The Vatican Has Fallen

I DO NOT AGREE with this author’s conclusions but this idea is going mainstream (Front Page magazine now) and we have to understand how to address this:



https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/francis-first-anti-pope-centuries-frontpagemagcom

Francis: The First Anti-Pope in Centuries?
The case is airtight - and foolproof - that he is.
Fri Aug 5, 2022
It is well known that orthodox minded Catholics have felt considerable consternation with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, known to the world as Pope Francis. On issue after issue, year after year, Catholics have had no shortage of occasions to feel perplexed, alarmed, and alienated – justifiably so.

There’s been his positioning on the issue of remarriage and Holy Communion, for example, or his punitive attacks on the traditional liturgy. Even if non-Catholics may be indifferent to those matters, anyone of good will would also be troubled by his oblivious stance vis-à-vis Islam, his kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party, his subservience to the globalists (whose “new world order” he condones), and so forth.

Let’s also not forget about his accommodation of priestly pederasty during his Argentinian days and, as Pope, his calculating association with and elevation of prelates known for their own similarly egregious deviancy. It is baffling that he gets little to no bad press about this. Our society’s overlords, normally keen to seize upon any occasion to attack Christianity, have rather curiously refrained from pouncing on his – the Pope’s! – record on this front; that they turn a blind eye to this giant bulls-eye is worth pondering. Evidently this Pope is off limits. After all, Bergoglio is their man – not the “Vicar of Christ”, a title he himself has tellingly shelved.

But cataloguing all his misdeeds and deviations from the deposit of faith, and from common sense and common decency, is not my aim here. My intent is to briefly mention a couple of reservations circulating about the legitimacy of Francis’ papacy - and to share a firm conclusion I unexpectedly and belatedly reached about Bergoglio.

Many Catholics have wondered: is Francis a heretic? Several well-respected scholars and religious have formally claimed so. If any Pope were indeed an explicit heretic, he would automatically forfeit the Papacy, and place himself outside the Christian fold. I have some views on the subject, but I wish to explicitly distinguish the question of heresy with the conclusion I have reached about Bergoglio – because it does not depend on any particular issue, or any of his statements or actions.

There is also the matter of the St. Gallen Mafia, a group of high-ranking cardinals vehemently opposed to Benedict XVI, named for the town in Switzerland where they regularly met. According to a recent autobiography by the late Belgian Cardinal Daneels, one of its members, they maneuvered in advance to install Bergoglio. Such manipulative scheming, if true, would automatically invalidate the outcome of the conclave.

Both these issues do appear to be massive red flags but even they may be cast aside, because there is a more germane consideration – one that led me to believe, with moral certainty, that Bergoglio is not really the pope.

He is an anti-pope because Benedict XVI did not validly renounce the Papal office as required by Canon Law – the most recent 1983 version of which he himself helped craft. Therefore there should never have been a conclave following his surprising February 11, 2013 announcement known as the Declaratio. This would be the case even if someone other than Bergoglio had been chosen, and even if Bergoglio hadn't done and said all the things he’s done and said.

That is my conclusion. Here is how I got there.

When trying to make sense of Bergoglio’s ambiguous or problematic positions, I was inclined – like many others – to give him the benefit of the doubt; to focus instead on crediting things he expressed that were consistent with the deposit of faith that any Pope is entrusted to guard and pass on; to allow things to sort themselves out over time.

So I didn’t concern myself with any questions about the legitimacy of the Bergoglian pontificate itself. It never crossed my mind.

As time went by, I heard some chatter here and there about how Bergoglio might actually be an anti-Pope, but still never really gave it any thought. After all, I told myself, aren’t there people out there who say that John Paul II wasn’t really the Pope either? That the Holy See has been vacant since 1958? Wouldn’t it be too dicey to try to navigate that whole minefield?

Other thoughts came to mind: there is so much on the internet, so how can one be sure what is reliable and what is not? And if Bergoglio is an anti-Pope, why hasn’t anyone within the hierarchy been sounding the alarm?

And if I were to engage the issue, wouldn’t I be “schismatic” – at least potentially; that was obviously an uncomfortable thought, but one I came to deem as overly deferential and ultimately evasive. (I suspect a noble but fallible impulse towards loyalty may in part account for why Catholic outlets have tended to steer clear of this matter). After all, if looking into this is somehow un-Catholic, how did previous anti-Popes ever get identified?

So one day I said to myself: I am going to look into it. I am going to read what people who claim Bergoglio is an anti-Pope have to say – and evaluate their arguments. Not their personality or writing style, nor their position within “society” or the Church, but the thrust of their arguments. I wouldn’t have to commit. I could just sit with it all for a while. And so that’s what I did.

First off, I was a bit surprised to learn that immediately after Benedict XVI’s Declaratio (within days), prominent Latinists, canonists, philosophers, theologians and journalists were pointing out significant errors in the Latin text Benedict XVI had delivered. Do such errors always nullify a juridical act? Possibly not. But let’s just say it raised eyebrows even at that time.

Most significantly, though, I was struck by the simplicity and persuasiveness of the contention that, from an objective point of view, Benedict XVI’s Declaratio does not adequately constitute a valid Papal renunciation as stipulated by canon law. If the relevant canonical requirements are not satisfied in the communicated act of renunciation, no other circumstance (e.g. “everyone now accepts Bergoglio as the Pope), event (e.g. a conclave), or rationalization, whenever expounded, can validate it. At its core, it really is that simple.

It is indeed noteworthy (and mortifying) that no one affiliated with the subsequent conclave called for an investigation into this matter at the time. That would have been prudent and indeed necessary, precisely because non-compliance with canonical norms voids such juridical, ecclesiastical acts.

After all, if the consequential shortcomings or ambiguities of Benedict XVI’s Declaratio had been publically enumerated in a transparent effort to clarify his objective, Benedict XVI could have easily responded by issuing a simple, unambiguous renunciation of the Papacy, free of error, which would meet the requirements of canon law. But that never happened.

Read the rest at the link

 

Only the Church can decide/ declare whether a putative pope is actually an antipope. Lay people cannot take it upon themselves to make this determination.

That said, I have the mental reservation that this pope probably is an antipope and that eventually the Church WILL get around to declaring that. That’s the only way I can maintain my own spiritual peace and sanity, given the obvious heresies of this Vatican regime, and the continual promotion of high churchmen who obviously display active same sex attraction.