Do you have a hard time understanding Pope Francis? Are you wondering what he s trying to accomplish? What if I told you that a secret group of leftist cardinals conspired to elect Pope Francis, contravening rules for papal elections? Well, some of you may have already heard of the St. Gallen Mafia, but we have with us an amazing journalist, one of the best researchers I know, who has done a deep dive into the inner workings of this group. And what is most startling is how their stated agenda falls totally in line with the Francis papacy.
00:03:06.460So it's a group of high-ranking churchmen.
00:03:09.520And they started meeting at or near St. Gallen, Switzerland in the mid-1990s.
00:03:17.5401996 is usually the date we're given for when they officially start.
00:03:21.820And the figurehead, the dominant personality of the group is Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini.
00:03:30.300And he had been a Jesuit biblical scholar, and then he became the Archbishop of Milan.
00:03:36.820And in the 1990s, he was kind of seen as the next pope.
00:03:44.020At least the world wanted him to be the next pope after Pope John Paul II.
00:03:48.800And he gave some prominent interviews where he kind of signaled that he was a little flexible, let's say, on things like contraception and women priests and that sort of thing.
00:04:00.780Kind of just hinting, having a kind of ambiguity that's very suggestive.
00:04:06.500You could even call it Jesuitical, you know, the way that he would answer questions.
00:04:10.560So it's right around the same time that he's being, that talk of him as being bandied about as the next pope, that he founds this group called the St. Gallen Mafia.
00:04:23.300And the then bishop of that area in Switzerland, Ivo Fuhrer, was the person who would host these meetings.
00:04:37.880And some of the other dominant personalities would be Cardinal Walter Kasper.
00:04:45.580He's the German theologian who, of course, had the Kasper proposal for communion for the divorced and simply remarried.
00:04:52.400He was, he was there, Cardinal, he wasn't a Cardinal then, but Carl Lehman, another German, another, he was actually an assistant at one time to Carl Rahner, one of the dominant towering figures of the Second Vatican Council.
00:05:14.480And so a lot of these people, they were, they were kind of like the next, they were like the heirs to the Vatican to big personalities.
00:05:24.400And there were other figures that came in.
00:05:29.420Cardinal Achilles Silvestrini was an important one.
00:05:33.520And he was an Italian diplomat and he was very kind of scheming, maneuvering.
00:05:38.660And he came into the group in, I believe, 2003, because Martini, the man who should have become the next pope, he got Parkinson's disease.
00:05:49.340And so he had to leave the group, but he still was kind of this spiritual presence for the group.
00:05:57.880So even though he formally left, allegedly in 2003, he remains kind of the dominant figure throughout all of this.
00:07:38.300Cardinal Caspar was the same guy who fought Pope Benedict all those years ago while he was still Ratzinger in the CDF over the issue of communion for the divorce and remarried.
00:07:50.660But that didn't figure in right away on day three of the papacy.
00:07:53.740It was more like, oh, here's the theologian who's doing such great theology.
00:07:56.820And we were like, oh, that's kind of strange.
00:07:59.480Layout for us was, if you will, Cardinal Caspar and his connection here to Pope Francis.
00:08:05.580We know from interviews that Caspar has has done and, you know, this is documented in the book.
00:08:12.780There's there's like over 600 footnotes.
00:08:15.140So there's quite a lot of documentation here if people want to look any of this up.
00:08:20.500But we know from interviews that Caspar met Bergoglio when he was a cardinal, I believe, in Argentina, and he actually went back several times and had visits with Bergoglio.
00:08:39.460But this really interesting narrative comes up, which kind of ignores that mysterious prior connection that they had.
00:08:48.420And basically talks about the famous story that like, oh, in the con, you know, around the time of the 2013 conclave, Caspar had just gotten the Spanish translation, Spanish edition of his book, Mercy.
00:09:08.740Bergoglio happened to be like the room across from him.
00:09:11.720And so he went to Bergoglio and shared it with him.
00:09:14.340And then allegedly that was kind of like how he got on on Bergoglio's radar.
00:09:19.780So this becomes this kind of legend there.
00:09:22.520And then it becomes this explanatory event to to account for why Pope Francis is praising him three days in.
00:09:32.160But again, as I said, there appears to have been a prior history of visits.
00:09:37.240And we know that the mafia was talking about Bergoglio and in 2001, because Bergoglio had been the one of the synodal officials for the October synod that they had on collegiality.
00:09:53.900And he especially impressed Cardinal Godfrey Daniles, who's who's another important personality in this group.
00:10:03.400So that's kind of a little bit about that.
00:10:05.400It's a very interesting history, because what you note about him going to visit Bergoglio.
00:10:11.780So Caspar and Bergoglio are visiting in Argentina.
00:10:15.300And nevertheless, we have this then story as if, you know, it comes the whole idea and notion of the, you know, divorce, remarriage communion comes from this beautiful exchange.
00:10:25.600Pope Francis reads Cardinal Caspar's work and just is so inspired, gets him to lead off the discussion about that issue of divorce, remarriage communion, which then leads to the first extraordinary citizen of the family, second citizen of the family, Morris Letitia, where, of course, the whole of the church teaching gets turned upside down by Pope Francis, led in a way by Cardinal Caspar.
00:10:46.860But interestingly, they had this connection before.
00:11:05.140He gets dropped off when in Argentina, still as Cardinal, he gets dropped off a couple of blocks before the rectory so he can be shown to walk there.
00:11:13.780There's a other famous story of him, you know, one of his aides having taken his suitcase, his bag, the Pope's bag, up onto the plane already.
00:11:22.320And he scolds him and says, no, no, no, I know I wanted to carry it in myself.
00:11:35.340All the cafeteria workers were told they're not allowed to talk to him unless, of course, they're tapped and then they're supposed to be the ones who talk to him.
00:11:41.460So there's a lot of setup, unfortunately, that has gone on in the Vatican in recent days.
00:11:46.660But let's deal with this cardinal that you now brought up, because I think Cardinal Daniels is also a very central figure in this whole thing.
00:12:07.980He's the one who confessed everything.
00:12:10.240He's the one who had the need to boast.
00:12:12.220His biography was coming out, I believe, in the fall of 2015.
00:12:17.540And he was on stage and there's video of him where he's just smiling about the fact that, you know, oh, we called ourselves the Mafia.
00:12:31.620So that's where we, you know, definitely where we get the name from.
00:12:37.140And Daniels is an incredibly important and disturbing figure because he, for anyone who doesn't know, he had been caught on tape trying to quiet a sexual abuse victim.
00:12:54.080And this victim was a man who had been abused by his own uncle who became a bishop, a bishop under Daniels.
00:13:03.340And he had been abused from the age of five to 18.
00:13:08.380And he can be heard on the tape saying things like, why are you always taking the side of my abuser?
00:13:14.740I thought I was coming here to get support from you and you're always taking his side.
00:13:20.660So it's really devastating when you actually look at the transcripts.
00:13:25.980And yet, nevertheless, he begins speaking about how he had a resurrection.
00:13:33.660That's his imagery, a resurrection under Pope Francis.
00:13:38.660And he's very important because I think he's where we get the name Francis from.
00:13:44.620We talked about, you know, you were talking very eloquently about setups.
00:13:47.900We all know that, you know, the story of how Pope Francis got his name sounds pretty spontaneous and inspired, right?
00:13:56.060Because Cardinal Humus says, don't forget the poor.
00:13:59.480And a light bulb goes, turns on in Cardinal Bergoglio's mind, who's now Pope Francis.
00:14:07.600And he just decides to become Francis.
00:14:11.260Well, Daniels, of all people, you know, I document this in the book.
00:14:16.200In the 1990s, he was talking about how we need a new Francis.
00:14:20.760Multiple times he has an essay about it.
00:14:23.260And he was telling people about it as well.
00:14:26.800We have documentation of that from the New York Times.
00:14:30.220And right before the 2013 conclave, he gave a press conference and said, we need a Francis.
00:14:38.080So this is another moment where so many of these moments that appear to be, like, beautifully spontaneous and quaint in that way, they appear to be completely scripted.
00:14:51.940The spontaneity is completely programmed into them.
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00:15:22.620What's amazing about this and that hugely close connection there between Daniels and Francis is that for all the world, and I mean even the secular world, Daniels should have been a total scandal.
00:15:34.760The reason why he needed to be resurrected, as he said, by Francis was because he was totally shunted byāwell, after he was named Cardinal, but nonethelessāshunted by Pope JP II in the end of his papacy and also Benedict.
00:15:48.500Because not only is he on record as having been caught, not only covering up, trying to, as you said, silence a victim about the sexual incestuous pedophilia of his uncle, who's a bishop under Daniels, but also because in the Catholic world, he was not pro-life at all.
00:16:13.720In fact, he okayed the King of Belgium to go ahead and legalize abortion.
00:16:17.640He actually is public about wearing a rainbow stall.
00:16:22.360This is a scandal to the faith in so many ways, even the secular way, and yet Francis resurrects him in his own words.
00:16:30.920Let's go on to another one of these figures that I think is really the central character in the story.
00:16:37.200And this is where we come up with some of the mostāand you lay out some of the most fascinating details that explain Francis, that really, for all those of us who are scratching our heads going,
00:16:54.840Your book brings a clarity that really is hard to find, and it's because of this connection to the Cardinal you mentioned off the top, Cardinal Martini, Archbishop of Milan.
00:17:07.220Tell us a little bit more about him and his connection to Pope Francis.
00:17:12.840The book isāit has many different chapters, many different personalities.
00:17:17.460I try toāfor most of the chapters, I try to pick one person to kind of focus on, and then I lay out an issue and a narrative based on that person.
00:17:26.980So Martini has several chapters, but at the end of the day, he's the catalyst for everything, the center of gravity, and Martini is interesting because we have testimony from Nicholas Diat, who talked to a Cardinal, and the Cardinal indicated that Martini, in the 2005 Conclave, under no circumstances, wanted to support Bergoglio.
00:17:54.540So Silvestrini, who I mentioned earlier, was kind of spearheading the movement for Bergoglio to be backed by the mafia, but Martini was unpersuadable.
00:18:09.240And then something happened, because if you look at the late Martini, Eugenio Scalfari indicates that when Martini was, you know, getting close to his deathbed in the last couple months, he was talking about the positions that he shared with Bergoglio.
00:18:26.660And then you also have, we have at least one of his works, again, I cite it in the book, but where Martini is quoting Bergoglio in his works.
00:18:44.100We know that from Austin Ivory, who's the papal biographer of Francis, but this was the time Martini was quoting Bergoglio.
00:18:52.440So, they have this interesting dynamic, and then basically, what the book tries to lay out is the case that we have the ghost of Cardinal Martini after he dies.
00:19:06.660And that phrase, ghost of Cardinal Martini, is a very eloquent phrase that the Vaticanista Edward Penton talks about in one of his pieces.
00:19:17.360And I think for me, if I can just focus on one particular instance here, we've seen Pope Francis go to Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist, for a lot of interviews, right?
00:19:31.460Now, there are multiple interviews that Martini gave to Scalfari, and one of the interviews talked about the Pope being the Bishop of Rome.
00:19:46.920And it also talked about having councils, and they would be serial, and one of them would be, the first one, the most important one to have would be on the divorced.
00:20:00.840And then the second or third most important one would be on priestly celibacy.
00:20:08.260Oh, yeah, it should be. You have Francis, who refers to himself over and over again as the Bishop of Rome.
00:20:13.460We have this now ongoing synod over and over and over again.
00:20:18.440And we had the very first, you know, very first one, extraordinary first, on the issue of the family, which was really all about, from its beginning,
00:20:27.580divorced, remarried communion, and spearheaded by Casper. Continue.
00:20:30.560We have the Amazon synod that, you know, was supposed to make headway on the ordination of married men.
00:20:37.620So that's, again, coming from Martini.
00:20:40.000And the interesting thing is, when Pope Francis gave that kind of bombshell October 2013 interview with Scalfari,
00:20:50.440one of the first things that he says in that interview is, they're talking about, they're kind of joking, like,
00:20:58.520Scalfari saying, oh, my friends say you want to convert me. And then Pope Francis assures him he doesn't want to convert him.
00:21:06.580And then he says proselytism is solemn nonsense, according to the interview, of course.
00:21:13.740In the Scalfari-Martini interview from, I believe, somewhere around 2009,
00:21:21.260this one that was talking about a council for the divorced,
00:21:23.680a very similar thing happens at the beginning, where Martini says, don't worry, I'm not going to proselytize you.
00:21:31.740So it's like very, a very tight connection between the two, I think.
00:21:37.200It's amazing, you know, the layout of your book showing basically the plans of the Sangalan Mafia,
00:21:45.320particularly of Martini, but also even his mentor, layout, and it's even called A Hundred Days of the First Pope,
00:21:54.580but the absolute lockstep fashion in which this seems to be rolled out is incredible.
00:22:01.320One of the things, for instance, that struck me was the issue of the red shoes.
00:22:05.200Everybody remembers Francis Garburit of the red shoes.
00:22:08.120But where was that in discussion by the Sangalan Mafia?
00:22:11.880We have somewhere where Casper was joking about the red shoes.
00:22:15.980And then we have, I found some testimony where his Martini's sister was talking about how Martini,
00:22:23.780you know, as early as like the early 1980s, you know, he didn't like the red socks.
00:22:30.400And I mean, this, this fixation seems, it seems kind of silly, right?
00:22:36.080The, the different, talking about different items of clothing and everything.
00:22:41.300But to, to these men, it was symbolic of a monarchical princely church versus a down to earth,
00:22:53.900And the book tries to kind of lay out how we can, we can look at things like the choices about the shoes and everything
00:23:03.540and see a symbolism and see how that eventually gets us to the type of person who wants to do that
00:23:12.780is the same type of person who might wave a white flag of surrender and to the, to the dictatorship of relativism as, as Benedict called it.
00:23:22.660I think one of the most striking things about Pope Francis was one of, in one of the very first interviews,
00:23:29.780the world was introduced to him and it was so revolutionary.
00:23:33.940His comment about homosexuality and same-sex civil relationships is saying, who am I to judge?
00:23:41.040And if that's, that's, that's basically emblematic of Pope Francis, not only on the issue of homosexuality,
00:23:48.540but it's sort of like on everything immoral.
00:23:51.400But even that has its origin, not in Pope Francis, but in Martini, if you wouldn't mind explaining.
00:23:59.980This is something that the, the Italian author that, um, Antonio Sochi, uh, really registers and, and wrote it, wrote about, um, basically there's this eerie echo that you can hear when you take, who am I to judge?
00:24:19.680And then you take something that Martini said, which is, I would never think of judging, um, a same-sex couple.
00:24:29.720Um, I'm loosely paraphrasing it, but the idea, um, I, I would never think to judge that is there.
00:24:38.840And, um, so she heard the connection and he actually, he has a book where, um, I forget which one of the books it is, but, um, where he, he takes a bunch of statements from Pope Francis and just puts them side by side with statements from Martini.
00:24:58.280And he basically says, you know, Francis seems to be using Martini's book, Night, Night Conversations as a kind of canvas.
00:25:09.880Um, and, and again, I, I mentioned before, but we, we know from Austin Ivory, the papal biographer, and he was actually the spokesperson for Murph, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, who's another mafia member.
00:25:24.380But, um, we know from him that, that, that, that Bergoglio loved to quote Martini.
00:25:31.560So, um, sometimes he'll quote, even as Pope now, sometimes he will quote Martini explicitly.
00:25:38.160And he did that, I think in December, I want to say 2021, if it, if it wasn't 2021, it was 2020.
00:25:46.120But he, he quotes Martini's last speech where Martini was saying, like, you know, the church is 200 years behind.
00:25:56.960So he explicitly talks about, says that this is from Cardinal Martini.
00:26:01.140But then he has these other moments where he says things like, um, we, we need to listen to, um, the, the, the, the God of surprises, the surprises of the Holy Spirit, that sort of thing.
00:26:13.880Martini is on record talking about the surprises of the Holy Spirit.
00:26:19.020So it's, it's very, it's very pervasive, definitely.
00:26:23.320I want to conclude with this, encourage people really to go out and get your book, uh, Sangala Mafia, available from TAN Books and Publishers, uh, really faithful publishing house.
00:26:34.400Uh, congratulations on the work, by the way, just amazing.
00:26:36.580But tell us, because this gives us sort of, um, an indication of where Francis is coming from, one of the big questions we're left with is, where are we heading to?
00:26:48.580So from your research into the Sangala Mafia, where is this going?
00:27:00.780And just like maybe two weeks later, um, was when Tradiciones Custodas came out.
00:27:07.240And it's obviously, you know, this, this kind of attack on the, the traditional Latin mass has obviously, um, you know, it appears to be a devastating one.
00:27:18.280And I think Peter Kwasniewski compared it to a, kind of like an, an atomic bomb, basically.
00:27:25.560And, um, I was, you know, even as someone who has studied the, the mafia for this book, you know, I, I was surprised by what a, what a bombshell, um, you know, that this development was.
00:27:39.700And I, I wrote kind of an article that I kind of view as kind of an afterword, um, or companion to the book, because it just talks about how the, the mafia also had a, a kind of war against the traditional Latin mass and Pope Benedict's Summorum Pontificum, um, which, which, um, tried to make it more wild, widely available.
00:28:04.380Um, so I think this is, you know, one of the major battlegrounds that, um, is, you know, even, it's even worse than I, than I could have anticipated and predicted.
00:28:15.440And then we have the synod on synodality, this kind of two-year process.
00:28:20.340And that, that just screams Martini because Martini, um, had this 1999 dream speech where he, he basically laid out the groundwork for a series of synods.
00:28:34.380Um, so this was before the Scalfari interview that talked about the council on the divorce and it used code words, but you can read into it.
00:28:43.760And it's basically the same thing we were talking about.
00:28:45.900It's things like deaconesses and priestly, priestly celibacy and that sort of thing.
00:28:51.240But, um, to, to, to make, to focus so much on making the church synodal, I, I think it's incredible.
00:28:59.460It's also incredibly devastating because, um, Edward Penton has a really great article about how some experts are comparing permanent synodality, which is Martini's idea to permanent revolution.
00:29:14.860So, um, to me, what I say to people is these two things, traditionus custodius and the synod on synodality.
00:29:23.760Um, it's, it's like the mood of an end game.
00:29:26.240I mean, these are, these are the prizes now.
00:29:29.760And, um, I, I, yeah, I'm, I'm incredibly worried.
00:29:35.080And I think we need to just have a lot of, um, vigilance about this and continue to, to speak out.
00:29:43.480We've, we've done this before with other synods and I think we can, we can do it again, just, you know, monitoring the situation very, very carefully.
00:29:51.660Julia, I know you as a very faithful Catholic, uh, someone who's very learned and studied and, and you've done a lot of research into this.
00:30:00.480You've seen the muck of things in a way that few people have, how do you maintain your hope?
00:30:06.080And, uh, what do you see as, uh, the real end to all of this?
00:30:10.740A couple of years ago, I think, I think you guys, LifeSite published, um, a reflection that Matthew McCusker from, I believe, Voice of the Family did about, um, how it's, it's important when you're in the pro-life, pro-family.
00:30:29.160Um, any, any, any one of these movements, it's very important to, um, have something concrete that keeps you hopeful, um, because it's, it's very, you know, it's, it's very spiritually exhausting work to have to, to deal with this all the time.
00:30:47.720And, um, and he talks specifically about Fatima and the First Saturday's Devotion.
00:30:53.560And, um, that, that's something that's really important to me.
00:30:57.980Um, I, I like to tell people one kind of way to live out the First Saturday's Devotion is if you can do it one time, all, all five Saturdays, you know, you might try doing it kind of like a perpetual first, first Saturday, um, devotion.
00:31:15.500So I've done that when I can, where I'll just do another five Saturdays.
00:31:19.860And then if I can, I'll do another five Saturdays, but that's something concrete that I think kind of keeps us, gives us graces to continue on.
00:31:29.800Um, and in terms of how this ends, um, it ends with, with the, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
00:31:38.220Um, it's important to remember Martini and the St. Gallin Mafia, they, they don't have the last, the last word on any of this.
00:31:46.820And it's, it's up to us to be faithful to our vocations and, um, to try to, to do as Our Lady has asked and to just have hope that, that we will see what she has promised.
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00:32:36.360Thanks for watching and may God bless you.