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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Up and Down, Up and Down: Follow the Bouncing Scalfari Interview, and More about that “Celestine” Jubilee Year

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Up and Down, Up and Down: Follow the Bouncing Scalfari Interview, and More about that “Celestine” Jubilee Year

Remember that explosive “interview” Pope Francis gave to the radical Leftist and atheist Eugenio Scalfari? Not the third one, just published in La Repubblica, but the first one, published in that same newspaper on October 1 of last year, featured in L’Osservatore Romano, and lodged on the Vatican website as one of Francis’s speeches, thus seemingly making it part of his rather liquid magisterium.   You know, the one in which Francis is said to have declared that he does not believe in a Catholic God, that everyone should pursue his own vision of good and evil, and other “greatest hits” of what the press delights in calling a “headline-grabbing papacy.”

Recall that after one of the by now routine semi-disclaimers by Father Lombardi—who called the interview “faithful to the thought” of Francis and “reliable in a general sense”­­­—the text was removed from vatican.va in embarrassment. Well, the same interview suddenly reappeared on the Vatican website this week, in both English and Italian, and was included once again among the Pope’s speeches. But, after this stupefying development was noted by Antonio Socci and the Mundabor and Chiesa et Postconcilio blog sites, the “interview” was removed again, and the link provided by these bloggers now redirects searchers to the Vatican home page.

As Socci asked before the interview was taken down for the second time: “What is going on at the Vatican?” What indeed? I await Socci’s and other commentators’ reaction to the second removal, as well as the Vatican’s “clarification” of how this could have happened.

Speaking of the burning question of what is going on at the Vatican, it has been brought to my attention that Francis’s declaration of a Jubilee Year dedicated to Pope Celestine, who abdicated the papal throne on account of his own incompetence, duplicates Pope Benedict’s own declaration of a Celestine Year in 2009. In a speech announcing that declaration, then Secretary of State Cardinal Bertone noted that during a visit to Celestine’s tomb in that year, Benedict had laid his pallium, the symbol of his authority, on the tomb—a clear indication of his own approaching abdication (as Socci noted in his accurate prediction that Benedict would resign the papacy in his eighty-fifth year).


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Two Celestine years since 2009? Two entire years devoted to a Pope who resigned the papacy in disgrace after a few calamitous months in office? Was Francis even aware of Benedict’s declaration of a Celestine Year? If so, why would he declare another Celestine Year? If not, then how could Pope Bergoglio have so little knowledge of the acts of his own immediate predecessor regarding the very same subject matter?

 The mystery and confusion surrounding this papacy deepens with each passing day. We have never been to this place before, and who knows where we are headed next.

 

 

Last modified on Thursday, July 17, 2014
Christopher A. Ferrara

Christopher A. Ferrara: President and lead counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Inc., Mr. Ferrara has been at the forefront of the legal defense of pro-lifers for the better part of a quarter century. Having served with the legal team for high profile victims of the culture of death such as Terri Schiavo, he has long since distinguished him a premier civil rights Catholic lawyer.  Mr. Ferrara has been a lead columnist for The Remnant since 2000 and has authored several books published by The Remnant Press, including the bestseller The Great Façade. Together with his children and wife, Wendy, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.