De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

The National Catholic Register  holds this interesting interview with Cardinal Pell: During a visit this month to St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, Cardinal Pell spoke with Register senior editor Joan Frawley Desmond about the spiritual impact of incarceration, his decision to forgive his accuser and the Vatican financial corruption trial that may be linked to his own case. You left your position as the inaugural prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy to stand trial in Australia, suspending your campaign to reform the Vatican’s financial system. Later, you learned that significant sums of money were transferred to Australia around the time of your arraignment in 2017. Are you confident that these allegations will come up in the Vatican trial? I’m not confident of anything with the Vatican trial. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not even entirely sure that it will go ahead. It might fail for legal reasons. There’s no doubt that 2,300,000 [Australian dollars] w...

  Getting on for a couple of weeks ago now, J.D. Flynn, Editor in Chief & Co-Founder of The Pillar Tweeted that he was in Rome; Borgo Pio is literally the next street to St. Peter's Square. I’m sure this restaurant has a name, but I find “that place on the borgo with the good norcina” is all anybody needs to know where you are. pic.twitter.com/a60XatgOM9 — JD Flynn (@jdflynn) July 16, 2021 Something was afoot. A matter of a few days later, the news about Mgsr Burrill — former General Secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops — broke . Today it became a bit clearer what the boys were up to. I think this is the key bit of the report: The Pillar met for more than 90 minutes with both Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, along with Dr. Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Vatican’s dicastery for communications, to present its findings July 17. The meeting’s discussion was agreed by all parties to be mutually confidential, but the fact of the meeting was not its...

George Neumayr, author of The Political Pope and the man who famously confronted a gaggle of American Cardinals in Rome , makes an important point in The American Spectator while commenting on Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's latest intervention. He reminds us that, although Cardinal Sandri has been chosen by the Pope to be "pilot of the next conclave secundum Franciscum " (a scandalous choice, given he is utterly compromised, having played a role in covering up the monstrous misdeeds of Marcial Maciel, the Legion of Christ founder) Pope Francis has already put another Maciel acoylyte in a position of power and influence for the next conclave: Cardinal Kevin Farrell. Farrell was promoted to camerlengo at the same time that his mentor Theodore McCarrick was defrocked. Farrell, the head of the Vatican’s office of Laity, Life and Family, was consecrated as a bishop by McCarrick in 2001 after McCarrick was installed as Archbishop of Washington. Farrell was a clos...

Some incredible things going on this week - Steve summarises it better than I can in this short video, especially the ridiculous new proposal from the useless Catholic Bishops of England & Wales! Tagle is interesting. He is largely reported as being a problematic liberal but I think it is important that we avoid guilt by association. Cardinal Tagle is a seriously respected theologian (unlike Pope Francis's chosen personal theological adviser and scribe  Archbishop Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández ). Tagle was appointed to the International Theological Commission under Cardinal Ratzinger's Presidency, consecrated bishop by Pope St John Paul II, archbishop by Pope Benedict XVI who then created him Cardinal. He did not not abuse their trust in him. Some commentators are suggesting he has been an advocate for and on behalf of the position that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics should be admitted to Holy Communion. The fact is that he offered a cautious opinion ...