Because The World Needs All The Help It Can Get

That’s why I’m presenting these brief views on the conclave currently going on in Vatican City. Back in 2013 I was still taking a serious degree of interest in these goings on. Not so much anymore. I have very low expectations, but there’s always room for a miracle. I have no specific predictions to offer, but I will speculate that

• There will not be another Jesuit elected, and

• One way or another the conclave will attempt to reject another jumped up third world dictator.

• The difficulty for a positive outcome is the shallowness of most of the participants. Still …

Here are a few brief speculative shorts from Damian Thompson to start with—mostly in a foreboding tone:

In the secular world, this week’s media reports about Parolin, Tagle and Prevost would sink their candidacies. But how well informed are the cardinal electors?

… it will take lots of energy and many years to repair the damage caused by the irresponsible and self-indulgent pontificate of Francis, a truly terrible pope.

I can’t shake off a horrible suspicion that years of subtle campaigning will still pay off for Parolin, a hollow man with an atrocious record but an amazing network of contacts.

In a more substantive vein, 1 Peter 5 has carried an interview with Henry Sire. I’ll copy in representative excerpts, but for those who don’t know, this is who Sire is:

Henry J. A. Sire (born 1949) is a Spanish-born British historian, Catholic author and a former Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. He was suspended and later expelled from the Order.

Life

Sire, who has French ancestry, was born in Barcelona in the mid-twentieth century. He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read history. Sire joined the Order of Malta in 2001 and was contracted to write a history of the Order. He lived in the Order's headquarters in Rome from 2013 to 2017. The history was published in 2016. He has established himself as a traditionalist Catholic, critical of innovations which he considers discordant with the Church's tradition and consistent teaching.

In 2015, Sire published Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition, a highly critical approach to the Second Vatican Council and its effects on the Catholic Church, in which he concludes: "The fact needs to be clearly stated: the Second Vatican Council was a betrayal of the Church's faith. Its consequences cannot be put right until that betrayal has been recognized and reversed."

In 2017, under the pen-name "Marcantonio Colonna", Sire published (initially as a self-publication) a book entitled The Dictator Pope, in which he criticized the pontificate of Pope Francis. Sire revealed his authorship in March 2018, one month before the publication of the revised and updated English edition, resulting in his suspension from the Order of Malta.

I can’t say I agree with all of Sire’s views—calling oneself a “traditionalist” is subject to highly contentious interpretations, much like claiming to want to MAGA. I offer these excerpts simply to draw attention to major issues:

Francis’s Legacy and the Path Forward: Interview with Henry Sire

…

… Why do you think synods were utilized so much by Pope Francis?

HS: The synods were the way in which Pope Francis tried to give an appearance of democracy to his autocratic rule. In fact, from the start they were rigged … so as to be controlled by cliques to move the Church’s teaching in the direction ordained by the controllers. In any case, the synods are irrelevant since Pope Francis did whatever he pleased.

Various Vatican documents have connected the Synod on Synodality (2021-2024) to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Similarly, Francis connected his pontificate to Vatican II in various ways. What connections do you see between the Council, the Synod, and Francis? Do you agree with fellow historian Robert de Mattei that “Pope Francis represents Vatican II in action”?

HS: Professor de Mattei is absolutely right. The Second Vatican Council was taken by Pope Paul VI in a direction whose destination could only be the dissolution of the Church, and that is what was delivered under Pope Francis. In particular, the Council struck a serious blow at the understanding of the Catholic priesthood, with a resulting catastrophic decline in the clergy in every area, from their theological learning to their moral character. Only a Church with such a debased priesthood could have produced a pope like Jorge Bergoglio.

With regard to Paul, it’s necessary to understand that he was in spirit a politician—he was as a person obsessed with secular politics, but was a shallow man as a thinker. The spirit of Paul’s Vatican 2 was one of bringing Christian faith into the world of secular politics in the modern ideological sense—any deeper Christian sense of politics as rooted in human nature had clearly been lost.

While I disagree with much of what de Mattei has to say in the linked article, he does offer some illuminating reflections:

THE PANORAMA WE have before us is one of ruins: moral ruins, political ruins, economic ruins; the Church’s ruins, the ruins of the whole of society.

In this scene, a silent shadow moves about the ruins like a ghost: Josef Ratzinger, who after his resignation from the papacy, wished to keep the title of Pope (Emeritus) and the name of Benedict XVI.

…

The pontificate of Pope Francis certainly represents a leap forward in the process of the Church’s auto-demolition, following the Second Vatican Council. However, this is only a stage, the last one of this process: we could say that it represents its ripe fruit.

The essence of the Second Vatican Council was the triumph of pastoral theology over doctrine, the transformation of pastoral theology into a theology of praxis, the application of the philosophy of Marxist practice to the life of the Church. For the Communists, the true philosopher is not Karl Marx, the Revolution’s theorist, but Lenin who carried out the Revolution, proving Marx’s thought. For Neo-Modernists, the true theologian is not Karl Rahner, the principal ideologue of the revolution in the Church, but Pope Francis, who is fulfilling this revolution, putting Rahner’s thought into pastoral practice. There is no rupture, therefore, between the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis, but historical continuity. Pope Francis represents Vatican II in action.

Benedict XVI’s renunciation of the papacy represents a historic rupture, but in another sense. For starters, it is the first papal resignation in history which has taken place without clear reasons, without valid motives. It is a gratuitous, arbitrary act, rendered contradictory by the way in which it took place. ... This is a historic novelty without precedent. Benedict XVI is the one responsible for it.

But the gesture of Benedict XVI also has a symbolic reach, which must be understood in its deepest sense.

…

Benedict XVI’s act of papal resignation was not only an admission of impotence, but a gesture of surrender. It was an act that expressed the defeatist spirit of the churchmen of our time, whose main sin isn’t moral corruption but cowardice. I say this with all the respect due to the figure of Benedict XVI, and with a certain compassion for this elder, made to watch the historical consequences of his decision by Providence. But we must have the courage to say it, if we do not want to be accomplices to this spirit of resignation and lack of confidence in the supernatural aid of Grace, which sadly today has spread among many Catholics, faced with an advancing revolutionary course.

In the next excerpt from de Mattei we need to understand that while the proponents of the Nouvelle Théologie claimed to advocate a return to the sources of Christian thought in the Fathers, in fact they were Neomodernists who used that claim as a cover for their Hegelian sourced ideology. There is, in fact, some justice in their claim—in that Hegel was a product of the Platonic stream of thought that has dominated the West and which was seminal in the thought of the Fathers. My view is that the reception of Platonism into Christian thought was the original sin of the Church that has led us to where we are now:

…

“The end of the Constantinian era”[8] was announced by one of the fathers of the Nouvelle Théologie, the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, in a famous conference held in 1961. Chenu aspired to free the Church from what he defined as the three decisive factors of her compromise with power: the primacy of Roman law, the Greek-Roman logos, and the liturgical language of Latin.[9] The Church no longer had to face the problem of Christianizing the world but accepting its secularist development, breaking every tie with Tradition, renewing her doctrine through (pastoral) praxis.

The modernists deny the social reign of Christ because they deny the visible dimension of the Church. They want to liquidate the structures of the Church, they want a fluid church in a fluid society, like a river which runs in a perpetual flow. According to Father Roger-Thomas Calmel: “Doctrines, rites, and the interior life are subjected to a process of such a radical and refined liquefaction which no longer allows for a distinction between Catholics and non-Catholics. Because ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the definite and the definitive are considered outdated, the question arises as to what it is that impedes non-Christian religions to also be part of the new universal church, constantly updated by ecumenical interpretations.”[10].

The fluid church requires fluid Catholics without an identity, without a mission to carry out, incapable of fighting: because fighting means resistance, resistance means staying, staying means being: and Tradition is nothing else than being which opposes itself to becoming which flows toward the sea of nothingness. Tradition is that which is stable in the perennial becoming of things, and that which is unchangeable in a changing world, and it is such because it has in itself a reflection of eternity.

The anti-Christian revolution which spans history, hates being in all its expressions, and counteracts it with the denial of all that in reality is stable, permanent, and objective, beginning with human nature, dissolved by gender theory.

So, the ruinous horizon before us is an expression of this revolutionary process, it is the result of a process of liquefying society and the Church, carried out by agents of chaos, by societies which would like to recreate or destroy the world. This route, however, leads to an inevitable defeat of the revolution.

Back to Sire.

As you note in your book, “Pope Francis was elected with the expectation that he would reform the [Roman] Curia….”[2] …

HS: ... What matters is the men who are appointed, and in that respect what Francis did was turn the Curia into the court of a South American dictator. The harm starts at the top with Cardinal Parolin, who has brought to a peak the domination of the Curia by the Secretariat of State, and thus its secularisation in outlook, which is one of the evil legacies of Paul VI’s “reforms”. It continued with Cardinal Parolin’s deputy, Archbishop Peña Parra, a man who was dismissed from his first seminary for suspect morals and who exemplifies the worst corruption of the Latin American Church. Then there is the notorious case of Archbishop Peña Parra’s predecessor, Cardinal Becciu, who has been convicted of financial corruption while in office. In fact, the real scandal is not Cardinal Becciu’s alleged crime but the show trial to which he was subjected, in which Pope Francis changed the legal rules three times to ensure his conviction. Vatican justice under Francis was as gross a travesty as in Soviet Russia, and that has its impact on the whole Curia. The clergy in Rome lived under a reign of terror in which only the sycophants and the morally corrupt thrived.

Another area of reform that Pope Francis vowed to address concerned the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, something for which the Church must have “zero tolerance,” as he said. Do you think his efforts in that area were successful?

HS: Again, I must query the premise of efforts being successful. It is not a case of “zero tolerance” but of zero efforts. This is an area in which Jorge Bergoglio was the worst offender, and his record of protecting clerical sexual offenders in Argentina was one which, if made known, would have ended the career of any bishop. ...

…

Prior to The Dictator Pope, you wrote in another work that “it is unclear whether, under the reign of Pope Francis, Catholic doctrine will be preserved or compromised,” and further, “The question for the future of the Church is thus not so much what Pope Francis does as who his successor will be.”[3] Now that his pontificate has mercifully concluded, how do you see the prospects of electing a good pope to follow him?

HS: The death of Francis has revealed the bubble which the Bergoglians have been living in. They did not realise how totally their position was dependent on the whim of one man, and their bubble has suddenly burst. The Pope was two months in dying, and yet his death caught them unprepared. An outstanding symptom of this has been the collapse of their supposed strong man, Cardinal Parolin. A big factor conducing to the upset was that Francis spent over five weeks in the hospital, and during that time many cardinals started flocking into Rome, thus foiling his policy throughout his pontificate of keeping them from meeting each other. The result has been that the great men of Benedict XVI’s pontificate, Cardinals Sarah, Burke and Müller, whom Francis treated with contempt, have come into their own, and the new cardinals have been able to speak to them and judge them for what they are. There are two very promising signs for this conclave: one is that strong criticisms of Francis’s reign are being voiced openly, and the other is that the cardinals are showing themselves willing to listen. The spectre that many have seen for years, of a claque of Bergoglio yes-men gathering to elect a Bergoglio clone, is proving illusory. The yes-men are there, but they have lost their power base. That is not to say that I foresee a smooth conclave or a happy outcome. Unless the cardinals listen to the Holy Spirit, the danger of electing a weak nonentity as a compromise candidate is very grave.

In closing, what are a few of the most pressing issues facing the next pope? What are some practical steps he can take (assuming, please God, that a virtuous man is elected) to begin correcting the damaging done during the Francis pontificate?

HS: There are so many urgent needs that it is impossible to answer this question briefly. One of the most pressing needs is to tackle the heretical schism currently being pushed in Germany. For this, the key must be to recognise the fraud that the German hierarchy are promoting and to meet it head-on. ...

Another enormous need is simply to re-evangelise the Church after the sixty-year chasm of ignorance and bad catechesis caused by the Second Vatican Council. A major area is that of sexuality and the Christian ideal of the family, where we need to recover a whole anthropology which has been lost in a surrender to modern paganism. But the need is across the whole range of Catholic teaching. A cardinal remarked recently that he saw only ten figures in the present conclave who could be regarded as theologians, and that ignorance is representative of the worldwide Church. The new pope will need to re-educate the entire world clergy in basic Catholic doctrine, an enormous task.