Monthly Archives: November 2021

Australia, Books, Catholic Church, Culture, Law, Media, The Left

The tide has turned against Louise Milligan and David Marr

Gerard Henderson’s book on the George Pell pile-on exposes journalism’s mob mentality

CHRIS MITCHELL, The Australian, 29 November 2021

The release last Wednesday of a book about the media pursuit of Cardinal George Pell, and an earlier decision by The Washington Post to re-edit slabs of its own reporting about Donald Trump and Russia, highlight the need for journalists to reflect on how they are being used by their own sources.

The Post probably helped restore some lost credibility after special counsel John Durham on November 4 charged Igor Danchenko with lying to the FBI over the now notorious Christopher Steele dossier. The Steele material was used by the FBI, the Democrats and the media to build the Russian collusion case against Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

This column had outed links between the dossier and the Democrats, but ABC’s Four Corners went on to run a three-part special on the subject in June 2018, grandly called The Story of the Century.

Four Corners has never corrected the record. Nor has it admitted one of its main sources, former Barack Obama security chief James Clapper, had already told a secret congressional hearing he had seen no credible evidence against Trump even before he told Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson the opposite.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Culture, Literature

Graham Greene’s ‘OUR MAN IN HAVANA – A review

I have just finished reading OUR MAN IN HAVANA. Greene may have called it one of his lighter pieces, but I found it up to his high standard. Much of it is an amusing, entertaining satire on the British intelligence community – MI6 – but through the satire comes glimpses of human nature at it darkest. The reader never knows exactly what Captain Segura does, other than being chief of police, but he is clearly quite a disgusting piece of work.

*****

Moral Imagination in Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”

Michael De Sapio, The Imaginative Conservative, October 22nd, 2021

Graham Greene classified his 1958 novel “Our Man in Havana” as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments,” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance.

In his book The Catholic Writer Today, Dana Gioia examines the religious character of the celebrated “Catholic fiction” of the mid-20th century. He writes, “Surprisingly little Catholic imaginative literature is explicitly religious… Most of it touches on religious themes indirectly while addressing other subjects—not sacred topics but profane ones…. What makes the writing Catholic is that the treatment of these subjects is permeated with a particular worldview.” It’s a question, in other words, of exploiting the moral imagination in the most vivid light. This Christian and Catholic worldview “does not require a sacred subject to express its sense of divine immanence… The religious insights usually emerge naturally out of depictions of worldly existence.”

These words could be aptly applied to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), a novel he classified as one of his lighter pieces or “entertainments” yet which allows for a surprising amount of spiritual substance. Set in Havana on the eve of the communist revolution, the story centers on James Wormold, an English expatriate who has sold vacuum cleaners in the Cuban capital for fifteen years. When a man from the British Secret Service comes by to recruit him to be a spy, Wormold jumps at the chance as it means extra income for his faltering business and a better future for his teenage daughter, Milly.

Read the rest here …

Australia, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, The Left

Need for one more royal commission

On previous standards – standards for calling a royal commission – there would be a royal commission into Victoria’s Police. The Andrews government is negligent of the demands of justice in refusing an official investigation into VicPol. Does Andrews have something to fear?

*****

George Pell saga makes case for one more royal commission in Victoria

Chris Mitchell, The Australian, 20 Decemb er 2020

In the wake of Vicpol’s pursuit of Cardinal George Pell and the failings of the two court cases and a Court of Appeal hearing to withstand a unanimous 7-0 verdict in favour of Pell in the High Court, a broadbased inquiry could also examine changes to the state’s sexual offences laws. When Mr Andrews tweeted after that High Court decision to alleged victims of sexual assault — “I see you, I hear you, I believe you” — what was he really saying? This ­newspaper’s former legal affairs editor Chris Merritt argued on April 7 that changes to the state’s laws effectively reversed the presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

“Victorian legislation meant the Pell jury was denied the full story about the man who claimed to have been assaulted by the cardinal. Relevant evidence about the complainant was kept from the jury by virtue of legislation that was put in place with the clear intention of protecting those who claim to be victims of sexual assault,” Merritt wrote.

Victims’ stories are to be believed by police, and defendants’ ability to challenge those stories in court has been curtailed. The High Court found this was at the heart of the Pell matter. Experienced journalists already knew this.

The Age’s John Silvester wrote on February 27 that Vicpol must have relished the opportunity to reverse years of mishandling of clergy abuse cases: “Now police are told to come from a mindset of believing a person who says they have been sexually assaulted.”

In the case of Pell’s alleged assault of two choristers (one of whom had died but had denied ever being molested) at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, Silvester wrote: “Pell was found guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the uncorroborated evidence of one witness, without forensic evidence, a pattern of behaviour or a confession … it is rare to run a case on the word of one witness, let alone gain a conviction.”

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, The Left

The St Gallen Mafia – Paul Kengor’s review

Julia Meloni’s The St Gallen Mafia: Crucial Insights into Pope Francis

Paul Kengor, TAN Direction, 21 November 2021

Julia Meloni’s new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, is a fascinating work. Rarely do I push through a book in two days, but this time I did.

The research and writing are outstanding. A read of the text and study of the footnotes and bibliography make clear that Meloni seems to have read every book available (many in Italian) on the central figure of Pope Francis and the core figures that comprised the so-called St. Gallen Mafia, namely: Cardinals Carlo Maria Martini, Godfried Danneels, Walter Kasper, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and Achille Silvestrini. Meloni’s examination of these characters and the connections she draws from them to Francis is admirably skilled and splendidly executed. It’s also eminently fair.

I do not know Meloni, but I partly expected a book on this provocative subject to contain hyperbole and flashes of anger and more than a few digs and shots at the chief characters—or maybe a better word for this group, the chief plotters. Meloni doesn’t do that. She is charitable, level-headed, and allows the facts to drive the conclusions. She narrates exceptionally well.

There is much to take from this book, and yet also, as with any analysis of Francis, much to leave one scratching one’s head. Francis remains an enigma. It is so hard to know the real Francis, especially where and when the man is leading or being led, or frankly, where and when the man is perhaps deceiving or being deceived by those whom he has surrounded himself with at the Vatican.

Read the rest here …

Culture, Law, Media, Religion

More about the Choirboy

Information about Cardinal Pell’s accuser continues to trickle out – the perfidy of VicPol (Victoria Police), as well. It is a farce that no official investigation into VicPol’s actions in this legal abomination has taken place.

*****

The Commissioner and the Choirboy

Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, 14 November 2021

The anonymous former choirboy, Witness J, who falsely accused Cardinal George Pell of sexually abusing him in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne, after Mass on a Sunday morning in December 1996, has now made some revelations of his own that shed new light on the case. He has put his Curriculum Vitae up on the online employment networking site LinkedIn. At Pell’s trial in 2018, Judge Peter Kidd put a suppression order on publication of the complainant’s name but many in Victorian legal and media circles know his real identity and will find the CV contains an intriguing tale.

While much of the public debate among Pell supporters prior to his acquittal pointed to the strange determination of the Victoria Police’s hierarchy to pursue such an improbable case, the focus was on the two most recent commissioners, Graham Ashton and Shane Patton. Their efforts to persuade both the Victorian Parliament’s inquiry into child sexual abuse and the national news media that Pell was guilty of such a crime was anything but the pursuit of justice. It looked like a stitch-up from the start.

The choirboy’s CV reveals, quite inadvertently, that as well as having these two members of the police hierarchy on side, he enjoyed the support of a third one as well, someone who has so far avoided any place in the overall picture.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Culture, Politics, Radicalism, Religion

The gang behind the elevation of Jorge Bergoglio

Julia Meloni’s book The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group within the Church, is one of the most important books published this year about the crumbling Catholic Church. I mean the visible Catholic Church.

It is a painstakingly researched book, loaded with references, that lays bare the manoeuvring, manipulation, and agitating of a small group of prelates on the Catholic far left to place Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio on the seat of Peter. Ms Meloni, in this article on her publisher’s website (TAN), provides some background to the writing of the book.

*****

Exposing the St. Gallen Mafia: Exclusive Interview with the Author

Julia Meloni, 12 November 2021, TAN

In discussing my new book, The St. Gallen Mafia, certain questions frequently come up. Here are some of them.

What made you want to write this book?

I still remember the moment when I first became captivated with the St. Gallen mafia, the secret group of high-ranking churchmen who used to meet at or near St. Gallen, Switzerland to plot their opposition to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. It was winter, it was night, and I was reading Henry Sire’s The Dictator Pope. When the first chapter turned to the mafia’s leader, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, I was arrested. I temporarily put down the book, downloaded Martini’s Night Conversations, and read late into the night.

When I finished, I knew I had wandered into a detective story.

A detective story?

Yes. At the center stood Martini—the man hailed as the next pope by the media in the 1990s. It is said that the mafia at this time wanted Martini as pope, too—but then Martini got sick with Parkinson’s. So Martini’s dream mutated in order to survive. No longer the “next pope,” Martini began in Night Conversations to call himself the “ante-pope,” the mysterious forerunner to some future pope.

Read the rest here …

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, Politics, Religion

The limits of papal authority

Pope Francis and his inner cabinet are never finished sermonizing about love and mercy, especially at those he continually denounces as (pathologically) rigid, as if rigidity has been elevated to the highest echelons of sin, so grievous that it must be confessed. But like so much else, and so typical of the left, it’s okay if he does it.

Bergoglio’s recent motu proprio, Traditiones Custodes, is one of the most savage merciless political actions that I have witnessed in my lifetime. It’s brutality, its intention to absolutely crush a political opponent, leaves one gasping, bewildered that such naked political aggression could emanate from the Vatican.

But the nature of the political act and its brutality is one thing. Bergoglio’s instructions to the world’s bishops to carry out the prescribed act of liquidation is another. Does he have the authority to demand obedience to his motu proprio, personal action taken by the pope himself, and do the Catholic faithful have the duty to obey?

Dr Peter Kwasniewski gave the most powerful response yet to Pope Francis at the recent Conference of Catholic Identity, organized by The Remnant Newspaper.

Dr Peter Kwasniewski is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and The Catholic University of America.

He taught at the International Theological Institute in Austria, the Franciscan University fo Steubenville’s Austria Program and Wyoming Catholic College.

He writes for The New Liturgical Movement, The Remnant, LifeSite News. OnePeterFive, Rorate Caeli, The Latin Mass Magzine, and others.

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Culture, My books, Radicalism, Religion

The St Gallen Mafia is the explanation

A thoroughly researched book, bulging with references, has just been released about the shadowy deceptive men behind the rise of Bergoglio. It threatens to blow the apostate papacy of Bergoglio wide open to reveal a revolutionary determination that will not be deterred from collapsing the traditional Church and replacing it with a Hegelian/Marxist creation. The scheming revolutionaries have been dragged out of the shadows.

The St. Gallen Mafia is the key to understanding Pope Francis

John Henry Weston

Wed Nov 3, 2021 – 3:06 pm EDT

A new book has been released which sheds light on Pope Francis and his connection to a secret group of leftist cardinals which began to meet in the mid 1990s.

(LifeSiteNews) – Ever since really the start of the Francis papacy, many Catholics have been shocked by much of the agenda coming out from the Vatican and have been trying to make sense of it all. A new book has been released which sheds light on Pope Francis and his connection to a secret group of leftist cardinals which began to meet in the mid-1990s.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Julia Meloni, a Catholic journalist and author of The St. Gallen Mafia: Exposing The Secret Reformist Group Within The Church, about her book and research into the inner workings of the “mafia,” and some of its controversial members.

Meloni mentioned several of the cast of characters connected to the St. Gallen Mafia, including cardinals Carlo Maria Martini, Walter Kasper, Godfried Daneels, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and even former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

However, she pointed that “the formal literature” she has seen has not named McCarrick as a technical member, even though James Grein, his most famous abuse victim, has revealed that the ex-cardinal was a frequent visitor to Sankt-Gallen, Switzerland.

But how does Pope Francis fit into this? Well, Meloni described to me how documents and interviews reveal that then-cardinal Bergoglio was meeting with Cardinal Kasper several times in Argentina, and the St. Gallen Mafia was talking about him.

Read the rest here…