Posted on 05/29/2026 10:18:00 AM PDT by ebb tide
At 6’4” the late Cardinal George Pell towered over his fellow prelates in height and stature. George Pell, renowned for his toughness, blunt candor, and fearless demeanor—qualities forged, in part, during his days as a hard-charging Australian Rules ruckman. Pell was a battle-scarred athlete, known for his savage takedowns, and the most formidable fighter in the entire College of Cardinals. His intellect and instincts were every bit as lethal as his physical prowess, with his verbal blows carrying the same crushing ferocity as his physical ones.
Whether Cardinal Pell was ruthlessly exposing the cynical manipulation and power grabs in the Synodal meetings or fearlessly digging into the financial sewer of corruption at the Vatican Bank, he didn’t flinch.
Almost immediately in the synodal process, Cardinal Pell spotted the slick manipulation and backroom dealing in the Synodal swamp. With the fearlessness of a ruckman, he called out the Synodal fouls, the penalties and the blatant infractions throughout the early process.
Six years into the Synod, the machinery is now gathering dangerous momentum, making Pell’s admonitions and warnings more prophetic, timely and urgent than ever. His warnings must be revisited as the Synod further journeys into the muck and quicksand of modernism. See Synodal Study Group #9
As prelate, George Pell stood at the center of the Bergoglio papacy, overshadowing his brother cardinals, contesting and challenging the perfidious plans and pronouncements of Francis and his minions.
Who could forget the scene during the 2014 Synod on the Family, when Cardinal George Pell banged his fist on the podium demanding transparency and accountability from Bergoglio and his sneaky synod relators? Vatican journalist Edward Pentin detailed the synodal gamesmanship in his blockbuster exposé, Rigging of a Vatican Synod? Pell excoriated the Bergoglians for their underhanded synodal tactics —changing the rules midstream, manipulating outcomes through misrepresentations, and steering the process into outright doctrinal drift.
Early on, Pell sensed that the Bergoglio Vatican posed a clear and present danger to the Catholic faith as it marched headlong toward modernism under the guise of synodality.
Pell didn’t stop there. He organized his fellow Cardinals to protest the conniving machinations of the ongoing Synod on Synodality. He drafted and personally delivered to Bergoglio a 2015 letter from 13 Cardinals denouncing the tactics and manipulative agenda of the Synod on the Family.
The earliest objections voiced in the Cardinals letter portend a rigged and manipulated process from the very start and it continues to this day:
“The new synodal procedures will be seen in some quarters as lacking openness and genuine collegiality. In the past, the process of offering propositions and voting on them served the valuable purpose of taking the measure of the synod fathers’ minds.”
Pell and the Cardinals were warning that the Synodal rules squelched debate and transparency and did not accurately reflect the intent or ongoing discussions during the Synod among the synod participants.
“The absence of propositions and their related discussions and voting seems to discourage open debate and to confine discussion to small groups; thus it seems urgent to us that the crafting of propositions to be voted on by the entire synod should be restored.”
Pell shrewdly read the synodal room and saw that the foundational premises of the Synod on Synodality are rigged to create a certain desired outcome.
“Voting on a final document comes too late in the process for a full review and serious adjustment of the text.”
Pell and the Cardinals saw the handwriting on the wall. This synodal process was being manipulated and the results manufactured. Bergoglio and his synodal minions created a rubbed stamp process where deliberation is largely performative because meaningful scrutiny, amendments, or opposition are all structurally impossible once the final text is presented. The Cardinals knew that the synodal process is engineered to force consent rather than foster genuine debate, relying on procedural compression, managed outcomes, and fait accompli results.
“Additionally, the lack of input by the synod fathers in the composition of the drafting committee has created considerable unease. Members have been appointed, not elected, without consultation. Likewise, anyone drafting anything at the level of the small circles should be elected, not appointed.”
In true Argentine Peronist fashion, Bergoglio stacked the deck with his ideological allies without any consultation with the College of Cardinals, the consultative body of the papacy. The Synodal scriveners were not subject to the scrutiny of the cardinals and were basically freelancers, writing at the whim of Bergoglio and the synodal leadership. Later on in the synodal process, conservatives were not invited and replaced by radical laity and non Catholics.
“In turn, these things have created a concern that the new procedures are not true to the traditional spirit and purpose of a synod. It is unclear why these procedural changes are necessary. A number of fathers feel the new process seems designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions.”
The Cardinals recognized that a calculated campaign was underway to transform and modernize dogma under the cover of compassion and inclusivity.
“Finally and perhaps most urgently, various fathers have expressed concern that a synod designed to address a vital pastoral matter – reinforcing the dignity of marriage and family – may become dominated by the theological/doctrinal issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried.”
“If so, this will inevitably raise even more fundamental issues about how the Church, going forward, should interpret and apply the Word of God, her doctrines and her disciplines to changes in culture. The collapse of liberal Protestant churches in the modern era, accelerated by their abandonment of key elements of Christian belief and practice in the name of pastoral adaptation, warrants great caution in our own synodal discussions.”
Pell, as the loyal son and prince of the Church still had unfinished business with Bergoglio and his synodal syndicate.
In 2020, now fully aware of the depravity of the Bergoglians, Cardinal Pell penned an anonymous letter sent to the entire College of Cardinals under the pseudonym, “Demos”, further condemning the Synodal/Bergoglio apostasy and heresy. He brutally excoriated the synodal project and the Bergoglioan agenda.
~ The Bergoglio pontificate “is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe.” Pell asserts that the role of the Successor of Peter is to be a unifier, preserve the apostolic tradition and uphold the Church’s teaching. Without any hesitation, Pell knew that Bergoglio was intentionally undermining this sacred duty.
“Demos” then lists the times that Bergoglio was silent in the face of evils in the Church, including in response to the current German Synodal Way that is promoting homosexuality and women priests, and what the author describes as “explicitly heretical” statements by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the global Synod on Synodality, rejecting the Church’s teaching on sexuality. The memorandum calls on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to formally correct Cardinal Hollerich. Otherwise, silence by the DDF imputes acceptance.
Pell noted that “the silence is emphasized, when contrasted with the active persecution of the Traditionalists and contemplative convents” — a reference to severe restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass issued in 2021, and harsh regulations imposed on women contemplative religious orders.
Pell decried that the “the Christo-centric legacy of St. John Paul II in faith and morals is under systemic attack,” and the “confusion about the importance of a strict monotheism” and criticizing a move towards “not quite pantheism” but “a Hindu panentheism variant.” Cardinal Pell was repelled and enraged over the veneration of the Pachamama statues in the Vatican during the Amazon Synod of 2019, calling it “idolatrous.”
The 2020 memorandum calls for the situation of traditional Catholics to “be regularized,” for individual traditional Masses to be restarted in St. Peter’s Basilica, and adds that the Pope has “little support among seminarians and young priests and wide-spread disaffection exists in the Vatican Curia.”
Pell turns to the next conclave, a subject which the cardinal was especially concerned about as he saw it as vital to choose the right pope in order repair the damage he believed had been caused by Jorge Bergoglio. Pell further warns that the next pope must stress the papal role of “unity and doctrine.” He continues that the next Pope “must understand that the secret of Christian and Catholic vitality comes from fidelity to the teachings of Christ and Catholic practices,” the text reads. “It does not come from adapting to the world or from money.”
Cardinal Pell insisted to his fellow Cardinals that the next pope must restore doctrinal clarity, which he saw diluted by the Synod on Synodality . Similarly, his memorandum states: “The first tasks of the new pope will be to restore normality, restore doctrinal clarity in faith and morals, restore a proper respect for the law and ensure that the first criterion for the nomination of bishops is acceptance of the apostolic tradition.”
Pell also expressed outrage over the synods held under Pope Francis’ leadership. He warned that they threaten to be a “new danger to world-wide Church unity.” His memo asserts that if “such heresy” of national or continental synods being given doctrinal authority isn’t corrected, the Church would end up “closer to an Anglican or Protestant model, than an Orthodox model.” Pell urged that the next pope should “remove and prevent such a threatening development,” citing “the morality of homosexual activity” as “one such flash point” that could provoke a rupture in the Church.
Pell prophetically concludes by warning of schism but adds that most likely it will come from the right rather than the left. He also called for an apostolic visitation of the Society of Jesus which is in “catastrophic moral decline” and argued that its charism and contribution have been so important to the Church that it must not be allowed to “pass away into history.”
On January 10, 2023, after seemingly successful hip surgery, George Pell suddenly died. Suddenly and cruelly, death silenced the mighty voice of George Pell. Yet, Pell had the final say. He left behind a final posthumous message for the Catholic Church-a grave and prophetic exhortation about the synodal storm gathering over Rome and the man who will follow Bergoglio.
On January 11th, his final commentary appeared posthumously in the U.K.’s Spectator magazine. The beleaguered prelate fired one final warning shot desperate to awaken Catholics. Pell spared no words. His final assessment of the Synod on Synodality, described as a “toxic nightmare” from which the Church “must free itself.”
The battle weary cardinal reminded the faithful that the role of bishops are “successors of the apostles-the chief teacher in each diocese. Pell again warned that the Synod process is a mockery of this sacred duty and making bishops “wall flowers or rubber stamps” of a confused bureaucratic process which inserts into the dialogue, “neo Marxist jargon about “exclusion, alienation identity, marginalization, the voiceless, LGBTQ as well as the displacement of Christian notions of forgiveness, sin, sacrifice, healing, redemption.”
And finally, from his grave, George Pell cautions the faithful about the synod’s gamesmanship:
“Why the silence on the afterlife of reward or punishment, on the four last things; death and judgement, heaven and hell?” asked Cardinal Pell regarding the content of the working document released last year by the Synod on Synodality, highlighting that the synodal way has “downgraded the Transcendent.”
George Pell’s relentless warnings about the Synodal secret agenda and its insidious corrosion of the faith now read like an elegy for a Church battered by infiltration and doctrinal sabotage in the post-Benedict era. What he feared most was not confusion alone, but a managed unraveling-carried out under the soothing language of “dialogue,” “listening,” and “pastoral accompaniment.” In his remaining years, this giant figure, this man of the Church expended every ounce of energy and courage to shake the faithful and his fellow cardinals out of their stupor.
The question now looms with terrifying urgency: can anyone still stop this runaway train before it hurtles over the cliff? George Pell was proved right about it all.
George Pell was described during his funeral eulogy as, “a man of God and a man of the Church, who was characterized by a deep faith and great steadfastness of doctrine, which he always defended without hesitation and with courage, concerned only with being faithful to Christ.”
Is there another ruckman to replace him in the battlefield to save Holy Mother Church?
Are there any such men even left in the College of Cardinals?
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Ping
Agnostic homosexuals have permeated the hierarchy. The “synods” are the way they are exercising power. Wonder how well Pope Leo sleeps at night.
I am not Catholic, but this Cardinal Pell fellow sounds like he was an amazing man.
He was. Strong, smart, holy. When he became bishop, the first thing he did was to shut down the seminary. It was beyond fixing. That’s gutsy, and wise.
He was ... he shone light on unpleasant, hidden truths ... for which the swamp persecuted him.
Thanks for posting, BUMP!
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