Posted on 04/06/2024 9:33:13 AM PDT by ebb tide
In George Orwell’s 1984, no one is supposed to know about anything predating the Revolution that put the now-dominant Party in power. In Orwell’s dystopian prophecy, the records must all be redacted, the memories must all be censored, and the statues must all be renamed to align with the Party’s official account of history.
In an eerily similar way, under the current regime of Pope Francis, a dubious history of the 2005 conclave is now being recirculated. With his new interview on the 2005 papal election, Francis is retelling an edited version of history promoted by the St. Gallen mafia—the group of high-ranking Churchmen opposed to the papal election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Ultimately, this official Party narrative looks less like a history than a hit piece—an Orwellian attack against the late Pope Benedict XVI. So let’s examine the Party’s key evidentiary records: a conclave diary, a cardinal’s “confession,” and a new papal interview.
A few months after the 2005 papal election, an anti-Ratzingerian conclave diary was published by Lucio Brunelli in Limes. This diary appears to have been leaked by the St. Gallen mafia’s “mastermind,” Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, according to Nicolas Diat’s L’Homme Qui Ne Voulait Pas Être Pape.
The diary’s central claim was that in 2005, the then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had had enough votes to block Ratzinger from becoming pope. This line was the Party’s official record of the 2005 conclave—and it sounded, some said, like a marketing piece for Bergoglio’s next papal run.
So several years ago, I researched non-Party records for my book The St. Gallen Mafia. In that book, I indicated the following:
Next came a French book called Confession d’un Cardinal, claiming to collect and report the musings of a powerful, anonymous cardinal. According to Diat, more than one reader suspected that this cardinal was none other than the St. Gallen mafia’s Silvestrini.
Of all the mafia’s members, it was Silvestrini who appears to have most encouraged Bergoglio to lead the anti-Ratzingerian contingency, according to Diat. In Confession d’un Cardinal’s section on the 2005 conclave, the anonymous cardinal who may have been Silvestrini said he and some others had talked for several years about the succession of Pope John Paul II. He said that he and his group thought about the prospect of a Latin American pope with European roots.
Then the cardinal spoke, by name, of thinking of “Cardinal Bergoglio.”
With that, the cardinal repeated the leaked conclave diary’s questionable claims regarding Bergoglio’s performance at the papal election. The mysterious cardinal said this information about Bergoglio needed to be kept in mind—just in case Benedict’s pontificate did not last long.
Benedict’s pontificate, as predicted, did not last long—and Bergoglio was indeed elected. Now, eleven years into the current regime, the Party is showing its anxiety about the past, doubling down on its reconstruction of the 2005 papal election.
“It happened that I got to have forty of the one hundred and fifteen votes in the Sistine Chapel,” Francis says in the new interview from the Spanish book El Sucesor. “They were enough to stop Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s candidacy, because if they had continued to vote for me, he would not have been able to reach the two thirds necessary to be elected pope.”
This statement is an overt repackaging of the anti-Ratzingerian conclave diary, down to the familiar line about the “two thirds necessary to be elected pope.” Here Pope Francis retells the Party’s story that he could have blocked Ratzinger’s candidacy—even though, to repeat, Pope John Paul II in 1996 decreed that a candidate could potentially be elected with just fifty-eight votes, not the seventy-seven votes previously needed for a two-thirds majority.
Ultimately, however, it is not just the history of the 2005 conclave that is at stake with Francis’s new interview. With the arrival of El Sucesor, you are now required to believe, for instance, that Benedict and Francis were in perfect harmony on the correctness of the latter’s liberal stance toward same-sex civil unions.
Welcome to Googling “Ratzinger” and “same-sex unions” to see if they’re making up the German cardinal’s opposition to them. Welcome to reading Summorum Pontificum and Traditionis Custodes to see if you’re crazy for thinking Benedict and Francis held somewhat different positions on the Latin Mass. Welcome to scanning 1984 just to find out if you are being gaslit—being made to question your perceptions and memories.
Welcome to life under a Party that (increasingly) controls the past.
Orwellian Pope Ping
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