Pope Francis Papacy Timeline: 2019

For other years documenting Pope Francis' papacy go here.

I continue to work on the papal timeline, but decided to skip from 2015 to 2019 since last year gave us such a bumper crop of scandals! Yes indeed, 2019 was a banner year for Pope Francis undermining the Faith of our Fathers with the help of his confreres!

What an understatement!

The pope follows his own advice to "make a mess" and made a mess big time in 2019! But that may be a blessing because, as evil positions itself center stage with fanfare of trumpets, rainbow banners, pagan symbols, idol worship, etc., more people are "woke"

Who could ever imagine even five years ago seeing worship of idols in the Vatican Garden including planting a tree using soil with God-knows-what mixed into it? Hopefully, if it contained blood, it wasn't the blood of unborn children offered to Pachamama and other Amazon idols. To see that bowl representing "Mother Earth" placed on the altar during the final Mass of the Amazon synod was sickening.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. So let's hit highlights (or lowlights) of 2019:

January 2019: 

January 22-27: World Youth Day in Panama -- Pope Calls for Sex Education: Another grenade launching plane interview took place on the return flight from World Youth Day. Pope Francis called for sex education in the schools. In view of the horrifying experience with explicit, Planned Parenthood style contraceptive-abortion-gender fluid education in America's public schools, parents were shocked by this recommendation. It also brought to mind the filthy and explicit sex ed program developed and promoted by the Vatican in association with the 2016 World Youth Day. Many, including some psychologists suggested the program could be used to "groom" children for sex abuse.

February 2019: 

February 4: Document on "Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together" also called the Abu Dhabi statement signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb. While much of the document is a testament to religious tolerance and non-controversial, it contained a bombshell paragraph promoting syncretism and containing the erroneous statement that God wills the "diversity of religion" which is clearly refuted by the Great Mission given to the Apostles to go forth and convert the entire world in the name of the Holy Trinity.  The paragraph reads:

 Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept;

 When Bishop Athanasius Schneider asked the pope personally and explicitly if he meant the "permissive will" of God, the pope replied that, “You can say that the phrase in question on the diversity of religions means the permissive will of God.” But he has never corrected or clarified the statement, so the confusion and the easily misinterpreted sentence continue to promote syncretism, i.e., that all religions are essentially the same. Unfortunately, this kind of confusion is typical of Pope Francis and appears to be a deliberate pattern, just like the statements in interviews with the atheist reporter, Eugenio Scalfari, which have resulted in so much controversy.

Fr. Thomas Weinandy also weighed in on the controversy in an interview with LifeSiteNews:

LifeSite spoke with Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy, a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission and former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops’ committee on doctrine, about the controversy. 

In 2017, Fr. Weinandy wrote a letter to Pope Francis (which was subsequently made public) saying his pontificate is marked by “chronic confusion” and warning that teaching with a “seemingly intentional lack of clarity risks sinning against the Holy Spirit.” 

In our interview with the Fr. Weinandy on the Abu Dhabi statement, he identifies what he believes is its most problematic element, and offers his perspective on both on the Pope’s private clarification to Bishop Schneider and his public remarks at this week’s general audience.

“What I find very sad and scandalously troubling” he added, “is that, in the midst of it all, Jesus is being insulted. He is reduced to the level of Buddha or Mohammed when in fact he is the Father’s beloved Messianic Son, the one in whom the Father is well pleased.” 

Even with the Pope’s informal clarification at this week’s general audience, Fr. Weinandy points out that, “more than likely, the vast majority of the media and many other theologians and bishops will continue to interpret the original document in the manner that, as God willed Judaism and Christianity, so he also willed other religions – full stop.”

Fr. Weinandy says while he believes Pope Francis is motivated by a “noble desire” to “foster mutual understanding” and “undercut some Islamic factions that foster terrorism,” his signing the Abu Dhabi statement “has doctrinal consequences well beyond what he may have envisioned or desired.”  

“There still persists some lack of clarity,” he says, “since Pope Francis has not directly repudiated the original statement as it appears in the Abu Dhabi document. In the end it is still quite confusing, and unnecessarily so.” 

For more on the Abu Dhabi meeting see: 

"Francis and the Joint Declaration on Human Fraternity: A Public Repudiation of the Catholic Faith"

February 21-24: Meeting in Rome with presidents of all the bishops' conferences on Protection of Minors in the Church

While the meeting heard much heart-rending testimony from victims of clergy sex abuse, the results repeated many of the mistakes of the Dallas, i.e., ignoring the problem of homosexual pederasty. Until the bishops identify the root of the problem, they won't dig it out and eradicate it. There is a "culture of tolerance" and homosexuals tend to create networks of perversion. Read more, especially the letter penned by Pope Emeritus Benedict about the Rome meeting. It was published in April after Benedict received many letters expressing concern over the meeting: 

 Pope Benedict's Letter about the sex abuse crisis and the devastating impact of moral relativism

After the Vatican Summit on the Protection of Minors in the Church

APRIL

April 30, 2019

Prominent clergy, scholars accuse Pope Francis of heresy in open letter

A number of prominent clergy and scholars including theologian, Aidan Nichols, publish an open letter calling on the Catholic bishops to deal with the problem of the pope committing heresy. There letter is a follow up to their 2017 filial correction outlining errors in the post synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetititia.

From January - December 2019

 Chinese Catholics get the Hobnailed Boot! Cardinal Zen continues to fight the Vatican's disastrous agreement with the Communist government of China.

The "disastrous" relations with the Vatican over the Chinese Church

Is this why the Vatican wants Zen gone?

Intense spike in persecution of Chinese Church after Vatican accord 

September 2019

September 10: Even before the Amazon synod convened, reports surfaced that the pope allowed married deacons in the Amazon to say Mass. Rome journalist Sandro Magister reporting for the Italian weekly L'Espresso wrote:

For a few days a video has been circulating on the web in which an Italian priest of the highest rank, among those closest to Jorge Mario Bergoglio, says that in the Amazon the celebration of the Mass by married deacons is already a de facto reality, authorized by the local bishops. And Pope Francis, informed of the matter, is alleged to have said:”Go ahead!” 

The author of this revelation is not just anybody. He is Giovanni Nicolini, 79, an esteemed priest of the archdiocese of Bologna, which has as its archbishop that Matteo Zuppi whom a few days ago Francis promoted as cardinal.

Fr. Nicolini is currently a national ecclesiastical assistant of the Catholic Associations of Italian Workers, ACLI, and was previously director of Caritas of Bologna, in addition to being a parish priest in the neighborhood next to the prison. A priest of the poor, of the imprisoned, of the immigrants: this is his best-known profile. 

But even before this he was a spiritual son of Giuseppe Dossetti (1913-1996), a leading politician in postwar Italy and then, as monk and priest, a protagonist of Vatican Council II along with Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro....

Moreover, Fr. Nicolini is connected to that influential progressive Catholic think tank known as the “school of Bologna,” which had its founder in the same Dossetti and has in Church historian Alberto Melloni and in Bose monastery founder Enzo Bianchi its current mainstays and gurus, both of them ultra-Bergoglians.

Magister links to the video which is in Italian, but he also quotes the exact transcript from Nicolini who was asked the next day whether the pope really said it. He replied, "I do not have proof, it's just 'word of mouth." In view of his position and influence, it seems probable that the "mouth" spreading the "word" was Cardinal Zuppi. And anyway, if it was just a rumor, wasn't it scandalous to spread it?

October 2019

October 6 - 27: Amazon Synod -- I've written plenty about the Amazon Synod and I'm not going to rehash it all here. The Instrumentum Laboris was awful and if you really want to read about it you can join Topsy and Tuptim over coffee and see their analysis. For the rest, here's the Amazon Synod search results on the blog.

December 2019

December 12 - Pope Calls Greta Thunberg, global warming poster teen, a "great witness" to the Church's environmental teaching. He appreciates her proselytizing for the earth religion!

December 31 - While the pope is visiting the Vatican nativity scene, a distraught Asian woman grabs his hand and begs, "Why destroy their faith? Why destroy the Chinese? [Look for] the Chinese [feelings]. [Talk] to me!" The media focuses on the hand-grabbing and completely ignores the message. In view of the disaster the Vatican has caused by its ostopolitik policy with the Communist Chinese government, this borders on media malpractice. But for sure, Francis and his secretary of state Parolin want the focus off China.