THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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Did the Pope lie?
The Vatican censors him by 'cleaning up' his statement
on Vigano after Stilum Curiae denounced an omission

May 29, 2019

After nine months Pope Bergoglio has responded, in a certain sense, to the testimony of Archbishop Viganò on the McCarrick case. In the last post we saw how he responded: very weakly, entrenching himself behind an “I don’t remember.” Here are his exact words: “And when he [Viganò] says that he spoke to me on the day that he came – and I don’t remember if he spoke to me about this, whether it’s true or not. I have no idea.”

In response to this, Archbishop Viganò said to me, very simply, that if the Pope says something like this he is lying.

In order to understand why the Archbishop can make such an assertion, it will be good to reread his testimony concerning the days of June 20-23, 2013:

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On the morning of Thursday, June 20, 2013, I went to the Domus Sanctae Marthae, to join my colleagues who were staying there. As soon as I entered the hall I met Cardinal McCarrick, who wore the red-trimmed cassock. I greeted him respectfully as I had always done. He immediately said to me, in a tone somewhere between ambiguous and triumphant: “The Pope received me yesterday, tomorrow I am going to China.”

At the time I knew nothing of his long friendship with Cardinal Bergoglio and of the important part he had played in his recent election, as McCarrick himself would later reveal in a lecture at Villanova University and in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter. Nor had I ever thought of the fact that he had participated in the preliminary meetings of the recent conclave, and of the role he had been able to have as a cardinal elector in the 2005 conclave. Therefore I did not immediately grasp the meaning of the encrypted message that McCarrick had communicated to me, but that would become clear to me in the days immediately following.

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And here is Viganò’s account of his audience with the pope (which lasted forty minutes) on Sunday, June 23, 2013:

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I began the conversation, asking the Pope what he intended to say to me with the words he had addressed to me when I greeted him the previous Friday. And the Pope, in a very different, friendly, almost affectionate tone, said to me: “Yes, the Bishops in the United States must not be ideologized, they must not be right-wing like the Archbishop of Philadelphia, (the Pope did not give me the name of the Archbishop) they must be shepherds; and they must not be left-wing — and he added, raising both arms — and when I say left-wing I mean homosexual.” Of course, the logic of the correlation between being left-wing and being homosexual escaped me, but I added nothing else.

Immediately after, the Pope asked me in a deceitful way: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” I answered him with complete frankness and, if you want, with great naiveté: “Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him. He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”

The Pope did not make the slightest comment about those very grave words of mine and did not show any expression of surprise on his face, as if he had already known the matter for some time, and he immediately changed the subject. But then, what was the Pope’s purpose in asking me that question: “What is Cardinal McCarrick like?” He clearly wanted to find out if I was an ally of McCarrick or not.

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Thus it was Pope Bergoglio who asked Viganò about McCarrick. This detail, and the tone of Viganò’s response, which was so dramatic and serious, takes away credibility from the Pope’s present statement, “I don’t remember.” Besides, if this is so, he should have simply said so on August 26.

But perhaps – and this is what many people think – he wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any documentation that would dramatically contradict what he said.

But is it possible that upon hearing such a dramatic denunciation of McCarrick, the Pope did not bat an eyelash (as Viganò asserts) and [assuming he was learning about this for the first time] didn’t then try to find out for himself? A person who has worked in the Vatican for a long time made this comment:

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Upon hearing what Vigano said, because of the high office to which he was elected and his great moral responsibility to both the Church as well as God, he [the Pope] should have made inquiries [regarding McCarrick] in the appropriate offices, at the very least for the sake of prudence and verification. Did McCarrick do these things or not? And what answers would have been given to him, if not the truth, of which the particulars are now known, as a result of which McCarrick has been reduced to the lay state?”

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Thus, “I don’t remember” is certainly an unbelievable response, as well as an embarrassing one – so embarrassing that it was not reported in the FIRST version of the interview published by Vatican News. That sentence was expunged. Apparently somebody who is an expert in journalism (and we can easily imagine who), realized that that response was very difficult to defend, and thought it would be best to throw it out.

Except that the Vatican decided to restore the omitted statement, after Stilum Curiae noted the discrepancy with the original, which our outstanding colleague Valentina Alazraki kindly pointed out to us. Here are the two versions of the interview which prove what we are saying:

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There are some who continue to think it is true and continue to ask whether you knew about McCarrick or not. In the press of course there are all sorts of things being said.
Pope: Concerning McCarrick I knew nothing, naturally, nothing. I have said it many different times, I did not know anything. You know that I knew nothing about McCarrick, otherwise I could not have kept silent. The motive of my silence was first of all because the proofs were there,[???] [colore-#b200ff] as I said to you, “Judge for yourselves.” It was truly an act of trust. And then also, for the reason that I said to you about Jesus, that in moments of fury one cannot speak, because it’s worse. Everything is going against you. The Lord showed us this way and I follow it."

The pope's reply, now including the statements omitted from the above:
"Concerning McCarrick I knew nothing, naturally, nothing. I have said it many different times, I did not know anything. And when he says that he spoke to me on the day that he came – and I don’t remember if he spoke to me about this, whether it’s true or not. I have no idea! You know that I knew nothing about McCarrick, otherwise I could not have kept silent. The motive of my silence was first of all because the proofs were there, as I said to you, “Judge for yourselves.” It was truly an act of trust. And then also, for the reason that I said to you about Jesus, that in moments of fury one cannot speak, because it’s worse. Everything is going against you. The Lord showed us this way and I follow it."

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[I would strongly qualify Skojec's observations by saying that he refers to the tiny minority of Catholics who regularly follow Vatican affairs and what the pope says and does through the super-abundant information overflow available on the Internet. The observations do not apply at all to the vast majority of Catholics - pewsitters, non-Churchgoers, and merely nominal Catholics alike - for whom whatever their local priest or bishops tell them that 'the pope says' take it to be 'gospel truth' literally.

So no- it is a great illusion and delusion to say outright that "Catholics have begun to see the truth", etc. The world's Catholics, by and large, continue to think Bergoglio is not only everything a pope should be, but based on the media myths created about him from the start - no doubt hammered home in every way by priests and bishops who are acting as mindless puppets literally following, acting out and preaching Bergoglio's every whim and caprice to their hapless parishioners - also the best pope that ever was.

Let us be realistic. Don't ever under-estimate the power of media myths in the Internet world, and the easy gullibility of the man on the street who has absolutely no idea that popes can be bad, if not evil, and certainly anti-Catholic, simply because, since the terrible popes of the Renaissance, Catholics have never before experienced having a truly bad pope and cannot even imagine an anti-Catholic one.


In fact, in another blogpost yesterday, Tosatti fisks Bergoglio's responses on the Vigano question. I have added ny own comments, and in general, I am far more severe on Bergoglio than Tosatti. ("Who am I to judge the pope?" Just an ordinary Catholic who is outspoken about what I perceive to be the reigning pope's deliberate destruction of the one true Church of Christ and of the Catholic faith as it has been professed and practised before he came along in March 2013, and who takes my duty under Canon 212.3 very seriously.)

‘The unfortunate one has answered’:
But it would have been better for him, after all,
to have remained silent on McCarrick
Translated from

May 29, 2019

Dear followers of Stilum Curia:
Never has Alessandro Manzoni’s famous phrase – this time in reference to a male – sounded more true.

[The phrase, “La sventurata rispose”, was the title of a chapter in Manzoni’s classic I Promessi Sposi, in which he describes the wrong-headed response of a cloistered nun of Monza (the unfortunate on)] forced by her father to be a nun at an early age, andwho succumbs to a seductor and thereafter enjoys her sinful life (the nun's response to her misfortune is to bring on more misfortune). In fact, my preferred translation for 'sventurato' or 'sventurata' for either the Pope or the nun of Monza would be 'The disgraced one" - disgraced, not just unfortunate or disgraceful.]

We refer to the interview that the excellent journalist Valentin Alazraki had with the reigning pope, seeking answers to some questions - obviously not all – to clarify obscure points about an embarrassing situation.

We present herewith the part of the interview concerning Mons. Carlo Maria Vigano’s Testimony in August 2018 about what he told Pope Francis in June 2013 regarding the sexual misdeeds of Theodore McCarrick. I ask you to be with me in a precise examination of the pope’s statements on the matter, point by point, and I will propose considerations which I hope will merit your attention. My remarks after each Q&A are in italics.

Alazraki: The issue of McCarrick leads me to another question I wished to take up with you. You asked me during one of your recent trips abroad to read Lettere della tribolazione’ which I have done, so I have fulfilled my assignment.

[It is a book published in Argentina in 1987 with a preface by Bergoglio to an anthology of eight letters written between 1758 and 1831 by two Superiors-General who led the Society of Jesus during the period the Jesuits call ‘the great tribulation’, when the Vatican suppressed the order. La Civilta Cattolica published an Italian edition in January this year, to which Fr. Antonio Spadaro added two letters written by Bergoglio as pope to the Bishops of Chile – one in May 2018 at the start of the meeting he convoked in the Vatican after he finally chose to take the accusations against Mons Juan Barros seriously . having dismissed them for three years as ‘calumny’, and the other, after the meeting, to ‘the People of God” in Chile – plus a third letter, Bergoglio's pro forma letter to the ‘People of God’ in the USA, in August 2018, after the release of the Philadelphia Grand Jury report detailing clerical sex abuse cases investigated in the dioceses of Pennsylvania. Obviously, Spadaro considered these letters major enough to rank with the writings of the Jesuit superiors at the time of the Jesuit suppression.]

Many times, I came across the word ‘silence’ and the explanation of why at times, silence is necessary./b] [I am betting the explanations are by way of self-justification. I hope Alazraki has read Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence - as against random justifications of silence in the pope’s letters - for a wide-ranging, fuller and far more authoritative testimony about the uses of silence!] Don’t laugh, Pope Francis, that’s how it is. You remember when eight months ago, there was this statement by the ex-Nuncio to the USA, Carlo Maria Vigano, who said that he had told you, at an audience shortly after the start of your pontificate, exactly who McCarrick was, and you did nothing. You answered us at the time, “I will not answer. Judge for yourself. I will answer at the right time”. That silence has weighed a lot, because for the media and for many people, when one chooses not to say anything .. well, it’s like between a husband and wife, no? Nag your husband, and when he does not answer, the wife says, “Something must be wrong here’. Why then have you kept silent about this? The time has come for you to answer the question we asked you on the plane – it has been eight months since, then Pope Francis. [Brava, Senora Alazraki!]
PF: Yes, those who have studied Roman law say that silence is a way of speaking. This case of Vigano – I had not read the whole letter, I saw a bit of it, and so I know what it is about.

[When asked about the Vigano testimony last August, his first words were “I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested. Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself... ” [#0026ff] Yes, it did and does speak for itself. It alleged two things that the journalist on the plane asked him specifically to say if they were true: that Vigano spoke to him in June 2013 about McCarrick’s record, and that Benedict XVI had imposed restrictions on McCarrick. There is absolutely no reason, other than fear of self-incrimination and/or perjury, that he could not have answered the question right there!]

So I made a decision: I trust in the honesty of journalists. [Really? Did he not infamously define the media a few months before he was elected pope, as 'shit-lovers and shit-eaters’ (though he used the Latin-derived terms coprophilia and coprophagia), to Andrea Tornielli, no less???] So I told you (the journalists): “Look, you have everything in your hands. Study it [the Vigano testimony] and draw your own conclusions”.

[What a deliberate misdirection! They had Vigano’s allegations, but no access at all to any of the confidential documents he cites to support his statements about McCarrcik’s misdeeds and the sanctions imposed by Benedict.
- The obvious follow-up question would have been, “Well, will the Vatican let us see the documents he cites, so we can judge for ourselves?”
- No one asked that, and the Vatican has been promising it will release the documents as soon as it has completed its ‘investigation’ into Vigano’s allegations, but nothing has come out so far,
- And on May 28, in the wake of the new brouhaha over the Figuereido report and the pope’s TV interview, Cardinal Parolin repeated the promise, but with no timeline.

This is absurd! What ‘investigation’ is even needed to just, for a start, release the documents Vigano has cited , providing the corresponding dates ? The Vatican has never denied these factual and easily verifiable elements of Vigano’s testimony.
- The pope simply had to order to the Secretariat of State, the Congregation for Bishops, the office of the Apostolic Nuncio in Washington, DC, and the Archdiocese of Washington, DC., to make those documents available instantly (redacted as the Vatican sees fit, but at least available).
- We’re not talking here of voluminous archives such as those regarding Pius XII’s wartime activities, just ‘routine’ bureaucratic letters.
- If the Vatican has been footdragging so embarrassingly on these documents, it must be because they cannot afford to make those documents public and thereby corroborate Vigano’s testimony.
- McCarrick has already been dealt the ‘worst’ punishment the Church can impose on him, so it’s not as if he had any reputation that the Vatican felt called upon to ‘safeguard’.
- Moreover, other Vatican officials, including the current Prefect of Bishops, have already acknowledged in writing that the Vatican knew for years about McCarrick’s record and that Benedict XVI did indeed impose sanctions on him in 2008.

That the Vatican has not released any of the documents that journalists need in order to ‘judge for themselves' simply proves Bergoglio’s bad faith In making his sanctimonious and empty challenge to them, a very Bergoglian grandstanding attempt that simply does not play at all.]

Bergoglio: And this you have done, because you did the work, and in this case, it was fantastic! [What work? No one did any investigating; everyone simply branded Vigano a liar and frustrated cardinal-aspirant! That’s the work Bergoglio calls ‘fantastic???]

I have been very careful not to say things which weren’t there [in the testimony?] but which a judge in Milan three or four months later said [about Vigano] when he convicted him.

[Tosatti’s comment: He says he did not even read the whole letter [from Vigano]. And that he simply decided not to answer. Trusting in journalists. Well, he was right. Because apart from a couple of courageous journalists – Anna Mtranga and Cindy Wooden – there was no attempt on the part of the journalists to press the pope on the questions which everyone had. Not on that trip, not on the following trips. Instead, everyone – or almost everyone – launched themselves in support of the character assassination against Vigano undertaken by the team of journalists in the pope’s magic circle.

Everyone joined in the anti-Vigano campaign – from Catholic and para-Catholic media outlets, financed directly or indirectly by the Church (including those outlets who now rejoice at the end to this blog’s day-to-day count of how long Bergoglio has not answered Vigano’s main challenge) to the major newspapers and international news agencies: in short– all the letists and politically correct. Quite rightly, Bergoglio calls their work ‘fantastic’. And I must say that if I were one of them, I would cower in shame like a thief to be described as having done ‘fantastic work’.

As to Vigano's 'conviction' by a court, someone who has spent years working in the Curia pointed out: “Mons Vigano was ordered by a court to return money to a brother who is a priest, who had accused him of using part of their common inheritance from their parents for his own (Carlo Maria’s) benefit. He complied with the order and also paid the accrued interest on the questioned funds. It was a civil case, not a criminal one, and had nothing to do with the McCarrick case”.] [Bergoglio’s intention in bringing it up was obviously to further discredit Vigano as someone who ostensibly ‘cheated’ a brother out of his share of their inheritance, so why should anyone trust the word of a cheat?]

Alazraki: You mean the problem with his family?
Bergoglio: - Of course. I did not say anything because that would have been muck-raking. Let the media find out for themselves. [This was an open and notorious case that had been known to the media for years, since at least 2011, around the time Vigano was still Secretary, or #2 man, at the Vatican Governatorate.]

And you did discover it – you found out all about ‘that world’. My silence was based on my confidence in you. I also told you at the time, “Look at it [Vigano’s testimony on McCarrick], study it – it says everything”. And the result was good – better than if I had tried to explain anything, to defend myself”. [The man is delusional and lives coccooned in self-delusion. That has to rank among Bergoglio’s most embarrassing self-justifications – because incoherent, illogical, and irrelevant in this case, deliberately mixing up Vigano’s family troubles with his denunciation of McCarrick.]

[Tosatti: So now he chooses to sling the mud. And again, he congratulates the journalists - who did not do their job as far as the Vigano testimony was concerned, and have since been constrained, step by step, to acknowledge that Vigano did not invent anything about McCarrick (the Figuereido report is only the most recent vindication of Vigano). I insist, because I believe it, that it would be a good time for many of my colleagues to examine their conscience.]

Bergoglio: Judge for yourself, with the proof in your hands.

[What proof???? Certainly none that would exculpate Bergoglio or the Vatican for having covered up for McCarrick, in effect, all these years. To the contrary, every fact so far unearthed about McCarrick simply reinforces Vigano’s testimony. In this interview, Bergoglio indulges in the fantasy that he never knew anything about McCarrick’s clerical sex abuse record.

In fact, after June 2013 and his meeting with Vigano, Bergoglio didn’t do anything to diminish McCarrick in his privileged position as papal adviser and confidante, in fact reinforcing his role with many favors, until a New York archdiocesan investigation concluded in June 2018 that a young man’s accusation of sexual abuse by McCarrick, a family friend, when he was a teenager, was credible and substantiated. This was quickly followed by public acknowledgement by two dioceses in New Jersey that they had paid substantial amounts to settle sex abuse complaints against McCarrick by ex-seminarians. After that, the floodgates opened to disclose ‘Uncle Ted’s’ long history of misconduct with seminarians for decades, a history that was an open secret to Church officials in the USA and in the Vatican. By which time, Bergoglio had no choice but to go into full hypocritical 'zero tolerance' mode - swiftly ending McCarrick's heretofore impunity in record time!]

Bergoglio: There’s another thing that has always struck me: The silences of Jesus. He always answered, even his enemies when they provoked him – ‘Can such and such be done, or not?” - to see whether he would fall into their trap. In that case, he answered. But when it became a ‘hounding’ on Good Friday, a hounding by the people themselves, he was silent. To the point that Pontius Pilate has to ask, “why don’t you answer me?” Which is to say that, in a climate of being hounded, one cannot answer. And that letter was a hounding, as you yourself have noticed, from the results.

[He is mad. Who exactly is hounding him and about what? No one dared question him again about Vigano until Alazraki did in the recent interview! What ‘results’ is he talking about? Does he consider the successive corroboration of almost everything Vigano said in his three testimonies as a ‘hounding”? Strange attitude towards the truth, but then we all know now that Bergoglio has habitual disregard for the truth. Yet brazenly cites Jesus who is the Truth to justify his falsehoods.]

[Tosatti: He continues to enlist the sympathy and complicity of newsmen. One cannot understand how a single document . [Three, actually, because the first Testimony was followed by two shorter ones] – which he refused to answer - can be called a ‘hounding’, which means repeated episodes. And to liken his refusal to answer a precise and documented question of fact to the silence of Jesus before Pilate – you be the judge whether that is not, at the very least, disrespectful, if not outright blasphemous.

Bergoglio: Some of you have even written that he (Vigano) was paid to do what he did. I don’t know, but I don’t think so. . [YECCH! How hypocritical, to bring up an insinuation few have bothered to even think about, and then to say, “...but I don’t think so!” Has any pope – in the age of audio and video recordings – ever allowed himself to say such hair-raisingly revelatory bits of malice and pettiness before?]

[Tosatti: Yet another insinuation that is objectively negative about the person who makes it. In the same way that what he says at the end is [B truly ‘clerical’ in the worst sense of the word: He brings up a calumny, and then says he does not think it is true - because he cannot prove it.]

Alazraki: There are those who continue to think you must have known about McCarrick and continue to ask why you would not say whether you did or did not know. Obviously, one can read anything in the media.
Bergoglio: Of course, I knew nothing about McCarrick, Nothing. I have said it several times. I knew nothing,, I had no idea at all…

[Tosatti: This statement sounds ‘shameless’. [Tosatti uses the Italian word 'inverecondia’, whose dictionary meaning is ‘shamelessness’, ‘indecency’.]/dim] “Many times”? To whom? When? Where? Alazraki’s courage apparently didn’t rise to making those obvious follow-up questions.] Until this interview, Bergoglio had not said anything in public about the Vigano testimony, nor in private but later reported publicly. This statement is either a pure lie, or the outcome of some mental disequilibrium.]

Bergoglio: And when he says that he spoke to me about it that day that he came to see me... I don’t remember if he spoke to me about this, if it is true or not. I have no idea.

] [Wow! This man does not even lie well!
1) There are two components in the sentence: the second - about whether what was said was ‘true or not’ - implies that something was said! And
2)How can you – even if you were not the pope – not remember if one of your most important nuncios tells you, in response to your fishing question “And how is Cardinal McCarrick?’, “Don’t you know about him? There’s a whole dossier in the Vatican about his questionable record with seminarians and priests?”, and don’t even deny it but simply change the subject?

It might have been more honest to say to Alazraki now, six years after the episode, “He may have mentioned something, but I ignored it”, which is what he apparently did. Or simply, “It was six years ago – I really don’t remember what we talked about”, because even now, he cannot bring himself to say, “We never talked about McCarrick at all!”

Of course, I am taking Vigano’s account as essentially truthful. If he had fabricated the entire story, Bergoglio could have easily said from the start, “The nuncio is lying. We never discussed McCarrick, much less his supposed abuse record.” Human nature and common sense all militate against Bergoglio’s truthfulness in this matter.]

[Tosatti: On this point, Vigano is very clear: The pope is lying. That it was the pope who asked him about McCarrick, to which he got an explosive, harsh and very serious answer. In the face of which he apparently did not bat an eyelash. And now to pretend that he does not remember such dramatic accusations against an important cardinal whom he expressly asked about, is simply not credible. And an offense to the intelligence of his listeners. Always trusting, obviously, in the sympathy and complicity of the media – those of the Vatican, those who are servile to the Vatican and those who have interests to protect.

Bergoglio: You know that I knew nothing about McCarrick [his record of sexual misconduct], otherwise I would not have kept quiet. [Yeah, right!]

[Tosatti: How was anyone supposed to know what he knew about McCarrick when he refused to say anything? In other cases – Grassi, Inzoli, Murphy O’Connor, Barros, Maradiaga, Danneels, Zanchetta, just to cite the known cases – silence and complicity (i.e., covering up for the guilty) has been the pope’s rule of behavior. In October, he promised that all the documents relative to McCarrick in the archives of the Curia would be made public. It is almost June, and the only documents we have seen came from Mons. Figuereido. How can we trust him at all? ]

Bergogio: “The reason for my silence was first of all that the proofs were there. [Proofs of what, and where? Really, sir, you cannot expect us to ‘discern’ what you mean to say if you do not learn to speak as responsible grown-ups do. What is there to ‘discern’ about infantile twaddle, and why would anyone bother?]

Bergoglio: As I told you, ‘Judge for yourselves’. It was really an act of trust [in the media]. [ [AW, SHUT UP ALREADY! His [Un]Holiness does protest too much, and his word, such as it is, gets increasingly debased with every new protestation.]

An then, there’s what I said about Jesus, who in moments of provocation, could not speak because it would make things worse. The Lord has shown us this path, and I am following it.

[Tosatti: What proofs is he talking about? Since August 2018, every new revelation about the McCarrick case has only confirmed much of what Vigano said. And once again, the pope drags Jesus into the picture to justify his silence till now.

But the pope was perhaps right on one thing. That he could not speak about the Mccarrick case because ‘it would have been worse”. This interview he gave during which he finally ‘broke his silence’ on the Vigano Testimony shows it would have been better for him to keep refusing to answer. In order not to bring out in broad daylight the stuff of which his humanity is woven. It is not ‘the pope’, or better, it is not just the pope who is the problem: it’s the man who is the pope, as one of his fellow Jesuits, Fr. Joseph Fessio, pointed out.

[Tosatti ends this post by quoting what Vigano wrote in August about his meeting with the pope and what he claims he told him about McCarrick. This was also quoted in Tosatti’s companion post fully presented in Skojec’s post above.]

Now, we have a fresh example of the many petty and mean ways the Bergoglio Vatican can 'take it out' against anyone who publicly questions the reigning pope, let alone that he co-authored and signed the Open Letter accusing the pope of heresies... I think 'shame' is one of the words lke 'sin' and hell' that is no longer in the lexicon - and worldview - of Bergogliacs.

Pontifical university revokes parking privilege
for 83-year-old British scholar who signed the recent Open Letter-
and Catholic University press in DC now declines to publish
a book of tributes to Prof Rist's scholastic achievements
[C'mon, guys - what's next? Fire him from his job?]
by Dorothy Cummings McLean


ROME, May 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the English-speaking world’s greatest living scholars of classical philosophy was told he has been barred from all Pontifical Universities after he signed an Open Letter along with a number of prominent clergymen and scholars accusing Pope Francis of committing heresy.

Professor John Rist, 83, who converted to Catholicism from agnosticism in 1980, told LifeSiteNews that aafter a short absence from Rome, he had been refused entry into the Augustinian Patristic Institute in Rome where he has been doing academic work for 15 years.

A Pontifical university is an ecclesiastical school which has been established or approved by the Holy See.

“For years I have been allowed to leave a car at the Augustinianum where I am still doing [academic] work,” the scholar told LifeSiteNews by email.

“On May 18, I drove it out, chatting in passing with an old priest friend in the Augustinian curia, telling him I would be away for a week. When I returned on the 25th I drove in through the gate and found the barrier down. I waited for the porter to open it, but nothing happened. So I got out and was told I could not enter the property. Apparently ... this was because some Vatican apparatchik had issued a decree that I [was] now [persona] non grata and … to be forbidden entry to all pontifical universities,” Rist continued. [Of course, despite many instances where Jorge Bergoglio has demonstrated he has a penchant to micromanage some matters himself, I cannot think he ordered the parking ban on Rist, and that it is his mini-me's who are more Bergoglian than Jorge who decided it on their own. But what do I know?]

“Since I had received no previous indication of it ― not even when I had collected the car ― this less than Christian response took me completely by surprise, not least since I had been there a week before, and nothing was said about my being unable to return the car.”

The ban would be a sharp about-face for the pontifical universities: Professor Rist was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical institute Università della Santa Croce in 2002.

It is particularly worrisome to the professor because he was still supervising the PhD work of a student at the Institute, whose doctoral candidature is therefore now in doubt. Professor Rist told LifeSiteNews this morning that he has now been informed by the president of the Augustinianum, Fr. Giuseppe Caruso, O.S.A., that he may no longer supervise this student.

On April 30 Rist and eighteen others signed the Open Letter. The authors state in the letter that they based their charge of the Pope committing heresy on the many examples of the Pontiff embracing positions contrary to the faith, calling attention to seven in particular. The letter writers asked the bishops of the Catholic Church, to whom the open letter is addressed, to "take the steps necessary to deal with the grave situation" of a pope committing this crime.

Rist suspects that he has been barred from the Pontifical Universities because he signed the Open Letter.

When Rist attempted to return the car to the Augustinianum, he exchanged “free and frank” views with priests there but did not succeed in budging the “bureaucratic brick wall,” he said.

“When I was told by one of the priests that he could do nothing about it, I replied that he could just open the barrier - that being greeted with a cynical smile and shaking head: one felt the man of God (an American) was enjoying it.”

After the scholar, who had taught part-time at the Augustinianum as a visiting scholar for 15 years, told his interlocutor that he had nowhere else to leave the car and a plane to catch in four hours, he was told: “That’s your problem, not mine, isn’t it?”

“In the upshot, I left the car in the long-stay car-park at Ciampino [airport] and shall have to return for it before the costs mount too high,” Rist told LifeSiteNews. So far they are estimated to be 400 Euros ($446).

“I feel I have been treated with grotesque discourtesy,” he said.

Another discourtesy to Rist and a number of scholars is the refusal of the Catholic University of America Press to publish his Festschrift, a traditional collection of essays by former students and academic colleagues published to celebrate the achievements of a notable scholar. A Professor Emeritus of the University of Toronto, Rist was the Kurt Pritzl, O.P. Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America (CUA) from 2012 to 2014.

LifeSiteNews has seen a communication explaining that Catholic University of America Press had rejected the book because the CUA Committee and Press believed it is “imprudent, at this time, to publish a volume” in Rist’s honor.

Scholars who had contributed essays in the collection included Catholics and non-Catholics, philosophers, ethicists, and theologians, scholars hailing from the Catholic University of America; Ave Maria University; Trinity College, Dublin; Yale University; the University of Toronto; Boston College; the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas; the University of Georgia, and a number of Italian universities.

Dr. Trevor Lipscombe, the Director of the CUA Press, confirmed that the Festschrift had been rejected.

“I can confirm that it was indeed declined for publication by the Catholic University of America Press,” Lipscombe told LifeSiteNews by email.

“The deliberations of the editorial committee are confidential, so I am not at liberty to go into any further detail. But I will add that, at that same meeting, another project to which Professor Rist was a contributor was approved, and we are proud to be the publisher of his book Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presupposition of Ethics." Rist’s acclaimed Plato’s Moral Realism was published in 2012.

Rist was one of the contributors to the book Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, a volume prepared prior to the Extraordinary Synod of the Family. Although it was sent to the members of the Synod through the Vatican Post Office, most of the copies never reached them, having been intercepted by the general secretary, Cardinal Baldisseri. Rist had contributed an essay on “Divorce and Remarriage in the Early Church”.

Among Rist’s fellow essayists in the suppressed Remaining in the Truth of Christ were Cardinals Burke, Brandmüller, Caffarra, and Müller, as well as Archbishop Cyril Vasil’, SJ. The other scholar of Rist’s stature who signed the Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church was Fr. Aidan Nicholls, O.P.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/05/2019 14:12]