.
- The dismissal of Libero Milone, the first-ever Vatican Auditor-General
[an office instituted by the papal decree that created the Secretariat for the Economy], was a victory for those who oppose financial reform at their expense.
Why did it happen? Because the pope – who was elected to reform the Curia
[as everyone made it a point to emphasize again and again in 2013, as though that were the primary problem for the Church, and not the crisis in the faith that had been developing for decades sicne Vatican II] - discovered that he could do this more effectively through corrupt veterans who depend on him to retain their power – and he obeys them blindly.
Have there been reactions from the Holy See to your book?
Obviously, the book is not liked by the powers that be. There were immediate efforts to find out exactly who wrote it. At one point, they thought they had identified him in someone who lives in the UK, whom they threatened on the telephone. What they do not understand is that
the book does not represent just my voice, a solitary voice, but that it expresses the concerns of many persons – inside the Vatican and elsewhere – who simply want the truth to be known.
‘The Dictator Pope’:
A mixture of hearsay and insight
The anonymous book makes unproven claims but
some of its analysis is uncomfortably plausible
by Dan Hitchens
Tuesday, 12 Dec 2017
The easily scandalised should avoid The Dictator Pope, a new e-book by the pseudonymous “Marcantonio Colonna” which has risen to 4th place on Amazon Kindle’s Religion and Spirituality bestseller list. And others should approach its more sensational claims – which I won’t repeat here – with caution.
Everyone who writes about the Vatican hears credible things from good sources which we nevertheless cannot publish, because they do not quite pass the evidence threshold, or
because we would rather not bring the papal office into disrepute. Colonna just goes right ahead. But t
he book is also judiciously written and genuinely insightful.
For instance, he addresses the old puzzle: how does the Pope sound at one moment like a theological “liberal”, at the next like a “conservative”? Colonna’s answer is cynical but not implausible: the Pope belongs to a uniquely Argentine tradition, exemplified by the three-time president Juan Perón. There is an apocryphal story about Perón inducting his nephew into politics:
“He first brought the young man with him when he received a deputation of communists; after hearing their views, he told them, ‘You’re quite right.’ The next day he received a deputation of fascists and replied again to their arguments, ‘You’re quite right.’ Then he asked his nephew what he thought and the young man said, ‘You’ve spoken with two groups with diametrically opposite opinions and you told them both that you agreed with them. This is completely unacceptable.’ Perón replied, ‘You’re quite right too.'”
As that suggests, this is a very political book. Colonna expands on previous claims about a group of cardinals – the “St Gallen mafia”, as one member jokingly called them – who tried to prevent Joseph Ratzinger’s election in 2005. The group was originally led by the late Cardinal Martini, who once claimed
Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical reiterating Church teaching on contraception, had done “serious damage”.
The St Gallen mafia adopted Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as their candidate in 2013, and campaigned for him with all their energy. “With Martini dead, and most of the group coming within a hair of the cut-off age for participation in a conclave, time was running out – they knew this was their last realistic chance,” Colonna writes.
The St Gallen group liked to talk about a more “pastoral” Church, by which, Colonna says, they meant
a desire “to get away from the firm upholding of Catholic moral teaching that had characterised Pope John Paul II and move towards the approach that has since been seen in the synod on the family.”
Colonna describes the family synod of 2014-15 as a series of tactical moves to undermine Church teaching on Communion for the remarried. He quotes Cardinal Wilfred Napier, who said
he had been told by a Vatican insider that the organisers’ plan was “manipulating the synod, engineering it in a certain direction… I asked: ‘But why?’ He said: ‘Because they want a certain result.’”
Pope Francis specially appointed several prelates to the synod who opposed the traditional teaching. Even then,
some ambiguous words about Communion did not receive enough votes from the synod fathers. But they were included in the final report nevertheless.
This material has been presented before, but rarely with such lucidity. Similarly, Colonna’s chapters on the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate and the Knights of Malta make it clearer than ever that, if the conflicts began within those orders, it was Vatican intervention which turned them into catastrophes.
“Fear,” Colonna claims, “is the dominant note” in the Curia. Officials have noted the fate of three officials from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) who were fired. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, then the prefect of the congregation, publicly complained that the Pope “gave no reason” for dismissing this “highly competent” trio.
According to the book, Cardinal Müller asked to discuss the matter with the Pope; but getting an appointment took two or three months, by which time it was too late. This is not untypical, the book says.
“In the past there was a system which provided for each head of a Vatican body to see the Pope regularly, usually twice a month; it was called the
udienza di tabella. This has now been abolished; officials have to make special appointments, and they are often told that the Pope is too busy.”
As Colonna tells it, while earnest churchmen like Cardinal Müller flounder, the Vatican is increasingly dominated by canny ecclesiastical politicians who devote much of their time to preventing important reforms. For instance, the proposed audit from PwC was stopped; anyone who seems serious about rooting out financial corruption – such as Libero Milone, the recently ousted auditor general – quickly runs into trouble. Colonna also makes some unsettling claims about what it is like to work for the Pope, both in today’s Vatican and formerly in Buenos Aires archdiocese.
To repeat,
The Dictator Pope is not for the easily scandalised. But then
it is meant to counterbalance the image presented in the media: the Pope of “No H8”, “Who am I to judge?”, “the leader of the global left”, “a conscience for the world”.
Colonna queries some of the Pope’s much-praised gestures of simplicity, such as his moving into the Vatican guesthouse, instead of the grander papal palace. The book claims the move has cost €2 million, while the palace still has to be maintained.
He also suggests that, despite Pope Francis’s immense popularity with the secular media, he has not won over the Catholic faithful in the same way. Colonna cites official statistics for average attendance at the Pope’s weekly audience in St Peter’s Square:
2013: 51,617
2014: 27,883
2015: 14,818
No figures for 2016 have been published, but Colonna says “they are understood to be under 10,000”.
Unthinking adulation for the Pope can, at times, seem a harmless enough mistake. But amid the present doctrinal crisis, it is not helping anyone. If this book is worth reading, be warned it is as an almost unbearably bitter-tasting medicine.
Let me post another belated translation here. Somehow, it all ties up...
A reader reminds us of
a Marian prophecy in Akita
Translated from
A friend whom I will call ‘Super-Ex’ has written me again – in an earlier post, he had described himself as "ex-Movimento per la Vita, ex- Scienza&Vita, ex-journalist for Avvenire, ex-teacher at a Catholic school" – who fortunately, does not say ‘ex-Catholic’ because he is still and more than ever Catholic. Which, if you think about it, seems like a true miracle in these days, when the ‘witness’ provided by the pope, along with many bishops, prelates, priests and theologians is not what one would consider Christian… But here is what Super-Ex writes:
Dear Tosatti, After my long letter as an 'ex-', above all, of Avvenire, a newspaper that today is unrecognizable, unreadable and intolerable, I thought of sending you a brief excerpt from a book by journalist Andrea Tornielli, once a Ratzingerian of iron, now a Bergoglian of steel, and tomorrow who knows? It is taken from his book Attacco a Ratzinger (Piemme, 2010, p 272), from an apocalyptic chapter focused on many prophecies which foretold an unprecedented crisis in the Church. [The book, co-authored by journalist Paolo Rodari, was actually a defense of Benedict XVI written at the height of the open and determined media campaign to force him to resign over the sexual abuse scandals.]
This passage reminded me of the insults and vulgarities with which some Bergoglian cardinals, Maradiaga above all, have often insulted other cardinals ike Burke and Caffarra for merely raising doctrinal questions to the pope, without ever descending to the personal.
It also reminds me of the inconsistent wanderings of Cardinal Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert Schönborn (I hope I did not drop any of his names), who since March 13, 2013, has been so committed to saying the opposite of what he said and wrote before then [most notably, against the Catechism of the Catholic Church, of which he was the chairman of the editorial board that compiled it in 1985-1992]. Has he converted to Bergoglianism, or to use a word from the prophecy Tornielli quotes, ‘compromised’ himself? Here is what Tornielli wrote:
Explicit references and images about a difficult crisis in the Church are found in the messages from the 1973 Marian apparitions in Akita, Japan, that with the consent of the Vatican, were acknowledged to be supernatural by Mons. John Shojiro Ito, of the diocese of Niigata. Before Mons. Ito made public his approval, he had met in 1988 with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
According to him, on October 13, 1973, anniversary of the Fatima ‘miracle of the sun’, Our Lady appeared to Sister Agnes Sasagawa and said, among other things:
‘The work of the devil will insinuate itself even into the Church in such a way that shall show cardinals opposed to cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me shall be despised and hindered by their brother priests… The Church will be filled with those who accept compromises.’
It is striking to read this today in the light of what is happening in the Church. A veritable photograph…
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/12/2017 04:48]