Cardinal George Pell shared his suspicions that up to €100m in unregistered cash owned by the Vatican could be hidden in foreign bank accounts at a secret meeting with Australian bankers in London’s financial district in 2016 — but four years later his questions remain unanswered.
In a new book citing confidential letters, documents and transcripts of private conversations between cardinals, Italian investigative journalist Gian Luigi Nuzzi recounts in detail the campaign of intimidation and psychological warfare unleashed by the Vatican’s old guard against attempts by Pope Francis and his German predecessor Benedict XVI to clean up the finances of the Holy See.
The intimidation included a Watergate-style break-in and the theft of a dossier of documents relating to the 1982 murder of the Vatican banker Roberto Calvi just weeks after Pell’s appointment as financial tsar. This was interpreted internally as a Mafia-style warning to busybody outsiders.
Nuzzi’s 835-page tome, The Vatican’s Black Book, documents more than 50 years of financial skulduggery by sections of the Roman curia to avoid proper scrutiny and accounting for the millions in cash donated by Catholics around the world each year.
I have tried to resist the idea that we have an apostate on the see of Peter. It is such a shocking thought. How could it be? But the evidence piles up. The latest is the news that Marxist ex-priest Leonardo Boff is a particular friend of Pope Francis who reads and re-reads his Marxist scribblings. Edward Pentin, in his article below, quotes Boff’s crass rubbishing of St John Paul II and Cardinal/Pope Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Is there a clearer sign of this man’s corrupted mind – and of Francis’s apostasy? Once again we are exposed to the deadly fantasies of a man locked away in a dark theoretical nightmare. I think there must be a special place in hell for unhinged theorists.
Liberation Theologian Leonardo Boff is a Keynote Speaker at Vatican’s ‘Economy of Francesco’ Conference
The controversial former Franciscan priest was disciplined by the Vatican in the 1980s, for disseminating Marxist-oriented ideas that demonstrated ‘a profound misunderstanding of the Catholic faith.’
VATICAN CITY — The controversial Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff will be a keynote speaker at the Economy of Francesco, a three-day international Vatican-organized conference that starts tomorrow aimed at making finance inclusive and sustainable.
A former Franciscan priest, Boff will speak on “socio-ecological responsibility: global view, territorial actions” along with Father Vilson Groh, who works with the poor in the favela (slum) of Florianopolis in southern Brazil.
According to the Economy of Francesco organizers, the Nov. 19-21 conference aims to propose ideas that “move and live for a fairer, more fraternal and sustainable economy and give a soul to the economy of tomorrow.”
Some 2,000 economists and entrepreneurs under the age of 35 from around the world will take part in the live-streamed meeting which will include a 24-hour “marathon” of online exchanges on the second day.
Archbishop Vigano, Pope Francis’s most outspoken critic, recently raised serious questions about the Second Vatican Council. He has joined a long line of critics over the years, with Archbishop Lefebvre of the Society of St Pius X at the forefront. Archbishop Vigano has followed Archbishop Lefebvre in demanding the documents of the Council be jettisoned and the Church start again, with Traditional belief the starting point.
I follow St John Paul II and Benedict XVI in their interpretation of the Council documents. The documents should be read in the light of Tradition – according to the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’. Any apparent ambiguities are resolved by placing them in the teaching of what went before Vatican II. There have been a number of crucial documents following the Council that have corrected the alleged ambiguities.
The collapse of the Church after the Council was due to the adoption of the ‘Spirit of Vatican II’, which ignored the documents and created a whole new church, which was the stated aim of its promoters. The so-called ‘spirit’ prevailed politically, not doctrinally. The overthrow of the Traditional Church was a political victory.
The political forces for the new church were tightly organised before the start of the Council. On the 11th of October 1962, the opening of the Council, they went into operation. Their political manoeuvring and manipulation steamrolled the thoroughly unprepared Traditionalists, those defending the centuries-old Church. Several years’ work in the preparatory documents were tossed out and a new start made, at the head of which were some of the most notorious dissenters in the years following the Council. Indeed, it was only the intervention of Pope St Paul VI at critical points that stopped the Council tipping over the edge into heresy.
My thesis that the Second Vatican Council was primarily a political contest is grounded largely on Fr Ralph Wiltgen’s THE RHINE FLOWs INTO THE TIBER, reissued in 1978 as THE INSIDE STORY OF VATICAN II, and Roberto de Mattei’s magisterial THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL (AN UNWRITTEN STORY). There is also my experience of the Council and its aftermath. I was sixteen in 1962 and nineteen when the 1960s cultural revolution and the student rebellion exploded on the West in 1965. The Council wrapped up in December 1965.
In a very informative discussion of the Council, Patrick Coffin interviews Dr Ralph Martin about his new book A CHURCH IN CRISIS: PATHWAYS FORWARD. The discussion gives depth to my views. Highly recommended.
TIMES OF DISTRESS: A STORY OF UNSWERVING FAITH AND COMMITMENT, Book 1 in my new Conciliar Series, has been released on Amazon in ebook and paperbook formats. To read a sample click below:
