“It is the opinion of an Argentine official who works in the Vatican and who, logically out of fear, prefers not to be quoted: Bergoglio “is someone who above all knows how to infuse fear“. That is why he has an influence on the Holy See that surprises many.

Although he painstakingly works to impress everyone with an air of sanctimoniousness, austere and mortified, he is a man of mentality of power. And always was.”

 

One of the most curious aspects of this pontificate is the lack of curiosity about his past. I remember the day Benedict XVI was elected. After I caught my breath, I and my co-workers divided up the very large task. I was given the assignment to write about Cardinal Ratzinger’s personal history and my colleague took the theological work. It was an all-day task, and it was a good thing I had been reading a book by Peter Seewald about it that week, and I happened to live in a house full of Ratzinger’s books. Benedict was the first pope to be elected in the modern internet age, and was the first whose life and history was minutely scrutinized from internet archives.

This is normal whenever there is a newly elected official of any kind anywhere. It’s the journalists’ first task, and even if there are language barriers, with improvements in automatic translations, online dictionaries and cross-checking it’s now possible for a writer from anywhere in the world to dig into the history of anyone else. This is a key skill for journalists.

So I have to wonder, why do we still know so little about Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the state of things in his very large and important former diocese? Is it the language thing? Because that’s a bad excuse for journalists who are all familiar with the uses of the various auto-translators.

I’ve been in conversation recently with some people who lived and worked in South America, particularly in Argentina, and the things that they say are “widely,” even commonly known about what kind of man now sits on Peter’s throne. These things would likely curl the hair of most people just coming to these discussions. Even those who are comfortable identifying Francis as a heretic and an enemy of the Faith and of Christ would likely balk at hearing the things I’ve been hearing.

As always with such things, it is of paramount importance to confirm and re-confirm. Just posting rumours, even when we have them directly from the source, is worthless. But, apart from these stories being very much in line with what we are seeing in the news every day, one of the things that makes them plausible is their consistency. I am getting exactly the same stories, the same events, the same characters, the same dates, from different people. More will likely come.

At the moment I can’t share much of that with you, but there is actually quite a lot that was written about him and his style of governance of Buenos Aires that is publicly available and pretty easily accessible. And it paints a terrifying picture of a man totally uninterested in the Catholic religion or the law – whether Canon Law or the Moral Law – a man obsessed with power and utterly ruthless in his methods of gaining it.

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This is by a blogger, Francisco Jose Fernandez De La Cigona, who more or less fits the “conservative” Catholic model, and writes a great deal about the Church in Spain and in the Spanish speaking world.

Here he speaks in 2009 about Bergoglio’s crafty refusal to promote the traditional Mass in B. Aires after Pope Benedict’s Motu Proprio. (Which of course, hardly makes him stand out among his brother bishops around the world. The story in brief is that he allowed only a re-written version of the Mass with many Novus Ordo/vernacular insertions, which the faithful who had been asking for the Mass attended exactly once. He then threw up his hands and said, ‘See? No one wants this,” and cancelled it.)

But note the language this non-Traditionalist uses to describe Cardinal Bergoglio, calling him a “dictator, not for good but for evil” who has salted the earth of the B. Aires diocese.

Of course it would be better if Bergoglio did not impede the Pope’s Motu proprio but [would] that all his defects were just that. In Spain we have excellent bishops in whose dioceses the extraordinary mode [of the Mass] is not celebrated. For I am with them a thousand times more than with one in whose diocese it is celebrated.

I think Bergoglio has other more serious defects. And I will comment on two. The first is that he is the dictator of the Argentine Church and, as such, has imposed an absolutely mediocre hierarchy. That is sinking that Church. He is not a dictator for good but for evil. And that is an immense responsibility of yours. It takes many years to rebuild an evil episcopacy. In Spain we have known not a little of it. Bergoglio is leaving the field of the Argentine Church covered with salt. And that’s how it’s going to be for a long time.

He also has a truly alarming proclivity to relativistic syncretism. Mingling with Jews, Protestants, Freemasons … likes more than a fool a chalk. And people end up thinking that anything goes if the cardinal is worth it.

The photograph with which I illustrate this article, with the cardinal kneeling, receiving a blessing or imposition of hands or what is of an evangelical pastor, with the pleasing presence of Fr. Cantalamessa seems especially miserable. And those acts are the ones that should make you happy as it lends itself to them delighted.

That is what is really serious in the cardinal of Buenos Aires. Hopefully, the only thing that could be blamed on him is that he does not sympathize with the traditional mass.

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Perhaps one of the more obscure but most telling stories comes from about 2010, involving Bergoglio’s efforts to curtail the success of a rival in Paraguay, a story characterized by writers at the time as an example of the way the “Argentina mafia” does things.

The short form is that Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, bishop of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, the country’s second largest city, and one that is nearly on Argentina’s northermost border, tucked into a little corner where the two nations meet Brazil. Livieres was attracting vocations to his seminary from all across Latin America. This was for the same reason most “conservative” and “traditional” bishops do: his seminary was a place where the Catholic religion was taught and priests for it were trained, very much in contrast to the general trends across South America.

This annoyed Bergoglio, the kingpin of the South American Church, particularly since among the “refugees” to Livieres’ seminary were those from his own fief of Buenos Aires. Thus, the destruction of that seminary and/or its bishop became a matter of great interest. To do this, he used his own creature that he placed into the Congregation for Bishops, with oversight for Paraguay, in order to intercept private letters handed directly to Pope Benedict by Livieres. This material was under the papal seal, but was obtained by his man in Rome, and then somehow found its way into the press, and used to discredit Livieres.

What is not included in this article, dated December, 2011, is the coda. One of his early public actions against traditionalists was to have Livieres removed on a pretext. Rorate took it up, saying that it was Livieres’ own fault because he had taken as his Vicar General a priest who had been accused of sexual impropriety in the US. This is as may be, but a look at the background history between Bergoglio and Livieres tells us that however “odious” the priest – the notorious Urrutigoity – this is the flimsiest of figleaves.

If Francis were so interested in having bishops be completely distanced from homosexual abusers, maybe he could explain why Cardinal Danneels took such a prominent place on the Loggia on the night of the Conclave?

And why he was specially invited to take a prominent role at both Synods on the Family?

And what he is doing with a man like Battista Ricca as the head of his household.

And while we’re at it, we can perhaps ask why this man’s priestly faculties, removed under Benedict XVI, were suddenly restored with no real reason given, above a pile of mush-mouthed nonsense about “mercy”.

Anyway, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Urrutigoity thing was a pretty big mistake on Livieres’ part, but that just about any excuse would do for Bergoglio. Apparently Rorate didn’t do a lot of digging into the background, because they would have found out that this is more or less Bergoglio’s MO from way back.

Certainly they didn’t do much about investigating the bishop’s complaint of “ideological persecution.” Certainly the Vatican’s own media release about it didn’t give any hint about the Urrutigoity angle, giving us instead a pretty broad hint that the bishop’s interpretation was the correct one, citing “pastoral reasons” and the “unity of the bishops.” It is now more or less standard procedure for the Bergoglian Vatican to accuse anyone seen as too “conservative” of being “a divisive figure”.

Of course, we will never be able to find out everything because a few months after he was removed from office, the shock (or something) killed the bishop who was suffering from diabetes.

I cite this story now only to give an example of the strange stuff that is widely available on the internet if you know where to look, about Bergoglio’s strange past and even stranger current habits. In short, none of what he is doing now – things like demanding that the Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Malta come to his office in an hour and not tell anyone – were pretty much standard operating procedures for the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires.

And quite frankly, this is precisely the sort of information that would do a great deal to disperse the cloud of confusion and gloom about this pope, had journalists bothered to ask these kinds of questions and done the very little digging into the internet archives it required. A lot of the difficulties people are having with this is reconciling this facade of avuncular “humility” with the monstrous picture that is coming out of the Vatican now. If it could be shown that there is now not that much difference in style or goals between Pope Francis and Cardinal Bergoglio, a lot of confusion would be cleared up.

Our friend Francisco Jose Fernandez De La Cigona takes the matter up from other sources. (I do my best here with auto-translate and dictionaries, so please forgive the roughness. If someone can give me a good translation from Spanish, that would be a help. Fortunately, quite in contrast to similar but more circumlocutory writers in Italy, our friend’s Spanish is very clear.)

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Steps of Pedacchio in the territory of Paraguay

The reading of the post on the presentation of the resignation of the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires at the age of 75 has moved the pen of a Roman friend who sent me two articles and announces to me more about the personality of Bergoglio and his ideas. Mine is no more than this introduction. I did not even know who this Pedachian was, an agent of the cardinal in Rome, it is said. I do, however, have the best references of the Paraguayan bishop mentioned.

It would be good to give some example of how the priest Pedacchio, official of the Congregation for Bishops, informs Cardinal Bergoglio and manipulates according to his indications confidential information – in addition, of course, distorting and creating evidence.

According to reliable sources, some of the most recent activities of the Cardinal of Buenos Aires and his minutants [a minor officer who takes minutes at meetings] in the Curia have concentrated on a bishop of Paraguay. Let us remember that Paraguay is, precisely, the country that Pedacchio is responsible for in the Congregation for Bishops.

By the end of 2008 there had been a very curious leak of highly confidential information. A bishop from Paraguay, Rogelio Livieres, had given the pope a personal and confidential letter during the ad limina visit in which he pointed out some of the pressing problems in the nomination of bishops of that country – one of those bishops had just acceded to the Presidency of the Republic, against all canon law – and then made public what the Paraguayan bishops kept silent: [this bishop] had procreated some children “according to the flesh”, to use the expression of the Scriptures.

That letter, personal and confidential, was leaked to the press of Paraguay to attack that bishop [Livieres] who seeks an improvement in episcopal appointments. With grave detriment, of course, for Monsignor Livieres. No one except Livieres knew the text of that letter in Paraguay. And he had only given a copy to the Pope. Likely, it was the same Pedacchio who, as an officer in charge of Paraguay in the Congregation for Bishops, “filtered” that information under papal secrecy. [NB: this priest, Fabián Pedacchio is now Pope Francis’ private secretary.]

So far, what we have been informed by some friends of Asunción on this subject. But, as we have learned from Argentina and the Holy See, the privileged attention of Cardinal Bergoglio to that Paraguayan bishop has not been wearing away over time. On the contrary, it has only grown.

In Paraguay, Bergoglio is concerned above all that priestly vocations for the Seminary of Ciudad del Este should not advance, a real slap in the progressive progress that some Paraguayan bishops, like Bergoglio himself, encourage.

What is most worrying him is that the ecclesiastical and liturgical renewal that the Pope [Benedict XVI] promotes and which some call “the reform of the reform”, that is to say, the liturgical life conforms to the established by the Second Vatican Council, celebrated in the dynamics Of the “hermeneutics of continuity”. He is concerned that so many new priests are forming in fluid and habitual contact with the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form, something very unusual in Latin America.

Bergoglio’s general strategy would be to discredit the work of ecclesial renewal which Monsignor Livieres has undertaken, not from doctrine or liturgy, where he finds much echo in the Rome of Benedict XVI, but in the procedures of vocational promotion.

In fact, at the general meeting of the OSAR (Organization of Seminars of the Argentine Republic), on November 10, 2011, at the La Plata Seminar (Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina), the theme arose from one of the Superiors of the Seminary of Buenos Aires – allegedly revealing a papal secret – about a particular legislation that the Holy See would be preparing to restrict the “passage” of seminarians from one seminary to another. An example of a case of the Ciudad del Este Seminary, with first and last name, was mentioned as an example. It was said at that meeting that the Holy See “processed” a Paraguayan bishop – read, Monsignor Livieres – for having received a seminarian from Buenos Aires, without having requested the canonical reports, and proceeding to order him deacon, also according to them, without the academic requirements.

Let’s be honest. Although Bergoglio would have asked Livieres for sanctions, it was not necessary to go to Paraguay – the land guarded by Pedacchio – to find supposed examples of these cases. They occur, in fact, often in Argentina itself. And not a few are the seminarians who flee in terror from the Seminary of Buenos Aires – and, indeed, not only for liturgical reasons. To be directly and publicly named to this bishop, who on the other hand tells us he is offering so many good fruits in his land, means that Bergoglio and his informants are at least trying to discredit him, if not ruin him. In addition to the enormous injustice of this attack on the good name of the seminarian, who in fact had no disciplinary sanction and was not accused of anything serious. This was publicly acknowledged at the time by the Rector of the Seminary of Buenos Aires, Fr. Giorgi, who, however, did not even raise a timid voice to defend him [the seminarian].

It did not end there. Weeks later, this subject – again with the name and surname of the “involved” – was addressed at the meeting of the Presbyteral Council of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. Always seeking to affect the good name of bishops who are not well seen by the Cardinal.

Someone has in conscience the obligation to express what so many others are silent, out of fear, or for fear of seeing their career ruined in retaliation.

Everything is known in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires. The penalty is that what emerges from those sources is distorted, if not lies. And then, more than ever, the saying that “from Rome comes what goes to Rome”, since soon after the slander or slander, trained informants like Pedacchio bring “the case” to Rome, to sow infamy or ask for sanctions.

Under the archimanifest signs of humility that he boasts, Bergoglio hides not a few desires of royal power. It has had them since its origins in the Iron Guard and its former relationship with P.2 [Italian Masonic Lodge implicated in the death of Roberto Calvi] (with his proven relationship with Admiral Massera). The Cardinal’s fate is that he was attacked at these points by a journalist named Horacio Verbitzky, who has been discredited because of the manifest visceral hatred he has for the Church in Argentina. Thus, his attack on Bergoglio is said to be biased, even though his research was serious and well documented.

But returning to Bergoglio’s apparent preoccupations with the Seminary of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay, it surprises us so much when one thinks that his own Seminary leaves much to be desired. It is well known that there are seminarians of dubious morality [in it] who usually go spiritually with some of the less advisable auxiliary bishops of the Cardinal.

“The Jesuit”, as the title of his self-commissioned biography says, which neglects both [Bergoglio’s] spiritual life and the formation of his clergy in extinction, does not have the slightest pruritus [“itching”?] at the time of accusation. His specialty is accusing bishops of alleged homosexuality, or affinity with homosexuality, or for protection of homosexuals in their seminaries or clergy. Another of his tools is the accusation of psychiatric problems. He has a team of psychiatrists at his disposal, who prepare the “reports” useful for the case.

It is a pity that Argentina, and to some extent Paraguay and a part of CELAM – where he is not present but thanks to his minutantes – have to pay the consequences of their tricks. Will the next generation of bishops be mortgaged by these campaigns?

Anyone who wants to know the truth about Bergoglio has only to collect and analyze the body of information about the Cardinal – no gossip, no anonymous accusations, but statements made by authorized pastors. He will only encounter the difficulty that, whoever betrays the Pope revealing pontifical secrets, or who slanders and slanders, he is also able to make disappear some folios or the same folders of the reports of the Roman Curia.

After all, anything goes to prove him as the “Chosen One”, as his episcopal motto often explains.

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Now, doesn’t quite a lot of that sound familiar? Especially the accusations of mental problems against anyone who opposes his agenda?

We understand that this is the report of only one small voice. But he is well connected, and well respected as a writer on Church affairs. And everything he says certainly jibes extremely neatly with everything we’ve been seeing for the last four years.

One thing I’m hearing over and over is that Bergoglio operates by the careful gathering, storing and manipulation of information about individuals. Particularly their background and personal habits. And that he uses a carrot-and-stick approach, offering a quiet life and even advancement to those who are willing to play ball. This would certainly explain the large number of people he keeps around him who have obvious moral difficulties, such as the head of his pontifical household, Msgr. Ricca. And it backs up the reports we’ve had of the “climate of fear” in the Vatican, with curial officials saying they believe they are being spied and informed upon.

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Three days after our friend above published this information, he added another that he said came from the same source in Rome. I won’t copy the whole thing right now, but it can be found here.”

It gives some details about the methods that are not very flattering, including the planting of informants in Secretariat of Protocol of the Secretariat of State who report on every detail of the activities of selected individuals of interest.

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From Rome comes what goes to Rome.” Rome depends on its decisions on the information it receives and how it prioritizes the dissemination and processing of that information. He knows very well a great ambitious of power, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Cardinal Bergoglio knows how to tell lies with half-or inflated, or disguised truths, as appropriate in each case. But he does not hesitate, when it becomes necessary, to lie purely and simply.

The truth is that in order to weave his net of power and influence over the bishops and their appointments, as well as the priests and seminaries, he knows how to shoot defamation or slander and, above all, he knows how to steer them. He does so from trained informants who, violating the confidentiality to which the papal secret obliges them, inform him about everything that arrives in Rome on the subjects or persons that interest him. These same informants then “inform” or “digest information” to the Roman authorities, giving priority to the Cardinal’s agendas of manipulation – “El Jesuita”, as the title of a work commissioned to exalt it.

[…]

Of course the Cardinal pays a price for the work of this informant. Because, like every informant, he has the need to appear useful and flatter his employer, so he must often add or even invent in his reports. Apparently, he has received the order to capture how much gossip or “pettegolezzo” arrives by mail or e-mail, even when it arrives without signature, as an anonymous complaint, and print it and present it to the competent authorities to at least sow the suspicions and the distrust towards someone who wants to destroy or at least freeze in his episcopal or priestly work.

[…]

This is how Bergoglio generates a network of lies, intrigue, espionage, mistrust and, more effective than anything, fear. It is the opinion of an Argentine official who works in the Vatican and who, logically out of fear, prefers not to be quoted: Bergoglio “is someone who above all knows how to infuse fear”. That is why it has an influence on the Holy See that surprises many.

Although he painstakingly works to impress everyone with an air of sanctimoniousness, austere and mortified, he is a man of mentality of power. And always was.

Al Cardenal [Bergoglio] is very interested in Latin America. Over the years he built power in CELAM, although recently this has been somewhat diminished because Cardinal Ouellet, precisely the new Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, has become President of the Commission for Latin America – Indeed, this worthy prelate has nothing to do with the intrigues of “The Jesuit.”

But Bergoglio has powerful agents at CELAM. In particular, Bishop Lozano (Gualeguaychú, Argentina) and Archbishop Andrés Stanovnic (Corrientes, Argentina) were extremely “docile” to the Bergoglian positions and for years the candidate who would have liked Cardinal Bergoglio to be imposed as President of CELAM . Although he has not achieved this purpose, he hopes that he will succeed him as the future archbishop of Buenos Aires.

The Cardinal knows that his hours of direct power in this world are numbered. But he works hard and shrewdly so that even after his retirement by age, and even after the Lord has called him to account for his administration, his “plants” and heirs continue to retain in the Church what interests him most: Power.

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The more this pope acts out his South American Dictator power fantasies, however, the less his followers are going to be willing to follow. I do wonder what is going to be the result of the inevitable de-cardinaling of Cardinal Burke. The fallout may not be what he is anticipating.

 

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