Let’s talk about The Disastrous Pontificate with its author Dominic J. Grigio
Dominic J. Grigio has given his first interview to Gloria.TV
Why did you publish your book under a pen-name?
My natural preference is for my name to be out in the open, to openly stand by my published work, particularly when I’m writing about such a topic. However, when I informed my bishop about my intention to write such a book five years ago, he requested that I publish it anonymously.
You discussed writing the book with your bishop?
Yes, he had told me that if I planned to write more books, he wanted to know about them before they were published. So, before I started researching and writing the book I sent him an outline of what I intended to do.
So your bishop gave you permission to write it?
I’d rather put it this way — once I agreed to publish it anonymously, he didn’t object.
Why the name Dominic J. Grigio?
I always liked Cardinal Ratzinger’s nickname when he was the Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘God's Rottweiler.’ I chose the name Grigio because it was the name St. John Bosco gave his guardian angel. On the occasions when enemies of Don Bosco sent ruffians to kill him, a large dog appeared to fight them off. Don Bosco told friends that it was his guardian angel taking the form of a dog, who he named Grigio, because his hair was grey. I also chose the name Dominic because of its association with dogs. During her pregnancy with St. Dominic, his mother, Blessed Joan of Aza, dreamt a dog leapt from her womb carrying a burning torch in its mouth. The dog ran throughout the world, setting the earth ablaze with its flame—not with destructive fire, but illuminating everything with light and truth. The initial ‘J’ stands for Joseph, who is the Guardian of the Church.
So you see yourself as a guard dog of the Church?
Yes, a Russian Borzoi perhaps. These dogs were good for the hunting of wolves. Every day I pray St. Augustine’s prayer to the Holy Spirit that includes the sentence, ‘Strengthen me, Holy Spirit, that I may protect all that is holy.’
Why do you think it’s your job to protect the Church?
I received the sacrament of confirmation during a time when its primary catechetical image was that it made us soldiers for Christ. We are meant to fight for Christ, to fight for the Church, to fight for the Faith. We all have the vocation to fight for the Faith in our daily lives when we’re tempted to sin, unbelief and apostasy, and to fight against heresy in the Church that threatens the salvation of souls. This responsibility is doubly important for clerics who make a public promise of fidelity to the Faith when they’re ordained. Among other things, I affirmed, ‘With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed. I also firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.’ I made this profession before God, my bishop and the faithful. I take this promise very seriously.
But why do you publicly defend the Faith? Isn’t that the job of the bishops?
This is the crisis we have to confront in the Church — the majority of bishops aren’t publicly safeguarding and expounding the Faith. In countries like Germany, most bishops are doing the opposite — they are, forcing a new, woke religion on the faithful. And those bishops who aren’t actively working against the Faith are mainly silent in the face of heresy and immorality. Only a handful of bishops around the world have defended the Faith, and Pope Francis punished them for it — Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Viganò, Bishop Strickland, Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres. The injustices committed against these bishops were scandalous, but their fellow bishops said nothing.
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, the publisher of your book, said in a recent YouTube video that you’ve also suffered reprisals for upholding the Faith, even that some have tried to get you laicised.
I can’t go into too much detail about this, because it would reveal my identity. However, I can confirm that some in the Church have sought to limit my ministry and incite the imposition of canonical penalties against me. Thankfully, so far, these efforts at laicization have failed. But it has been painful to be subjected to this campaign to destroy my vocation.
The title of your book — The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis’ Rupture from the Magisterium — is provocative. If this is an example of your provocative style, is it a surprise that other clergy are agitating against you?
Many of Christ’s words were designed to provoke strong reactions that can lead to healing change. When did the clergy become so bourgeois, so prissy that they will not speak clearly! There’s all this talk of synodality, parrhesia, dialogue but it becomes just high-sounding words that in reality mean worse than nothing. Instead of open, honest, robust dialogue there is the imposition of heretical groupthink, - a pretense of ‘consultation’ as a cover to impose a new religion on the faithful. Such deceit and power games in the Church are not worthy of successors of the apostles.
You’ve related elsewhere that Cardinal George Pell inspired the title. How so?
One of the things I appreciated about Cardinal George Pell was that he was direct and outspoken. I recall him observing to a Catholic newspaper that Pope Francis was an unusual pope, then immediately going on to mention that there had been between 30 or 40 anti-popes in the history of the Church. Before the 2015 rigged Synod on the Family he hand delivered a letter to Pope Francis signed by 13 cardinals warning him not to attempt to manipulate synod proceeding as he had done during the 2014 synod. It was revealed after Cardinal Pell’s death that he was the author of the Demos memorandum in which he characterized Pope Francis’s pontificate as ‘disastrous, even a catastrophe’, mainly due to Pope Francis’s onslaught against doctrine. I settled on the title The Disastrous Pontificate to show that Cardinal Pell’s prophetic warning still resonates in the Church. Cardinal Pell’s enemies did everything they could to silence and discredit him, even imprisoning him for 13 months for totally ludicrous, bogus allegations. He was exonerated by the highest court in Australia, but his enemies still try to discredit him. I want my book to show that Cardinal Pell still inspires and encourages many of us. In my opinion, Cardinal Pell suffered white martyrdom, and is a confessor of the Faith.
So do you consider Pope Francis an anti-pope?
The status of Jorge Bergoglio is the third rail of ecclesial politics in the Church at present, especially for clergy. Touch it and you’re ‘dead’. We live in a time when canon law has been weaponized and is often not applied justly and impartially. Clergy and religious have been ruthlessly, callously excommunicated for challenging Pope Francis. Excommunication is being imposed not as a ‘medicinal remedy’ to help the victims reconcile with the Church, but to cancel and punish faithful clergy who uphold the Faith. To me, it’s like ecclesial murder. I think I have a duty to myself, and especially to others, to avoid being ‘murdered’ as long as possible. So I’ll make a couple of observations and leave it at that. It took the Church 43 years to condemn Pope Honorius and declare him anathema, and that was for being negligent in suppressing heresy, not for teaching heresy. Pope Honorius was not an anti-pope, he was a bona fide pope. Regarding anti-popes, apart from Novatian, the remaining anti-popes didn’t promulgate heresy but upheld the Catholic Faith. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of the legitimacy of Pope Francis, but leave that to the judgment of a future pope and council.
What do you say to those you accuse you of being disloyal, uncharitable and insubordinate to publicly question Pope Francis’ personal teaching? What’s the difference between you and Protestants?
The issue of obedience in the Church was thrown into crisis during Pope Francis’ pontificate. As Prof. Michael Sirilla observed in his endorsement of my book, ‘how are the faithful to respond when a pope, in non-definitive teaching, appears to impose error or even heresy upon them?’ The super-über-hyperpapalists as caricatured with his usual wit by the English priest Fr. John Hunwicke (RIP), argued that we should accept everything taught by Pope Francis because he held the office of pope, no matter what he said or did. When the faithful pointed out Pope Francis was contradicting the Deposit of Faith the super-über-hyperpapalists either denied it or pretended not to see or hear. This was an abuse of the Catholic understanding of obedience. In the crisis fomented by Pope Francis and his co-conspirators, we must hold onto the supreme law of the Church, the law to which all obedience in the Church is orientated — salus animarum suprema lex, the salvation of souls is the supreme law (Can.1752). As Peter Kwasniewski argues in his invaluable book, True Obedience in the Church [2021], ‘In normal circumstances, ecclesiastical laws create a structure within which the Church’s mission may unfold in an orderly and peaceful way. But there can be situations of anarchy or breakdown, corruption or apostasy, where the ordinary structures become impediments to, not facilitators of, the Church’s mission. In these cases, the voice of conscience dictates that one should do what needs to be done, in prudence and charity, for the achievement of the sovereign law.’ Pope Francis’s disastrous pontificate was such a time of anarchy breakdown, corruption and apostasy. His promulgation of erroneous teaching, such as his advocacy of situation ethics overriding Divine Revelation, is an example of a scandalous obstacle to the Church fulfilling her supreme law, the salvation of souls.
But isn’t this Protestantism — elevating your conscience above the authority of the pope?
The pope only has authority to safeguard and expound the Deposit of Faith, not to promote his own personal opinions that contradict, even repudiate, Divine Revelation. Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the Church’s most eminent canonist, proposed a way for the faithful to respond to this crisis without rejecting the authority of Pope Francis as such. It is imperative that we distinguish between ‘the words of the man who is Pope and the words of the Pope as Vicar of Christ on earth’. In the Middle Ages, the Church spoke of the two bodies of the Pope: the body of the man and the body of the Vicar of Christ. The first body is that of ‘the body of the man who is Pope’, and the second body is the ‘body of the Vicar of Christ.’ Cardinal Burke concludes that ‘Pope Francis has chosen to speak often in his first body, the body of the man who is Pope. In fact, even in documents which, in the past, have represented more solemn teaching, he states that he is not offering magisterial teaching but his own thinking.’ (Burke, R [2017] The Two Bodies of the Pope: Developing Lives of Peace after the Heart of Mary – Remedies for these troubled times of confusion, division and error [Online] Available at: Serve Christ Through the Marian Catechist …). When Pope Francis taught and behaved in conformity to the Deposit of Faith we, as Catholics, had a duty to obey him, but when he gave his personal opinions that diverged from the Church’s doctrine, we not only had the right to ignore him, we had the duty to challenge him.
The duty to challenge a pope?
It’s what St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, exhorted us to do in Summa Theologiae II-II.33.4, reflecting on St. Paul rebuking St. Peter (Gal 2:11-14). He made the argument that subjects have a duty to publicly rebuke their superiors if they endangered the Faith. In his commentary on Galatians, St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes that subjects must not fear to publicly correct prelates if their acts are a ‘danger to the Gospel teaching’, and ‘if their crime is public and verges upon danger to the multitude’. In these circumstances ‘the truth must be preached openly, and the opposite never condoned through fear of scandalizing others.’
You’ve spent the last 5 years researching and writing this book. What what have been the most grievous shortcomings of Francis?
I have a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary who has guided me during key moments of my vocation. The first theological discipline I decided to examine in 2020 was Francis’ Mariology, working on the principle that if you get the Blessed Virgin Mary right, you’ve got a good chance of getting everything else right, and conversely, if you get Our Lady wrong, you may get other important aspects of the Faith wrong. What Francis publicly taught on two occasions, including to very sick children and their families, still upsets me to this day. In 2013 and 2015 he had the audacity to speculate that at the foot of the Cross, witnessing the sufferings of her Son, Our Lady lost faith in God’s promises at the Annunciation, and accused the Archangel Gabriel of being a liar and a deceiver. Francis even made the unsupported claim that John Paul II — the 20th century’s most Marian of popes — was the source of this vile speculation. Though Francis didn’t reference the source of his claim about John Paul II, he may have been misrepresenting a passage from Redemptoris Mater, 18, 'And now, standing at the foot of the Cross, Mary is the witness, humanly speaking, of the complete negation of these words.’ John Paul II did not express the words or sentiment concerning Mary’s thoughts that Francis ascribed to him, ‘Lies! I was deceived!’ In fact John Paul II went on to express the complete opposite, writing, 'How great, how heroic then is the obedience of faith shown by Mary in the face of God's "unsearchable judgments"! How completely she "abandons herself to God" without reserve, offering the full assent of the intellect and the will to him whose "ways are inscrutable" (cf. Rom. 11:33)!’ (RM 18). Bergoglio not only deeply offends and insults the Blessed Virgin Mary, he also committed calumny and detraction against his predecessor.
How many similar errors taught by Francis do you examine in your book?
I cover 17 of Francis’ grave errors in total under 11 theological disciplines, including: Anthropology, Christology, Ecclesiology, Eschatology, Evangelization, Hamartiology, Liturgy, Mariology, Morality, Sacraments, and Soteriology. This is why Prof. Claudio Pierantoni was not exaggerating what he wrote in his endorsement of my book, that we have witnessed ‘what has certainly been the most disastrous pontificate, from the doctrinal point of view, in the entire history of the Catholic Church.’
Is your book not too academic for an ordinary layperson?
I’ve written this book for clergy and laity who knew something was wrong with Francis’ words and actions, and needed their sense of the Faith affirmed and to be provided with the reasons why they were right to be disturbed and alarmed. My book rigorously juxtaposes the claims of Francis with Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium. Its core section, The Errors of Pope Francis, delivers an easy-to-follow doctrinal analysis; elucidated by the exhaustive compendium Sources: The Errors in the Light of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. Together, they expose a profound rupture in the exercise of the papal magisterium. Further, a chronological section, The Questionable Words and Deeds of Pope Francis and His Appointees, exposes the full scope of these aberrations in action between 2013 and 2025: their pervasive influence on the Church and the far-reaching consequences for the faithful. This section is guided by our Lord’s advice, ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them.’ (Mt 7: 15-16).
Where can we buy your book?
It is available as hardback, paperback and e-book and can be purchased directly from the publishing house, Os Justi Press.
osjustipress.com
Also, from the various Amazon sites and major online book retailers
You can purchase Dr. Peter Kwasniewski book, True Obedience in the Church [2021] at
Amazon.com
Your book as an unusual dedication.
Yes, I dedicated my book to ‘the future pope and ecumenical council who will address these errors’. But for this to happen in the future the groundwork must begin now among laity raising their children, some of whom will become future priests, religious, bishops, popes. Not only will this book help you and your children protect yourselves from these grave errors that threaten the salvation of souls, it will ensure that you hand on the authentic Catholic Faith free from the aberrations that Francis sought to impose on us. Also, as Prof. Kwasniewski put it, we need to get this book into the hands of scholars, theologians, pastors, bishops and cardinals so the work can begin to address and redress these dangerous errors. It’s only by beginning to do the groundwork now that a future pope and ecumenical council will emerge sometime in the future. Please consider purchasing a copy of The Disastrous Pontificate for clergy and laity that you think will be open to face the reality of the confusion and intentional disruption inflicted on the Church by Francis.
For more info on my book, my explanatory essay has been published by Rorate Caeli
Dominic J. Grigio, “Why I Wrote The …