The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy

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The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy

Could Pope Francis be the most tyrannical and unprincipled pontiff in modern times? Yes, says Church historian Marcantonio Colonna, in his controversial yet judicious new book, The Dictator Pope.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was elected pope in 2013 as a liberal and a reformer. In fact, he was neither—except by coincidence. Though he was not well-known within the College of Cardinals that elected him, close observers in his native land already recognized him to be a manipulative politician, skilled at self-promotion, and a disciple of the populist dictator Juan Perón.

Behind the mask of a genial man of the people is a pope who cares shockingly little about theology or the liturgy but is obsessed with his own power. Allying himself with the most corrupt elements in the Vatican, Francis rules by fear. He has obstructed or reversed the very reforms that were expected of him and attempted to alter Catholic teaching by subterfuge. In The Dictator Pope you will learn:

• Why the head of Francis's own religious order thought he should not be made a bishop
• Why Francis may have diverted Church funds to support Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign
• How true Church reformers have been punished by the Pope and his allies
• How Francis himself has mused that he might be the cause of a schism in the Church
• Why clerics in the Vatican have gone from dismissing Francis as a "clown" to fearing him as a dictator

Marcantonio Colonna has exhaustively mined his extensive contacts in the Vatican to produce a provocative and revealing account of Pope Francis's true motivations. The Dictator Pope is essential reading to understand one of the most enigmatic, and dangerous, figures to occupy the See of St. Peter.

These parts of The Dictator Pope seem to foreshadow an end of the Vatican City State:
end of ch. 3:

How long, for example, will the Italian judiciary wait before demanding the names of the Italian citizens who have broken Italian law, in acts from money laundering to tax evasion, by using APSA-ciphered accounts? Will European and international banking authorities decide to shut down APSA’s access to global banking until APSA is reformed by bodies outside the Vatican? And finally, and most historic of all, will Francis’s failures prompt the Italian government to denounce the Lateran Treaty of 1929, ending Vatican City’s status as an independent state, in order to clean up the lawless, corrupt playground the Vatican has become?

end of ch. 5:

It was pointed out that, if the Holy See could ride roughshod over the sovereignty of the Order of Malta, there was nothing to stop the government of Italy from sending in its police to investigate the finances of Vatican City. Many suspect that this realization stopped Pope Francis and Cardinal Parolin from taking over the Order unconditionally, as their initial declarations suggested.

In the very last section he compares Bergoglio to some real popes:

Probably the last pope with such a worldly and political approach as Francis’s was Urban VIII (1623–1644). He involved the papacy in a disastrous war with neighboring principalities, and at Urban’s death the Holy See was bankrupt and his family was chased out of Rome. The more lasting damage that Urban did to the Church was his condemnation of Galileo, not because he considered that the astronomical theory of heliocentricity was heretical (the erroneous view that is often taken of the incident) but in personal revenge for the apparent insult to the pope that Galileo had woven into his book on the subject.

Perhaps a closer parallel was a ruler such as Paul IV (1555–1559), a zealot for religious poverty who was elected pope in his seventies. His political obsessions led him to fight against the Emperor Charles V, the prime champion of the Catholic cause in the war against Protestantism that was raging at that time, and he quarreled, again for political reasons, with Mary Tudor and Cardinal Pole, who were engaged in the difficult task of restoring Catholicism in England. His reign ended in political scandal and popular riots against him. Or one might consider Urban VI (1378–1389), who was elected as a complete outsider and soon showed that he lacked the mental balance for his office. The cardinals asked him to abdicate, and on his refusal declared him deposed and elected an antipope, thus initiating the forty-year Western Schism. Urban responded by creating a job lot of twenty-nine cardinals to replace those who had deserted him, but he soon quarreled with these too and executed five of them for plotting against him, while several others went over to the rival side.

Cases such as these illustrate the dangers of placing a loose cannon aboard St. Peter’s Bark, and the difficulty of deposing a pope.³⁷

Footnote:

37. In 1632 Urban VIII’s refusal to support the Catholic cause in the face of the Protestant military victories that were sweeping over Europe caused Cardinal Ludovisi (the nephew of the previous pope) to threaten to depose him as a protector of heresy, while at one consistory Cardinal Borgia read out a formal protest, with the cardinals crowding round him to prevent the pope from silencing him. One of the pasquinades that appeared against Urban VIII asked, “Is His Holiness by chance a Catholic?”—a question which has been heard in our own times.

As of 4/23/18, it's ranked #1 New Release in Church & State Religious Studies.

Ed Pentin interviews Henry Sire (🎩 to NovusOrdoWatch)

related: this WikiLeaks document of Francis to Cdl. Burke