Pope Francis Papacy Timeline -- 2014

See 2013 here.

Moving on to 2014, we see the wheels of the Francis agenda whirling along. He says many orthodox things not backed up by his actions. The media pope worship continues. "Friends of Francis" seem to be those who are most antagonistic toward orthodoxy. The pope's negative rhetoric is increasingly aimed at the orthodox who are labeled "rigid" and "Pharisaical." This harping on "rigidity" began in 2013 and is a continuous thread running through the pope's homilies and addresses. It is almost universally aimed at those who embrace orthodoxy as it's been handed down through the millennia from the Fathers of the Church and the magisterium. Francis often sounds like Obama talking about Christians who cling to their Bibles and their guns. Meanwhile he aids and abets those whose agenda includes turning the Church into one more politically correct Protestant sect in line with the Spiritus Mundi. 

• January 16, 2014: Pope Francis has personal audience with Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles. Mahony will become an important "friend of Francis" acting as papal representative following his resignation in 2011. Let's take a look at Cardinal Mahony. He is notorious for wrecking the West Coast Religious Education Congress (REC) which is a hotbed of dissent and liberalism. He also was personally disgraced when diocesan personnel files, which were finally revealed after a six-year lawsuit, showed that he covered up for over 100 predator priests in Los Angeles. Mahony was stripped of all "administrative and public church duties" in the Archdiocese by his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, in 2013. There is ample evidence of Mahony's misdeeds including his personal sex life. Researcher and psychologist Richard Sipe exposed Mahony to the Vatican (as he did McCarrick) but his warnings were ignored. Mahony is a master of deceit and cover-up but that doesn't seem to have diminished his reputation in Pope Francis' eyes. Despite his disgrace, a few weeks after Gomez's disciplinary action Mahony was back in the saddle. What happened? Pope Benedict resigned and the conclave to elect a new pope was imminent. Mahony participated in the conclave saying “the highest folks at the Vatican" wanted him there. Of course! He was a safe vote for the mafia. Since then Pope Francis has rehabilitated Mahony who continues to be treated as an honored prince of the Church. Mahony was among the pope's entourage in 2015 when Francis visited the United States. Francis appointed Mahony as his special envoy for the 150th anniversary of the Diocese of Scranton in 2018. Mahony withdrew after protests, presumably afraid of pickets and heckling. But he popped up again at the 2019 REC as a speaker where once again LGBTQ workshops were featured and dissent was everywhere. Mahony, an enemy of the church who belongs in jail, a man responsible for covering up hundreds of rapes and molestations of youth in his L.A. archdiocese, continues on his merry way thanks to Pope Francis! When you hear the pope talk about how horrible clerical sex abuse is and how vigorous he is to protect children, remember his friend Mahony!

• February 22, 2014: Pope Francis names 14 new cardinals.  Among them is Archbishop Vincent Nichols, a gay friendly bishop in the UK who did nothing to rein in the "Soho Masses" celebrating homosexuality. The scandalous Masses featured gay rainbow decorations with gays and transvestites serving as lectors. These supposedly "ended" in 2013 when in fact they were simply moved to another location on Farm Street run by the Jesuits where the gay liturgies were incorporated into the regular community. (Surprise!) How, after all, can the gay agenda be advanced if it's insular. After getting the red hat, Nichols said in 2015 that he wanted the Farm Street experience to become a model for the nation. Nichols also, like so many of Francis' friends, covered up sex abuse in his diocese and moved molesters around putting the reputation of the Church above the welfare of children.
  
  

  

  Transvestite lectors at gay Mass in Nichol's diocese.
  

  
  

  Vatican Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, also received the red hat. Remember, it was Parolin who played a major role in the betrayal of the Chinese underground church. Parolin engineered the agreement that the Chinese government would recognize the pope as head of the Church in China, but the government would name the bishops. Supposedly the pope would have veto power. One of the most infamous parts of the agreement was the demotion of two of the bishops in the persecuted underground church who were instructed to step down in favor of the government's picks. The Pope agreed to recognize and consecrate seven illegitimate bishops in the patriotic Church. Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong warned the pope in 2013 against making Parolin Secretary of State because of his "poisoned" mind toward China. Cardinal Zen has called for his resignation and continues to expose the betrayal of the Catholic faithful in China. The agreement with the Communist government throws millions of faithful under the bus. And persecution against the Church has escalated. Just a month after the agreement the government tore down two Marian shrines because there were two many pilgrims. Even Parolin admits that the Chinese deal is "not a good agreement" and, in fact, persecution is escalating.  Oh, and did I mention that the agreement is secret? Priests contintue to disappear and be arrested by the communists while Church politicians like Parolin fiddle.

Cardinal Zen has called for Parolin's Resignation, and warns that the Vatican agreement may lead to the "death of the true faith" in China.  The pope appears uninterested in listening and recently refused to meet with Zen shuffling him off to Parolin leading Zen to lament, "Then it is lost."

• March 27, 2014: Pope Francis has audience with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Vatican.  It's sometimes confusing trying to figure out whether Pope Francis is a religious leader or a politician as he embraces  political issues, harping on global warming and the evils of a countries defending their borders. As he attacks U.S. policy on the climate and immigration, he sounds more and more like a liberal Democrat in white, Which reminded me of the photo below. Where's Waldo Pope Francis?

• April 4, 2014: Pope Francis raises question of celibacy and married priests: As the Pan Amazon synod approaches, the question of married priests is very openly on the table, but Francis was already testing the waters five years ago when he had a private audience with Brazilian bishop Erwin Krautler. Recognize his name? He is one of the movers and shakers for the Amazon synod, the one who says he won't baptize any indigenous people and wants both married priests and women's ordination. (If you read the Topsy and Tuptim series on the synod, you are familiar with Krautler.) Are you connecting the dots? Married priests is a Francis goal and has been since he put on the papal tiara white beanie. The Pan Amazon synod is the camel's nose in the tent (actually most of the camel's body) and it's being orchestrated by the German bishops. (Almost a third of the delegates are German.) It's funded by German "charities." And it's regional so only a handful of bishops are involved. I've asked before why the African rainforest, the second lung of the world (as Francis likes to say) and its indigenous people, were not included. BECAUSE THE AFRICAN BISHOPS ARE MOSTLY ORTHODOX!  It's likely married priests were in the plan of the St. Gallen's mafia back in 2005 when they first tried to get Bergoglio elected, and continues to be on the agenda since he was lobbied into the papacy. Of course, married priests will be presented as an exception for remote areas of the Amazon, but it will quickly become the rule in Germany and other places. Bishops in England and Wales were already talking about it in 2014 as the article linke in the headline attests. 

• August 4, 2014: Pope Francis lifts suspension of Communist priest, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann. The priest was suspended by Pope John Paul II when he refused to step down from a position in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. While he was no longer in the government, there was no evidence that Brockman ever changed his communist or liberation theology views. In fact, at the time the suspension was lifted, the elderly priest had been nominated to a position at the U.N. In a letter to Barack Obama in 2013, he described Obama as "humanity's last chance," praised his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and went on a tirade against capitalism and the U.S. He asked the pope to lift the suspension so he could say Mass before he died. The pope could have allowed that quietly without scandal by giving him permission to say Masses privately. He didn't do that. The pope's public rehabilitation of Brockmann put a clear stamp of approval on the priest's leftist views. It was an ominous sign of where Francis would be taking us. 

• September 20, 2014: Pope Francis Appoints Bishop Blase J. Cupich of Spokane, Washington, as Archbishop of Chicago. Cupich got the red hat later in 2016. Cupich is notorious for his support of the LGBTQ agenda and other dissenting positions. He also seems to have taken over McCarrick's role as the pope's man in the U.S. Last November at the bishops' meeting in Baltimore when the Vatican nixed plans for addressing the sex abuse crisis, Cupich leaped up with obviously prepared remarks. While most of the bishops had no clue what was coming, Cupich seemed unsurprised and prepared. He quickly supported the Vatican's shocking move paying lip service to the pope's desire to "urgently" address the issue. The Cupich spin was that the Vatican did the bishops a favor by the delay and promised real reform later when the bishops met with the pope in February at the sex abuse summit in Rome. But the meeting in Rome did nothing of the kind. It ignored the abuse of seminarians despite the McCarrick revelations, focusing only on minors. While acknowledging that most of the victims were young boys, Cupich also stressed that homosexuality wasn't the real cause of abuse. It was power, i.e., the "clericalism" mantra. One thing was clearly evident from these events. Cupich replaced McCarrick as the powerhouse in the U.S. church with a hotline to Rome. Conference president, Cardinal Daniel Dinardo, is simply a figurehead. Cupich is one of Francis' closest allies in the American Church.

• October 5-19, 2014: Extraordinary Synod on the Family. This is only the third synod to be called since Pope Paul VI established the synodal process in 1965. Unfortunately, it has proved to be only the first of Francis' church-changing meetings which are clearly manipulated to effect changes the Church-wreckers desire. In an interview with The Wanderer, Cardinal Raymond Burke analyzed the extraordinary synod. Among his criticisms are the fact that the midterm relatio was "not a report, but a manifesto." The synod almost completely ignored the rich scriptural and magisterial teachings on marriage. The pope, who claims to respect the synodal process, ignored it by forcing three controversial paragraphs to be included in the final report although they failed to gain the 2/3 approval from the bishops. They involved Communion for the invalidly married and homosexuality, issues that Pope Francis obviously supports. It was at this synod that Cardinal Walter Kasper lied denying Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin's report when he quoted Kasper's insulting comments about the African bishops. Fortunately, Pentin recorded them. (I did a post about Kasper "liar, liar pants on fire" with this photo and the caption, "Maybe the rain will put out the flames.") 
  
  Kasper is another friend and ally of Francis who insults those who question anything Francis says or does no matter how unorthodox or confusing. Francis ignores legitimate questions like he did with the cardinals who wrote the dubia asking for clarification of Amoris Laetitia. They've never been answered. It was also during this synod that Cardinal Baldisseri, another Francis crony, intercepted a book sent to all the bishops, Remaining in the Truth of Christ, which debated points made in Kasper's book, The Gospel of the Family. (Rumor had it that Francis was outraged by the book, and Baldisseri did his criminal dirty work.) Kasper champions sacrilegious Communion for those in illicit unions and championed that in his book. The five bishops responded, defending the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage and Jesus' teaching about adultery. The books were removed from the bishops' mailboxes which involved two crimes: tampering with the mail and theft. This is the Francis Vatican! Kasper talks about "development of doctrine" in order to change it and quotes John Henry Newman, but he's not talking about development of doctrine in the same sense as Newman did.  He's working to change and corrupt doctrine. To Kasper (and Pope Francis) "development of doctrine" means doctrine is fluid and can be changed to be the exact opposite. He and Kasper both claim to uphold doctrine while they change the practice. Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister pointed this out. Read his interview with Goffredo Pistelli of Italia Oggi. [N.B. There are a number of articles on the Les Femmes blog about the family synods. Do a search if you're interested in more.]

• November 25, 2014: Addressing the European Union, Pope Francis insults grandmothers. In a speech defending the massive invasion of Europe by migrants, Francis made what can only be described as a tone-deaf and insulting slur on older women. He described the continent as a “grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant”, and then went on to say Europe risked “slowly losing its own soul." That Europe is losing its soul is true. Why? Because the West is making war on babies and the family, but that isn't what Francis was talking about. Ironically, it is the grandmothers who still populate the shrinking churches of Europe. If anyone is trying to help preserve the "soul of the continent" it's the "no longer fertile and vibrant" little old ladies in chapel veils and babushkas. This was one more example of the pope's casual insults against the orthodox. Their number is legion. (See The Pope Francis Little Book of Insults.) It's illuminating to consider that the targets of Pope Francis' insults are almost always orthodox Catholics. He praises abortionists, homosexuals, atheists, adulterers, fornicators, etc. but regularly insults faithful Catholics who love and defend the faith. 

• December 22, 2014: Pope Francis blasts the curia in his Christmas message. The pope not only scolds the curia but outlines a long naughty list of their offenses beginning with the "ailment of feeling immortal, immune or even indispensable." Francis also condemns them for being "rigid, tough and arrogant." Attacking those who defend orthodoxy as "rigid" and "pharisaical" will come up again and again to disparage the orthodox. Ironically, in retrospect many of the things Francis lambasted the curia for seem to be his own faults. (Transference perhaps?) And consider that many of the curia in 2014 were those working under Pope Benedict. Is Francis trying to create in the public mind an image of the tough reformer cleaning things up while he fills Vatican offices with his cronies? Is he creating the "deep Church" at the Vatican? Is he embedding the idea that the Benedict papacy was corrupt and he's going to change things for the better? One item of Francis' criticism is particularly interesting in retrospect: "Forming 'closed circles' that seek to be stronger than the whole." Think of the "closed circle" of the St. Gallen mafia. Think of how Francis, who calls for synodality and transparency, has ignored the dubia and other legitimate concerns raised by his flock, including bishops. When will he walk the talk?

2014 was a big year for the Church wreckers and there's plenty more that could have been added here. But it was just the beginning! Many of us, including myself, were still giving Francis the benefit of the doubt in 2014. We listened to the orthodox things he said and then wondered why we were pulling the shrapnel out of our backs when he lobbed the next grenade at faithful Catholics. We don't wonder any more.

TO BE CONTINUED....