The Italians have a saying, “dimmi con chi vai e ti dirò chi sei,” which translates as “tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are.”

At this point in the calamitous pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the list of his friends—those near to his heart, on whom he has lavished special attention­—tell us quite clearly who he is:

·         a lady abortionist turned radical Left politician in Italy, who boasted of performing thousands of illegal abortions with a bicycle pump;

·         people living in adultery, whom he counsels to receive Holy Communion without an amendment of life, disregarding any priestly advice to the contrary;

·         flagrant homosexuals living in “unions” based on sodomy;

·         the flagrantly homosexual priest he placed in charge of his household;

·         a pro-homosexual activist priest, whose hands he kissed;

·         “transgenders,” including one who mutilated herself to resemble a man, pretended to be “engaged” to “marry” another woman, and then had a personal audience with Francis, accompanied by his imaginary “fiancée.”

·         the defrocked, child-molesting priest he reinstated and whose suspension of faculties under Benedict XVI he lifted, thus overruling the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith;

·         a bishop who covered up for a child-molesting priest;

·         the notoriously modernist German Cardinal whose notion of “mercy” in the form of Holy Communion for public adulterers in “second marriages” Francis has been promoting from the beginning of his pontificate;

·         a Cardinal who participates in balloon Masses and is Francis’ official spokesman regarding Amoris Laetitia’s opening to Holy Communion for the divorced and “remarried”;

·         still another cardinal of notorious heterodoxy, who covered up for a child-molesting priest, had to resign in disgrace, later plotted for Francis’ election, and then was rewarded by being named to the rigged Synod on the Family;

·         a member of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta who oversaw the distribution of contraceptives, was duly dismissed from his position by the Order’s governing Council when he refused to resign, but then—in a flagrant violation of all applicable laws and norms—was forcibly reinstated by Francis after he had also forced the head the Order to resign;

·         the radically Leftwing, atheist journalist to whom he has made innumerable scandalous remarks reported in the press;

·         Loony Anglican and Lutheran clerics of all sorts, including lady “bishops”;

·         a liberal rabbi and a Muslim leader;

·         various Protestant ministers, with one of whom he “high-fived”;

·         a Marxist priest who thinks Fidel Castro was gift of the Holy ghost and whose suspension by John Paul was lifted by Francis;

·         Liberation theologians, including Leonardo Boff, who abandoned the priesthood and attempted marriage;

·         moral theologians who dissent from Humanae Vitae; including Bernard Häring, perhaps the most infamous of the dissenters;

·         communist dictators, including Fidel Castro and Raul Castro;

·         Marxist dictators, including the one who gave him a hammer-and-sickle “crucifix” he personally took back with him to Rome;

·         radical environmentalist ideologues;

·         atheist population controllers, who promote contraception, abortion and sterilization;

·         Barack Obama;

·         Liberal politicians, rock stars and loony Left Hollywood actors who despise the Church but love Francis;

·         the promoters of the Super Bowl and the Lady Gaga half-time show;

·         every Catholic who is divorced and “remarried,” is involved in homosexual activity, uses contraception, or is otherwise not a “rigorist” who thinks that the negative precepts of the divine and natural law are without exception;

·         Liberal Protestants and Muslim apologists in general.

This list, while seemingly exhaustive, is by no means complete, but it will have to suffice. On the other hand, it is far easier to list those who are not friends of Francis:

·         Orthodox Catholics, including the cardinals and bishops he has sacked, the traditional orders he has destroyed, and the many young people who are devoted to the Church’s liturgical tradition.

·         Conservative or populist politicians—above all, Donald Trump, against whom he has just launched a barely veiled attack in his latest papal video (read: manifesto).

So, what do we know about Francis based on the friends of Francis? We know what Antonio Socci has stated with unsparing candor: that with the end of the Obama regime, the fall of Hillary Clinton and rise of Western populism, Francis is “the only point of reference for the international Left, deprived of a leader,” whereas for the Catholic faithful he is “ever more perceived as a politician and a foreign body” in the Church.

I think the phrase “foreign body” says it all.

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and his wife, praying in the White House alongside President Trump, his family, staff members, and Father Paul Scalia, son of the late Justice, who offers the Latin Mass.
(Time for another Soros-sponsored 'spontaneous' protest, PRONTO!)

The nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the “Scalia seat” on the Supreme Court has already received its existential verification as a victory for what passes for judicial conservatism in America: the loony Left, already on the verge of declaring civil war, is now writhing and moaning in a collective fit of apoplexy.

Bergoglio confers with a chief co-conspirator

Purely from the standpoint of ecclesiastical history, the Bergoglian pontificate is a fascinating anomaly. Never before has the Church witnessed a Pope fanatically devoted to the overthrow in practice of universally applicable, exceptionless negative precepts of the natural moral law, beginning with Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.

URGENTLY IMPORTANT HIGH PRIORITY BREAKING NEWS

Special to the Remnant

In retaliation for alleged hacking of the email of the Democratic National Committee and its Chairman, John Podesta, President Obama has announced the explusion of 35 Russian diplomats and the closure of two Russian diplomatic compounds (in New York and Maryland).

“Never again must Russian hackers be allowed to reveal the truth about the machinations of my party,” said Obama in his statement on the sanctions. “This interference in our corrupt political process is intolerable.”

Russia has denied any involvement in the hacking, and Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has insisted that the Russian government was not the source of the emails WikiLeaks released to the public. While the Obama administration has yet to release any evidence of Russian involvement, intelligence sources in the intelligence community have reached a consensus that Russia was behind the hacking based on evidence that cannot be published because it is Top Secret evidence that no one is allowed to see—even in a closed Congressional briefing the intelligence community has declined to provide. “Even those who found this evidence are not allowed to see it. That’s how Top Secret it is,” said Ben Nascosto, a CIA spokesman.

Obama has promised, however, that his administration will release a review of the consensus by the intelligence sources in the intelligence community just in time to cast a cloud over the inauguration of President Trump, who “would not have been elected if Russia had not embarrassed Hillary,” said a DNC source involved in the intelligence review. The review will not include the Top Secret evidence because it will still be Top Secret.

“We certainly can’t let Russia know why there is a consensus that Russia is behind the hacking, because then the Russians would know how we arrive at consensuses, which itself is a Top Secret process,” said Nascosto.  “The people who are demanding to see evidence don’t understand how the intelligence community works. The primary evidence for an intelligence community consensus is the consensus. We would not have reached a consensus that Russia was behind this if we were not convinced that it must have been Russia. That conviction led to the consensus that is the basis for our consensus.”

“It is simply outrageous that Trump does not take the consensus of the intelligence community seriously,” said John Podesta in comments on the sanctions. “I find it alarming that the man about to be sworn in as President does not have implicit faith in the trustworthiness of the CIA in particular—as if that revered intelligence agency would spread disinformation or put out a hit on people like Putin does. How can anyone govern this country if he does not trust the CIA?”

Commenting on the sanctions during a press conference in Moscow, Vladimir Putin remarked: “This is a joke, right? No, really? 35 of our people expelled? For crying out loud, Russia was not involved! I told that clown Obama when I last met him and he told me to ‘cut it out.’ Cut what out? How about some evidence? I can’t wait until Trump is inaugurated and I can start dealing with an adult. Give me a break.”

When asked why there had been no sanctions for previous alleged Russian hacking involving classified information in federal agency data banks, compromising national security, Obama replied: “That was nothing personal, just espionage. We do it to them, they do it to us. But here we’re talking about Hillary and her turn to be President. If not for Russian interference, my legacy of abortion, contraception, sodomy, transgender bathrooms, massive illegal immigration, spreading Islamic terror and unaffordable health care would have remained intact with her. This outrageous interference in the folly of the democratic process cannot go unpunished. Russia must pay and the American people must know that Russia stole this election for Trump, according to the consensus of the intelligence community, no matter how many electoral votes he supposedly won. And, as we know, Hillary won the popular vote in Los Angeles and New York. So there’s that.”

In view of Russia’s hacking of the election, actor Martin Sheen has formed a coalition of celebrities and Democratic Party strategists in another last-ditch attempt to prevent Trump from taking power. The Mahogany Box Coalition aims to prevent Congress from counting the electoral votes that were placed in the traditional mahogany boxes by the electoral colleges that voted in each state before being sent to Washington for the count before a joint session of Congress on January 6.

“Who says they have to open those damn boxes?” Sheen asked. “If those boxes stay shut, no electoral votes can be counted and Trump will not be President. It’s that simple. The members of Congress have a duty under the Constitution not to open those boxes. The Founders wisely envisioned those boxes as the last defense against a dangerous homophobic maniac becoming president and launching all of our nuclear missiles at the first country that annoys him.”

A Keep the Boxes Shut petition online has already garnered 10 million signatures from at least 5,000 people.

The title of this post is about the last thing Remnant readers might expect from me, given my paper trail, which includes a 600-page study of the philosophy, theology, hagiography and mythology involved in the destructive rise and ever-accelerating fall of what the moderns call Liberty.

Then again, I am also on record praising the Constitution as a masterpiece of technical legal drafting whose problem consists not so much in what it provides as in what it omits: a foundation for the rights it asserts and the powers it purports to delegate and limit, that foundation being none other than God and His Law. It was not I but the Protestant President of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, who said this of the Constitution during the national chastisement of the War of 1812:

We formed our Constitution without any acknowledgement of God; without any recognition of His mercies to us, as a people, of His government, or even of His existence. The Convention, by which it was formed, never asked even once, His direction, or His blessing, upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God.

It’s Advent, the sacred season of Our Lord’s first coming. And what better time for a perpetually prattling Pope to disgust the whole Catholic world with what he seems to think is a clever analogy between irresponsible journalism and coprophilia, the perverse erotic attraction to human feces, and coprophagia, the perverse desire to eat feces.

For the second time since 2013 (when he was still Cardinal Bergoglio), Francis has uttered this scatological atrocity, this time in meandering remarks to an obscure Belgian magazine published on the Vatican website:

And then, I believe that the media should be very clear, very transparent, and not fall prey – without offence, please – to the sickness of coprophilia, which is always wanting to communicate scandal, to communicate ugly things, even though they may be true. And since people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia, it can do great harm.

UPDATE:
Religión Confidencial has published a correction of its original interview text, which I quoted in Spanish.  They got it wrong, as Mons. Vito was actually saying, according the Spanish daily, that "Pope Francis is not a Pope of other times in which those measures were used and that the Pope was not going to withdraw from them the Cardinalate dignity. The news is corrected, but we publish this rectification in case it was not enough.”   

Nevertheless, there is no change of Mons. Vito’s statement that the Pope could do so, even though he would not.  Nor is there any change to the rest of the statement. - Christopher Ferrara

For more than three years a Bergoglian mafia of handpicked soldiers in clerical garb and miters has been conducting the Capo di Tutti Capi’s relentless campaign to rub out the bimillenial teaching and discipline of the Church respecting divorced and “remarried” persons living in what even John Paul II’s often nebulous Catechism calls “a situation of permanent and public adultery.” The hit list includes the teaching of both of the Capo’s two immediate predecessors that “under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception.”

Determined to implement the Boss’s will and provoke internal schisms throughout the Church—what is a mortally sinful sacrilege in one diocese will now be viewed as “mercy” in an adjoining diocese—the antics of this mafia have reached farcical proportions in keeping with this endless farce of a papacy. In the wake of the four cardinals letter politely requesting to know, in essence, whether Francis intends to teach heresy and undermine divine and natural law, the head of the Roman Rota, Msgr. Pio Vito Pinto, has none-too-subtly threatened the four with loss of the cardinalate. As Don Vito put it during a conference in Spain: