It's Monday, March 20th, 2017, and I'm exhausted.
My goodness, the flood of news stories and just information from and about what is happening in Novels' Ordo land has been incessant and excessive.
To date, we'll focus on three big stories.
First, a Novels' Ordo cleric in Rome who goes by the pen name of Fra Cristoforo, Brother Christopher, says he has it on good authority that the much-touted formal correction that the four Dubia cardinals, Burke, Caffara, Brandtmuller, and Meisner, were going to issue against Francis is not going to happen.
Fra Cristoforo said this already on March 15th.
But then Vatican journalist Ed Penton, who writes for EWTN and the National Catholic Register, said no, this rumor is false, the correction will happen.
But today, Fra Cristoforo doubled down on his original claim and even added the reason why the formal correction won't happen.
And that is that in a meeting with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the head of the Vatican's congregation for the destruction of the faith,
warned them not to...
...publish this correction because it would risk causing a schism.
We have that story up on our blog at NovelsOrdoWatch.org slash wire.
You can look for more information on that there, and also a little bit of commentary.
Next, veteran Vatican journalist and papal biographer Andreas Englisch, who is German, by the way, not English,
claimed in a lecture that he gave in...
...in Limburg, Germany on March 16th, that Francis and Benedict XVI are at complete odds with each other and are not even speaking to each other anymore.
And that's gone on for a while, he says.
Further, he adds that Benedict XVI only appears in public whenever Francis explicitly asks for it.
By the way, Englisch is the Vaticanist who predicted Benedict XVI.
And another interesting tidbit, after the release of Amoris Laetitia, France's infernal document effectively permitting unrepentant adulterers to receive the Novels Ordo Sacraments,
Englisch said that although he doesn't think it's likely to happen, a schism in which Benedict XVI plays the role of antipope is not out of the question.
And finally, our last story...
Next week, on March 30th and 31st, there is scheduled to take place in Paris, France, an international event that they're calling the Deposing the Pope Conference.
The program flyer that's been released lists well over a dozen speakers that are all scholars, mostly university professors, so this is a big deal.
This is serious.
This is not something to just blow off.
In fact, I think it could be a key event and a possible schism within the Vatican II Church.
Now, regarding the actual notion of deposing a pope, let me make this very quick, because it's actually a very simple, a very black-and-white issue, believe it or not.
If Francis is a valid pope, if he is a true and valid Roman pontiff, then there is no authority on earth.
There is no authority on earth that can take that pontificate away from him, not even all the bishops together.
That's because there is no higher authority in the Catholic Church than the pope, and the act of deposing, judging, or punishing someone is proper to a superior, as St. Robert Bellarmine, for example, clearly teaches.
Well, the pope has no superior on earth, so no one can un-pope him, so to speak.
On the other hand...
If a manifest heretic, or in Francis' case, a manifest apostate, can be deposed, he can be removed, because he's already not a valid pope.
So in that case, there's no deposing of the pope going on, but only the deposing of an obvious non-pope.
So, I don't know what these conference speakers think they're doing, but when they refer to deposing the pope, if they think Francis is a valid pope and he can be stripped of the pontificate,
that is heresy.
Yes, heresy.
The heresy of Gallicanism, and also conciliarism, is what it's called.
Now, on the other hand, if by deposing the pope, they simply mean it's time to legally declare that Francis isn't pope,
because although this is already obvious in fact, and we can act on it, it needs to be established legally so we can have a new conclave.
Well, then they can say that, but then they're conceding that the Sedevacanus position is correct.
Because it has been our position that we can know that Francis isn't the pope even before and without a legal declaration.
In fact, to say otherwise would involve one in circular reasoning, because unless we can know that,
no gathering of bishops to depose the false pope would even be possible, right?
The only way you can have a declaration that Francis isn't pope is if that is knowable independently of the declaration.
Otherwise, no one could issue it.
So, you can see that in the end, this conference may just unwittingly confirm that the Sedevacanus position has been right all along.
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