Fatima Perspectives #1251
Marco Tosatti reports on the disturbing but entirely unsurprising news that both Cardinal Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider have been subjected by the Vatican to travel bans limiting their ability to address and fortify the faithful in the midst of what one of them, Dr. Douglas Farrow, the subject of my last column, calls “the troubling Bergoglio pontificate.”
As Tosatti notes, Bishop Schneider has been enjoined by the Vatican to “reduce the frequency of his foreign trips.” But there is no written order or any other written directive “on the basis of which the bishop could take some legal initiative, eventually before the Congregation for Bishops or before the Apostolic Signatura…” Instead, Bishop Schneider has been given only the appearance of an order, sotto voce, without any embarrassing paper trail to document what is obviously a plan to silence one of the foremost annoyances to “the Dictator Pope.”
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome bishop?
As for Cardinal Burke, whose freedom of movement cannot legitimately be restricted without any defined grounds for punishment, the Vatican’s action is even more pernicious. Tosatti refers to the “advice given to the American bishops — always orally and through a nuncio — not to invite into their dioceses persons like Cardinal Burke, and, if it is not possible to avoid his presence, not to go to the event…”
In other words, the Vatican “suggests” in a behind-the-scenes whisper that the Church in America shun a Prince of the Church who has committed no offense other than to annoy the current occupant of the Chair of Peter by noting such inconvenient truths as this: “His [the Pope’s] power is at the service of the doctrine of the faith. And thus the Pope does not have the power to change teaching, doctrine.”
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome cardinal?
And yet, as Tosatti further notes, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whose entire ecclesiastical career was marked by homosexual debauchery and the serial predation of young men, was not only relieved of the travel restrictions rightly imposed upon this criminal during the reign of Benedict XVI, but on the contrary was “sent by the Pontiff [Francis] to the Philippines, to Armenia, and acted as trait-d’union [liaison] with Cuba to prepare for the Pope’s visit.” This is not to mention several missions to Beijing during which McCarrick evidently assisted in the negotiation of Francis’ total betrayal of the Underground Church, which, as Cardinal Zen now warns — a warning Francis will of course ignore — is in the process of being snuffed out under a final persecution for which Francis himself effectively issued the warrant when he officially recognized the legitimacy of the Communist Chinese government’s pseudo-church, the Catholic Patriotic Association.
Is it any wonder that an ecclesiastic as prominent as Monsignor Nicola Bux, a former consultant to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope Benedict XVI, has been driven to declare in an interview: “‘More useful’ than a fraternal correction [of Francis] would be to examine the ‘juridical validity’ of Pope Benedict’s XVI’s resignation and ‘whether it is full or partial.’” This news appears at Edward Pentin’s blog — curiously enough, marked “dangerous” and blocked by a red warning screen by Google Chrome. Pentin’s report includes Bux’s view that “Such an ‘in-depth study’ of the resignation… could help to ‘overcome problems that today seem insurmountable to us.’” Meaning the problems arising from a pontificate whose program seems almost literally to attack the Church.
I make no comment on Bux’s astonishing suggestion except to note that only in the midst of a pontificate such as this one — the likes of which the Church has never witnessed — could a cleric of such prominence feel compelled to publish such opinions.
Only God knows how the acute exacerbation of the current ecclesial crisis represented by “the troubling Bergoglio pontificate” will be resolved. This much we can know for certain: what this Pope has wrought to the detriment of the Church will not stand. It will be undone along with all the rest of the calamitous departures from Tradition that Cardinal Ciappi, speaking in light of the Third Secret of Fatima, called an apostasy that “begins at the top.”
Want to read more?
Latest Fatima Perspectives
Fatima Perspectives Archive