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In the mid-1990s, a clandestine group of high-ranking churchmen began gathering in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Opposed to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the circle plotted a revolution in stealth. By 2015, their secret ached to be told. Before an audience, Cardinal Godfried Danneels joked of being a part of a "mafia." But as explosive as Danneels's confession was, a thick cloud of mystery still enshrouds the St. Gallen mafia. In this compelling book, Julia Meloni pieces together the eerie trail of confessional evidence about the St. Gallen group. Copiously researched and grippingly narrated, The St. Gallen Mafia sheds light on the following: The mysteries of the 2005 conclave, where mafia members grew divided over a plan to back Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope. The war against Benedict XVI by the mafia's Cardinal Achille Silvestrini - and the mysterious "confessions" believed to be linked to him. The enigmatic, complicated relationship between the mafia's Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and Benedict XVI. The mafia writings that presaged a new Francis - and the 2013 conclave that elected him. Martini's enduring role as an "ante-pope" - a "precursor" for Pope Francis.

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Christian Church

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	26 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781505122893
Langue	English

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THE ST. GALLEN MAFIA
THE ST. GALLEN MAFIA
Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church
Julia Meloni
TAN Books Gastonia, North Carolina
The St. Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church © 2021 Julia Meloni
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Creation, exploitation and distribution of any unauthorized editions of this work, in any format in existence now or in the future—including but not limited to text, audio, and video—is prohibited without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Douay-Rheims Bible.
Cover design by www.davidferrisdesign.com .
Cover image: The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican, photo by TTstudio/Shutterstock
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944394
ISBN: 978-1-5051-2287-9 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-5051-2288-6 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-5051-2289-3
Published in the United States by TAN Books PO Box 269 Gastonia, NC 28053 www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
For my father
“For there is not any thing secret that shall not be made manifest, nor hidden, that shall not be known and come abroad.”
—Luke 8:17
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
I. War
1. The Next Pope
2. Silvestrini
3. Martini
4. Kasper
5. Danneels
6. The Ante-Pope
7. Fire
8. No Country for Old Men
II. Time
9. Dark Horse
10. The Ghost of Cardinal Martini
11. God of Surprises
12. Man Behind the Curtain
13. Chekhov’s Gun
14. Things Fall Apart
15. Patience
16. Time
Bibliography
Foreword
F or many Catholics, Pope Francis’s election was a surprise. This book urges the faithful Catholic to look again. Look into the background, observe the small or dark spaces: great exertions were clearly spent on the 266th pontificate. Only arduous, midnightly labors could have generated (and did generate) the conditions for its possibility.
Back in 2013, Pope Francis’s manufactured doctrinal and disciplinary spontaneity seemed to be the hallmark of the new era. And yet Pope Francis’s canting forerunners—beginning with Cardinal Martini, who called himself the “ante-pope,” one who is not against the pope but who precedes the pope—spent years plotting for a like-minded soul to fill the highest position in the Church.
As you are about to read in Ms. Julia Meloni’s book, Pope Francis’s agenda is Cardinal Martini’s agenda: the Sankt Gallen agenda. Virtually everything you’ve been told, or not told, about that agenda was expressed or withheld such as to propagate Pope Francis’s views as the “pope of surprises.” Yet of all 265 popes since Peter, not a single one of them rivals (or comes anywhere close to rivaling) the degree to which Francis’s pontificate was ideologically foreordained.
Needless to say, to a Sankt Gallen mafioso in the know, there wasn’t a corpuscle of surprise about what happened at the conclave in March 2013. As shocking as the execution of any mafia conspiracy proves to the rest of the world, its conception and implementation prove to be quite the opposite to its conspirators: ruthlessly exacting discipline, pre-memorized lines and looks, and levels of single-mindedness mixed with unclarity. Or, as Ms. Meloni puts it more aptly: the actuating of the Gallen agenda was a simple matter of “patience” and “time.”
So precalculated was the Gallen agenda that, even among outsiders to the mafia, its shock and awe could only be described as partial. The shrewdest opponents of the mafia saw the junta that was coming. Indeed, Cardinal Brandmüller, a dubia cardinal and a faithful son of Mother Church, cautioned after only two years of the Francis pontificate, “Communion for the divorced and ‘remarried’ [comes] first. Then abolition of priestly celibacy, second. Priesthood for women is the ultimate aim, and lastly unification with the Protestants. Then we will have a national German church, independent from Rome. Finally, together with all the Protestants.” 1
As the shadows of his pontificate grow longer, Pope Francis quickens his pace and squares his posture with respect to the unrealized action items on Brandmüller’s list (viz., the Gallen list). The execution of the program is the thing! Pope Francis was emplaced to accomplish a short list of goals. This book offers its reader a reasonable basis for firmly believing at least that much. However much damage will be wrought unto the vineyard of the Lord by the time the Gallen agenda is accomplished, at least the reader of this book will see the blows as they come.
The book you prepare to read is, in some sense, a true mafia book. It tells the tale of one don —an ante-pope named Cardinal Martini—one underboss called Cardinal Silvestrini, a few capos like the man Cardinal Danneels, who revealed the mafia’s secrets to the world, and a few handfuls of soldiers. It is the tale of the subversion of the veritable Christian virtues of planning, persistence, and patience. It is the sad narrative of the attempted spoliation of pure things and of a darkling essay into the divinization of wicked things. It also insinuates an unfinished tale of two extant popes: one young conciliar liberal who ripened into a canny, apprehensive, postconciliar conservative who did too much and too little at the end of his pontificate and another young conservative whose fascination with the inscrutable and with political Peronism transformed him, under Cardinal Martini’s remote tutelage, into a man following the Gallen mafia’s not so hidden agenda.
While the former toils on in darkness and in doubt, the latter approaches the third act of his big performance. He and a small handful of surviving others know how it will end. But to the rest of us, the third act will be marked by surprises, even if uniquely insightful books such as this one have furnished the faithful with key lines and events to await. Alas, even the play-bill in hand, like all else in our age, has artfully been rendered inscrutable by the low lights of the theater!
Fast and pray for less strange days. As Pope Benedict XVI once said, would that we might be faithful servants in the vineyard of the Lord! Brothers and sisters, Deus Vult ! Cross yourselves and march on! Our Lord loves and identifies himself with a suffering servant.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, be with us on the Way!
Timothy Gordon, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA
May 31, 2021
_____________________
1 Edward Pentin, The Rigging of a Vatican Synod: An Investigation into Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015).
Acknowledgments
I ’m deeply grateful to all the colleagues and readers who have supported this project since its inception.
In a special way, I’d like to thank Patrick O’Hearn and all those at TAN Books who brought this book to publication; Timothy Gordon, who championed this project from a very early stage; Dr. Janet Smith, Dr. Maike Hickson, Matt Gaspers, and Timothy Flanders, who read this book in manuscript form and gave invaluable feedback; and John Vella and John-Henry Westen for editing and publishing my prior articles on the St. Gallen mafia.
I
WAR
1
The Next Pope
B efore the 2005 papal election, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini looked distressed, the papers said. 1 In photos of the Mass before the conclave, you can see him: a tall, glowering old man in red, gripping his cane, staring mutely downward. 2
“And what does it mean to be children in faith?” asked Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the longtime prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the Mass’s homily. “St. Paul answers: it means being ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’” (Eph 4:14).
“How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking,” Ratzinger continued. As he spoke, Martini, the retired archbishop of Milan, looked downward, blinking, as if thinking hard about some insoluble equation. Then he raised his piercing blue eyes and appeared to glare, for just a moment, at Ratzinger. Then he closed his eyes, fiddled with his cane, and clasped it tightly. 3
Ratzinger pressed on. He explained how the small boat of Christians had often been wind-tossed, flung by gusts from Marxism to libertinism to syncretism. Then he cried, “Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” 4
The dictatorship of relativism. Ratzinger, the son of a German policeman, wanted to warn the cardinals of a danger that he could feel more palpably than others. When he was a boy, one day an eerie new lighthouse sprung up on a hill outside his quiet village—and “at night, when it combed the sky with its glaring light, it appeared to us like a flash of lightning announcing a danger that still had no name,” Ratzinger said. 5 Back then, the flash was Nazism; years later, the glint was the dictatorship of relativism and Ratzinger was the sentry in the darkness, warning the post-conciliar Church against an “indiscriminate openness” to an “agnostic and atheistic world.” 6
But now there was something subterranean that was concentrating all its energies on toppling him. Something that had stayed quietly underground for a decade, building pressure and waiting.
* * *
Somewhere in a small, old journal, a photo with an understated caption proves that they met. Entitled “A Visit Enjoyed by Friends,” the photograph shows Martini and a group of European cardinals lined u