It is almost impossible to find a satisfactory report of what child visionaries, the shepherds Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat, were told when, on September 19^th, 1846, they were attended by the Blessed Virgin at La Salette-Fallavaux in the Department of Isère in south eastern France.  Allegations of censorship abound.  Two items have been mentioned as excised from the children’s reports.  The first is that Rome would lose the faith and become the seat of anti-Christ; the second, that there would appear in the century, or centuries, to come two worm-ridden popes – deux papes vermoulus.[1]

 

On the supposition that these reports are true, let us explore the possibilities.

 

Rome Will Lose the Faith

There can be little doubt that the first of the prophecies has been fulfilled with the current Vatican administration featuring a Pope, who not only indulges in heterodoxy but allows it to be broadcast that he no longer regards himself as the Vicar of Christ, attended by a Curia the majority of whose members offers no opposition to his dissent from Catholic principle.

 

Yet it should not be thought that this state of affairs was precipitated by the conduct of Pope Francis alone, or even with the elevation of Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy.   He is but the end result of a process that began with John XXIII’s decision to summon a synod of the Church’s bishops on the supposition that merely to label the resulting convocation ‘a general or ecumenical council of the Catholic Church’ was sufficient to make it so.  As remarked above, a council is ecumenical or general only if it is convoked to address some issue for the good of the Church and there was no such issue.

 

This shared act of papal incompetence opened a way for the invasion of the sanctuary of God by the forces of the devil.  Seven years later Paul VI lamented that reality publicly insouciant of the fact that he had been one of its chief facilitating causes.

 

In John XXIII’s utterances after his elevation to the papacy there had been causes for concern among the faithful.[2]  When Giovanni Battista Montini succeeded him these concerns were augmented.  Paul VI’s first encyclical Ecclesiam Suam ignored Catholic principle when its author indulged in subjectivism, justifying his doing so by reference to the dysfunctional Council then in progress.[3] 

 

Far from intervening to correct the Council’s bishops over their problematic utterances, he encouraged them.

 

His successor, Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraków, formed in the defective philosophy of phenomenology, had been a major contributor to the thinking of the Council’s bishops, his own subjectivism supporting the abandonment of Catholic principle in which they engaged.  It was appropriate that he should as Pope have adopted the name taken by his short-lived predecessor for he was to continue the revolution John XXIII had begun and Paul VI had nurtured.

 

Josef Cardinal Ratzinger who succeeded John Paul II as Benedict XVI had been one of the Council’s periti.  It seems he would have liked to moderate the effects of the revolution in which he had played a part.  He appeared divided in his allegiances and to lack the strength of character to act decisively.  His resignation from the papacy in February 2013 left the faithful to the care of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires whose heterodox opinions seem to have been patent even before his election.  In truth, the departures from Catholic principle in which the bishops appointed after the Council indulged made it inevitable that sooner or later the cardinals would elect a candidate completely unsuitable for the supreme office.

 

Now, if Rome no longer preaches the fulness of the Catholic faith, it is the seat of anti-Christ.

 

The Council’s effect was the creation of a counterfeit of the Catholic Church, the Church of Vatican II which, under the influence of Pope and bishops, thereafter assumed the guise of the Catholic Church.  These two Churches, the one of God, the other of man (and the devil), are - have been for at least forty years - at war.  Through the Counterfeit and its instruments, the succeeding popes, bishops and clergy, the devil has worked to convince the faithful that the direction of Christ’s Church has changed, that its operations are her operations, its teachings her teachings, its administration her administration.  In this struggle, the Counterfeit has, for the moment, the upper hand for the Pope is a heretic who claims to be speaking for God but is not.

 

Yet the efforts of these complaisant ministers have not served to compromise the Catholic Church’s integrity.  Since she is of God and not of man, her direction, teaching and end are immutable.   She is indefectible and infallible and, in due course, she will throw off the incubus of her Counterfeit and resume her wonted authority.

 

Deux Papes Vermoulus

As to the second prophecy we ought to consider what Our Blessed Lady meant by ‘worm-ridden’?  It is clear she spoke on analogy with an attack from the foundations of a wooden structure.  The inferences to be drawn are, surely, that the two popes to whom she refers, bound by their acceptance of the office inherited from St Peter, the rock on whom the stability of the Church and security of the faith is guaranteed to defend the faith, would fail to do so.

 

In 1870 the Vatican Council under Pope Pius IX taught that the Catholic faith—

“has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but… entrusted as a divine deposit… to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted… [and that] that understanding of its sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which Holy Mother Church has once declared… there… never be[ing] recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding…”[4]

Only among those associated with the Second Vatican Council, after John XXIII, are there to be found popes who have sought to recede from the meaning of the Church’s sacred dogmas.   Let us look at the possible claimants to the title - Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis.

 

Paul VI

There is every reason to agree with theologian, the late Fr Gregory Hesse, in according Paul VI the ‘honour’ of the first nomination.  We have set out in an earlier paper details of his dishonesty and duplicity while working for Pius XII and of an allegation of misbehaviour while he was Archbishop of Milan which, one may rationally conclude, placed him under masonic control.[5]  There is further evidence of this, if it be needed, in his employment as Secretary of State of Jean Cardinal Villot, later revealed as a mason.[6] 

 

Paul VI’s conduct during the Second Vatican Council provides abundant evidence that the concept of the Church he entertained departed radically from the reality of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic entity founded by Our Blessed Lord.  He endorsed the Council’s bishops’ illogical behaviour.  His expressed support for the self-contradictory document rejecting the Church’s teaching against ‘religious freedom’, Dignitatis Humanae, is eloquent of his refusal to adhere to Catholic principle.  By this single action he persuaded 179 of the attending bishops to abandon their opposition to it, leaving a rump of only seventy opposed.

 

Further evidence against him is found in his opposition to Archbishop Lefebvre’s efforts to train priests dedicated to offering Mass in the millennial form of the Roman Rite.  During a Consistory on May 24^th 1976, he reproached the Archbishop publicly for refusing today’s authority in the name of yesterday’s (as if the Church’s authority varied with time), for “leading people into disobedience on the pretext of keeping the faith intact”, and for refusing the New Mass because of a “sentimental attachment” to the old.  “This [the establishment of the novus ordo missae],” he claimed, “is nothing less than what our predecessor Pius V did when after the Council of Trent he made obligatory the missal that was reformed under his authority”.

 

The misrepresentations in this last statement are further testament to Paul VI’s duplicity.  First, Pius V did not reform the Roman missal.  With the authority of Trent, he canonised—that is codified—the mode in which Mass had been offered for a thousand years, fixing it irreformably (Quo Primum, July 15^th, 1570).   Secondly, when Paul VI instituted his rite he did the very opposite of what Pius V had done.  He introduced novelty.  He breached, moreover, the Church’s explicit monitum against doing so, incurring thereby an anathema imposed by Trent and another invoked by Pius V on anyone, including a pope, who would seek to alter the form in which Mass is to be offered.  Thirdly, the assertion that Archbishop Lefebvre’s refusal of the ‘new Mass’ was for sentimental reasons was a lie.

 

The Archbishop had tried on a number of occasions to see the Pope but had been rebuffed by Cardinal Villot.  It is worth reading the account of the interchange which occurred when, at last, on September 11^th, 1976 the Pope granted the Archbishop an audience.  This is the report reproduced in the biography of the Archbishop by Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais.[7] 

 

 

 

Paul VI rejected the Archbishop’s plea formally on October 11^th, invoking in his support the false understanding of tradition that the bishops of Vatican II had uttered in Dei Verbum n. 8, as to which see The Church of Paul VI and of John Paul II on this website.  The Pope’s refusal to uphold his own moral teaching in Humanae Vitae in the celebrated Washington Case confirms his duplicity.[8]

 

Who is the Second?

Despite his systematic departures from Catholic principle, John Paul II can, we think, be excluded.  Papa Wojtyla was not so much devious as philosophically incompetent, his ineptitude disposing him to embrace the misconception of the Church’s reality vaunted by the bishops of Vatican II and the syncretism the Council promoted.  While he pronounced innumerable material heresies, he would insist that his teaching was in conformity with the Church’s tradition.  That the ‘tradition’ he was relying on was not that of the Catholic Church but of her Counterfeit—that in Dei Verbum n. 8—would seem to relieve him of a degree of subjective guilt.  His ‘excommunication’ of Archbishop Lefebvre, Bishop de Castro Mayer and the newly consecrated bishops of the Society of St Pius X was founded on that false understanding of tradition, aided by a misunderstanding of the provisions of the new Code of Canon Law.

 

Despite the scandals in religious syncretism in which John Paul II engaged, he demonstrated adherence to Catholic principle in moral matters, such as contraception and artificially induced abortion, and he reproved Catholic lawyers cooperating in the procuring of divorces.  He upheld Catholic theological principle in his motu proprio Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the inadmissibility of admission of women to the priesthood and in other documents such as his apostolic exhortation on St Joseph on August 15^th, 1989, the 100^th anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical, Quamquam pluries.

 

Though Benedict XVI shared in the materialism and subjectivism of his predecessor, his reign as Pope differs dramatically from that of John Paul II.  

 

Benedict came to regret, it would seem, the isolation of Archbishop Lefebvre over his consecration of bishops without a papal mandate expressed in the apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei (July 2^nd, 1988), to the drafting of which he, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had almost certainly contributed.  The realisation of the document’s flaws may have moved him to lift the ‘excommunications’.  In similar fashion, he seems to have regretted the slide from orthodoxy the Council had precipitated, though he did not resile in the least from the revolution it had accomplished.[9]  The liberal ‘faithful’ criticised Benedict for his departures from the Council’s protocols, characterising him as ‘conservative’, and many of the faithful seemed convinced his election signaled a return to orthodoxy, a conviction rocked by his resignation.  As we will see, this event revealed a more invidious side to the Pope.

 

In a recent paper Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has remarked the philosophical interplay between Pope Benedict’s resignation and the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in his place, how their respective acts fulfilled two of the Hegelian protocols (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) which underlie the modernist heresy.[10]  He noted (i) that as early as 1970, the young Fr Ratzinger had envisaged, in discussions with the heterodox Fr Karl Rahner, the concepts of a ‘pope emeritus’ and of a collegial, or shared, papacy; and (ii), that Papa Ratzinger had during his reign confided to a trusted assistant on a number of occasions his intention of retiring to private life.

 

These revelations argue against the view that his abandonment of the office of Father of all the faithful merely demonstrated weakness and lack of faith in divine help.  They infer a positive intention to overturn Christ’s mandate reposing authority to rule and guide His Church in one man, St Peter (and his successors), and to contrive the sharing of that authority in furtherance of Vatican II’s program of ‘collegiality’ and false ecumenism.

 

The Council’s hint at the possibility of reducing the authority of the Pope was, as Archbishop Viganò notes, mentioned in John Paul II’s encyclical Ut Unum Sint (1995).  In a recent document of the “Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity” its authors, using an ambivalence characteristic of modernism, suggested overturning the solemn teaching of the 1870 Vatican Council which had confirmed the Catholic Church’s millennial position in the following terms—

”We teach and declare that the Roman Church, by the disposition of the Lord, holds the sovereignty of ordinary power over all others, and that this power of jurisdiction on the part of the Roman Pontiff, which is truly episcopal, is immediate; and with respect to this the pastors and the faithful of whatever rite and dignity, both as separated individuals and together are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, not only in things which pertain to faith and morals, but also in those which pertain to the discipline and government of the Church… spread over the whole world, so that the Church of Christ, protected not only by the Roman Pontiff, but by the unity of communion as well as of the profession of the same faith is one flock under the one highest shepherd.  This is the doctrine of Catholic truth from which no one can deviate and keep his faith and salvation.”  Dz. 1827: DS 3060

 

The bishops of Vatican II had sought through the imposition of the device of the bishops’ conference to diminish individual episcopal authority.  Paul VI buttressed this (1) by imposing, in 1966 (motu proprio Ecclesiae Sanctae), a retiring age on bishops, to produce the novelty of the ‘bishop emeritus’, and (2) in 1970 (motu proprio Ingravescentem Ætatem) by depriving the cardinals of their Curial functions after age 75 and of their elective functions after age 80.  These initiatives derogated from the authority and dignity Christ bestowed on the fulness of the priesthood and removed the benefit of the practical wisdom the bishops and cardinals had to offer.[11]  Papa Ratzinger’s creation, the ‘pope emeritus’, reveals similar motivation.  When, on February 10^th, 2013 in the Declaration Non solum propter he announced his decision to resign, he repeated Paul VI’s expression ‘ingravescente aetate’.[12]  An impartial observer would be entitled to conclude that in the case of each document the author had used it to hide another agendum.[13]

 

Thus, it is reasonable to argue that Cardinal Ratzinger’s acceptance of the office of Pope involved him doing so with a mental reservation to abandon the office and its responsibilities at will.  There have been papal resignations in the past[14] but Archbishop Viganò is right to say that Ratzinger’s involved a modality unique in the Church’s history.

 

All of the above is premised on the fact that Pope Benedict’s resignation was valid.  But there is a problem with it which turns on the metaphysical distinction between the essence (or nature) of a thing and its powers.[15]  With respect to the papacy these two elements are represented by the words munus and ministerium.   A study of Non solum propter reveals that Benedict purported to resign not the office (munus) but “the ministry (ministerium) of the Bishop of Rome, of the Successor of St Peter, entrusted to me through the hands of the cardinals…”

 

Canon 188 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law is clear:

A resignation which is made as a result of grave fear unjustly inflicted, or of deceit, or of substantial error, or of simony, is invalid by virtue of the law itself.

Since it involved uncertainty in its expression, the resignation contained substantial error and was eo ipso invalid.[16]

 

Archbishop Viganò mentions another aspect of the business.  The International Monetary Fund had suspended the operation of the SWIFT system preventing the passage of money into or out of the Vatican, a suspension which was lifted immediately Pope Benedict issued his Declaration.  This intrusion of a secular influence on the workings of the Vatican bears the hallmark of intimidation, “of a grave fear unjustly inflicted” which, if borne out by objective evidence, adds another ground for the resignation’s invalidity.

 

Now, if Pope Benedict’s resignation was invalid, the sentence in his Declaration is ineffectual which claims—

“that from the twenty-eighth day of February 2013, at the twentieth hour, the see of Rome, the See of St. Peter, will be vacant; and I declare that a Conclave to select a new highest pontiff needs to be convoked by those to whom the duty belongs”—

He remained Pope and, since the Church’s two thousand years of tradition is eloquent of the truth that there can be but one Pope at a time, the conclave and election of his ‘successor’ was void.  Accordingly, as Archbishop Viganò has remarked, after February 28^th, 2013 and the election of his ‘successor’,

“the Emeritus was Pope but did not exercise the papacy, while Bergoglio acted as Pope without being Pope.”

 

There is something else: since Pope Benedict’s death on December 31^st, 2022, the See of Rome has been vacant.

 

This analysis is argumentative, not determinative.  Neither the author nor anyone but God’s Holy Church has the authority to determine the issue.

 

Yet, the argument finds support in effects that flow from a logical principle quoted by St Thomas: contra factum non fit argumentum - no argument avails against a fact.  It is a fact that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is engaged, and has been since shortly after his election, in teaching error in faith and morals.[17]  Our Lord Jesus Christ gave His Church (and His faithful) a guarantee when He said this:

“And I say to thee: that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.”  Matt. 16: 18, 19

 

But if the duly appointed Pope teaches error in faith and morals, the gates of hell have prevailed against the Church!  It seems rational to conclude, then, that the Cardinals’ election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio was void.  Bergoglio is not head of the Catholic Church: he is not the Pope.

 

But the Church has asserted him to be Pope[18] and invoked the prayers of the clergy and faithful in his support!  How are they to cope with the dilemma?  St Thomas provides the essential principle: distinguendam est – ‘it is necessary to distinguish’.

 

The Church distinguishes between law and fact.  As a matter of fact (de facto) Bergoglio may not be - may never have been - Pope.  As a matter of law (de jure), however, he is Pope and, until the Church pronounces otherwise, the faithful are entitled to rely on the law.  Thus every priest may include Francis in the prayer he offers for the Pope in the Canon of Holy Mass, and the faithful are entitled to pray for him as Pope.  Whatever the reality, their heartfelt prayers may yet assist in converting him.

 

Regrettably, in the battle between the Church and her counterfeit, the Church of Vatican II, the latter is, and has been since the reign of Paul VI, in the ascendant.  Accordingly, the faithful cannot hope to have the issue resolved until the Cardinals elect a Pope who realises that a state of war, of holy war, exists between the two entities and that he must resolve it in Christ’s favour and against the devil.  Then, and only then, will Christ’s Church be able to resume the exclusive management of her affairs.

 

 

 

What, then, is to be said of Pope Francis, the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio?  Does he qualify, in the face of the opposition offered by Benedict, as the second ‘worm ridden’ pope?

 

If he is not Pope the question does not arise and, for the reasons advanced, that is the position we take here.

 

The Two Worm-ridden Popes

Who, then, are at the two worm ridden popes?  Or - better question - with Paul VI fulfilling the requirements for the first nomination, who is the best fit for the second?  An extrinsic fact which is neither evidence nor proof may assist in a tentative conclusion.

 

Of the four Popes we have considered, the end of the effective reign of two of them featured extraordinary meteorological phenomena.  The death of Paul VI on August 6^th, 1978, the fourteenth anniversary of his first, and problematic, encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, was marked by a tempest of thunder, rain and high winds such as had seldom been seen in Rome.[19]  On the evening of the announcement by Benedict XVI of his intention to resign from the papacy, February 10^th, 2013, in filthy weather, lightning struck the dome of St Peter’s Basilica twice.[20]

_______________________

 

Consolation for the Catholic Faithful?

Given the experience of some 120 years of the Catholic Church’s sufferings at the hands of heretics and schismatics since Our Blessed Lady’s appearance at La Salette, her prophecies, if correctly reported, may offer the Catholic faithful some hope for the future.  If, as she is said to have prophesied, the anti-Christ is already seated on the throne of Peter and the two ‘worm-ridden’ popes have already appeared, we may hope that the next Pope will offer a return to some sort of sanity and restoration of the Catholic Church to her rightful position as mistress in her own house.  At the very least this will require the Pope who replaces Bergoglio to acknowledge a distinction between the Church that Christ founded and the counterfeit Church of Vatican II.

 

The groundwork for this return to sanity has already been laid by the opposition to Vatican II and to the mindset of Paul VI and John Paul II by the late Archbishop Lefebvre carried on by the Society he established and the religious and faithful who have associated themselves with its work.  It is as a result of the Archbishop’s much-criticised initiative in 1988 of consecrating, with Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, bishops to ensure the ordination of priests to celebrate Mass in the millennial Roman rite, that has enabled the Society of St Pius X to grow as it has.  It was his initiative, moreover, that precipitated the reaction which produced within the Church of Vatican II the Priestly Society of St Peter and other associations of priests dedicated to offering Mass in the millennial Roman rite.

 

For all Pope Benedict’s shortcomings, then, his action of lifting the ‘excommunications’ removed much of the opposition to Archbishop Lefebvre’s initiative among the Catholic faithful.  Despite the ravaging of Christ’s Church and of the faith that flowed from the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Spirit remains her soul.  His program to expose the counterfeit Church for its imposture, and to place on the throne of Peter a Pope unaffected by its modernist poison, will come to pass in the fulness of time.

 

Magna est Veritas et Praevalebit!

 

December 25^th, 2024—Christmas Day