Text of a talk given to the Latin Mass Society in London on November 24th, 2023. Mr. Sire’s audio of this talk can be heard here.

When Joseph Shaw proposed this talk to me in early September, I suggested the title “Pope Francis: how much lower can we sink?”, but the fact is that since then we have been overtaken by events. Over the past eleven years we have all seen Pope Francis’s pontificate in a trajectory of accelerating descent into more and more overt betrayal of Catholic doctrine, but I must say I did not foresee the Gadarene rush we have seen just within the last three months. If we want to assess the very grave events that are happening around us, we need to try and understand the man we now have sitting on the throne of Peter. So before I comment on recent developments I would like to add some details to the picture of Pope Francis which I gave in my book The Dictator Pope, which was first published six years ago.

To give you some background on this book, I should explain that I arrived to work in Rome in April 2013, less than a month after the election of Pope Francis, and I lived there for the next four years. I was working for the Order of Malta, an organisation which has close links to the Holy See, and I quickly began to hear the reports that were privately coming out of the Vatican. They showed a very different Francis from the genial, liberal figure, who was being presented by the world’s media. Insiders were saying that, as soon as the publicity cameras were off him, Francis became a different figure: arrogant, dismissive of people, given to foul language, and notorious for furious outbursts of temper which were known even to the Vatican chauffeurs. Over the next couple of years I continued to hear inside information, for example from the late Cardinal Pell about the internal politics involved in the two Synods on the Family in 2014 and 2015. Let us bear in mind that in his first years Pope Francis had barely shown his hand and that people assumed he was the liberal reformer that the Church supposedly needed. Early in 2016 I wrote an article for Angelico Press titled “Pope Francis: Where is the reformer behind the media idol?” I was beginning to think that somebody needed to write a book disclosing the gulf between the public image of Pope Francis and the reality as seen within the Vatican; but at that stage I did not think that I would be the one to write it. 5 STARS UNITED Knee Pi... Best Price: $32.72 Buy New $36.95 (as of 09:06 UTC - Details)

Besides the information gulf I have described, there was another one stemming from the language barrier. There was in fact a great deal of information which had been available for years about Jorge Bergoglio and his career in Argentina, but it simply had not come through to the rest of the world because it had not been translated into English. Since I am half-Spanish, this was another of the factors that pointed to my shouldering the task that was needed. When I decided to start work on the book, the first thing I did was to make a trip to Argentina, which I did in March 2017, to speak to people who could tell me about Bergoglio’s past record. This was the information that had been sadly lacking to the cardinals when they elected Bergoglio in 2013. In particular, there was a very revealing book which had been written shortly after the papal election, but which had been quickly stamped on, and had since become almost unavailable. The title was El Verdadero Francisco (The Real Francis), by Omar Bello. The author was a public-relations executive who had known Bergoglio personally over the past eight years, having worked for him in a television channel run by the archdiocese of Buenos Aires. As a professional in the field of public relations, Bello was quick to recognise in Bergoglio a master in self-promotion. He also described a man who was accomplished in the covert exercise of power and the manipulation of people.

For example, Bello tells in his book two stories which were already well known in Buenos Aires. One was the way in which Bergoglio took a dislike to a member of the archiepiscopal staff, Mr Felix Botazzi, and decided to sack him without showing his hand. The aggrieved ex-employee then sought an interview with Bergoglio, who affected ignorance. “I knew nothing about it, my son. What did they sack you for? Who did it?” Mr Botazzi did not get his job back, but the archbishop presented him with a new car, and he went away convinced that Bergoglio was a saint, dominated by a circle of malicious subordinates. The other story that Bello repeats is of a Buenos Aires priest on the diocesan staff who sought psychiatric help, exhausted by the merry dance that he and his colleagues were being led by their archbishop. After listening to his woes, the psychiatrist said to him: “I can’t treat you. To solve your problems I would need to treat your archbishop.”

These and other revelations were made shortly after Bergoglio had been elected pope, but in fact there had been revealing reports appearing in the Spanish-language media even before that. For example, in 2011 the Spanish journalist Francisco de la Cigoňa published an article describing how Bergoglio was building himself a network of power in the South American hierarchies through followers he had planted in various departments in the Vatican. De la Cigoňa summed up his report:

That is how Bergoglio proceeds to generate a network of lies, intrigue, espionage, mistrust and, more effective than anything, fear. Bergoglio is a person who above all knows how to generate fear. However much he may work carefully to impress everyone with the appearance of a plaster saint, austere and mortified, he is a man with a mentality of power.

We should note that this was written well over a year before Bergoglio was elected pope, before anyone had reason to suspect that he might be more widely dangerous.

When I started my book, I set myself the objective of transmitting Spanish-language reporting of this sort to the English-speaking world, but there was another piece of evidence whose non-emergence had not been due to the language barrier. While I was living in Rome I began to hear from journalists of a document called the Kolvenbach Report, which several of them had been trying to track down without success. It was the report that Fr Kolvenbach, the General of the Jesuits, had written back in 1991, when it had been proposed to make Fr Bergoglio an auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires, and it was rumoured to be distinctly unfavourable. A copy of the report had been kept in the archive of the Jesuit General Curia in Rome, but it swiftly disappeared as soon as Bergoglio was elected pope. In the course of my research I discovered that at least one copy of the report existed in private hands, but its owner could not bring himself to share it with me for the purpose of publication. The nearest I was able to get to it was through a priest who had read it before it disappeared from the Jesuit archive, and he gave me the gist of it as follows: Fr Kolvenbach accused Bergoglio of lack of psychological balance, deviousness, disobedience cloaked under a mask of humility, and habitual use of vulgar language. He also pointed out, with a view to his suitability as a bishop, that Bergoglio had shown himself a divisive figure while Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina. After eleven years of the Francis papacy we can fairly say that Fr Kolvenbach had got him completely right. How Alexander Hamilton... Brion McClanahan Best Price: $4.09 Buy New $5.99 (as of 06:55 UTC - Details)

Another key to Bergoglio’s mode of acting is the political background of Argentina, which is so alien to the Anglo-Saxon understanding. One of the first things I heard about Bergoglio when I went to Rome was from an Argentinian priest who said: “What you’ve got to understand about him is that he’s a pure politician.” At the time, I did not grasp the bearing of this, but you need to add that Francis’s politics are modelled by the great figure in Argentina in the twentieth century, Juan Perón, who was dictator of the country from 1946 to 1955, the years in which Bergoglio was growing up. Perón dazzled a whole generation of Argentinians with his unscrupulous, opportunistic style, and his legacy has continued to dominate the country’s political life ever since. Bergoglio was more than a generic disciple of the great man. When he was novice-master of the Argentinian Jesuits in the early seventies, he was actively assisting a party called the Iron Guard who were working, successfully, to bring back Perón from exile for his final months in office as President until his death in 1974. By ordinary standards this was an unusual way for the novice-master of a religious order to spend his spare time, but it illustrates the comment that was made to me by one Argentinian who had been a pupil of the young Bergoglio when he taught at a Jesuit school in the sixties. On the strength of a lifetime’s personal knowledge, he described Bergoglio to me as “un enfermo del poder” – a man for whom power is a mania, or a sickness.

So, on the basis of reports like these I proceeded to write my book, and I included in it a chapter on Bergoglio’s career before his election. In it, my purpose was to provide something of a character study which had been sadly lacking to the cardinals when they elected him pope in 2013. Since publication however I have discovered a great deal of new information which shows that in fact things were far, far worse than I imagined.

Read the Whole Article