Destroying “Legacies” of Antipopes Who Themselves Destroyed Catholic Teaching

The noted “Saint John Paul II” hagiographer, Dr. George Weigel, has published a commentary in Catholic World Report about how the hypocritical autocrat named Jorge Mario Bergoglio (whose stage name is “Pope Francis”) has made those who work behind the walls of the Occupied Vatican on the West Bank of the Tiber River live in trepidation of being reprimanded for speaking their minds about the disaster that Jorge’s ten years as the universal face of public apostasy continues to produce without any sign of relief.

Obviously, Dr. Weigel did not put the matter in precisely those terms as he accepts the legitimacy of the Bergoglio “papacy.” What he did say on this score, though, is pretty strong stuff from a man who slobbered all over himself about the Wojtyla “papacy” much in the manner I had done until 1994 and thereafter:

March 13 ought to have been a happy day in Rome. But the mood in and around Vatican City before, during and after the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s election was more somber than festive — and not because the anniversary fell during Lent. Rather, the melancholy reflected the current atmosphere in the Holy See, which has gone unremarked for too long and deserves candid description.

The prevailing mood in today’s Vatican is one of trepidation. That’s not only what those who question the pontificate’s direction think. It’s also the judgment of some who are comfortable with the past 10 years, and who applaud Pope Francis’s efforts to display God’s mercy in his public persona, but who also know that “kinder, gentler” does not characterize papal governance behind the scenes. Because papal autocracy has created a miasma of fear, parrhesia (the “speaking freely” Francis encourages) is not the Roman order of the day, except in private. Even then it is rare, because trust among Vatican officials has broken down. When a brave soul dares to question or criticize the current line of papal policy, it’s almost invariably in the company of those of like mind. Serious, fraternal, charitable debate over the current condition of the Church and of the “synodal process” is largely non-existent. Silos are everywhere.

Living and working in this slough of dysfunction is enervating, and the inconsistencies and contradictions in papal pronouncements and policy that have become achingly apparent are not helping lift hearts.

At the beginning of the pontificate, Francis praised his predecessor’s decision to abdicate and suggested that abdication was an option for him. Now the Pope says he considers the papacy a job “for life.”

The Pope’s ambiguous role in the Rupnik affair — the quick lifting of the self-inflicted excommunication of a prominent Jesuit artist, Father Marko Rupnik, who committed multiple acts of sexual predation and sacrilege — has intensified concerns about Francis’s commitment to cleaning the Church of the filth of sexual abuse. (A somber anniversary.)

A brief interjection here, please.

George Weigel is correct about the case of “Father” Marko Rupnik.

However, his “sainted” Karol Josef Wojtyla appointed, promoted, and protected one moral derelict after another to the conciliar hierarchy around the world, especially here in the United States of America.

Additionally, there are also the little matters of one Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, of Theodore Edgar McCarrick, and of the recent revelation that “John Paul the Great” protected predator clergy in Poland:

Rome — A documentary hit the airwaves this week in Poland alleging the former pope, Saint John Paul II, protected pedophile priests when he was Archbishop of Krakow in his native country. It has reignited a long-standing debate over whether John Paul II was made a saint too quickly. 

The report aired this week by Polish broadcaster TVN24 accuses John Paul of allowing three priests to continue working in the church in the 1970s despite knowing they had been accused of abusing minors. Two of the priests eventually served prison terms for their crimes.

Calls for John Paul II to be made a saint began at his funeral, on April 2, 2005, when cries of "Santo Subito" (or "sainthood immediately") erupted from the half million pilgrims in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. Many held up banners calling for his sainthood.

The cries didn't fall on deaf ears. Just days after his death, the Vatican began the process of making him a saint. He was "beatified" only six years later and then "canonized" — formally declared a saint — just three years after that. It was the fastest canonization in the history of the Catholic Church. . . .

Accusations of failures to take action span across John Paul's 26-year papacy. He refused to believe accusations against Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionnaires of Christ order and one of the church's greatest fundraisers. Those accusations started surfacing in the late 1970s and continued for decades. Maciel was eventually found to have sexually abused minors and seminarians, and to have fathered several children, who he also abused. 

In 2004, two years after disgraced Boston archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law was forced to resign because he'd protected pedophile priests, John Paul appointed him to a prestigious post in Rome. 

In 2020, in a stunning admission, the Catholic church said John Paul II had ignored warnings about former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from as far back as 1999, instead raising him to the powerful position of Archbishop of Washington D.C. McCarrick has since been defrocked and is under criminal prosecution in Massachusetts for alleged sexual abuse of minors. (John Paul II accused of protecting pedophiles, fueling debate over late pope's "fast-track" to sainthood.)

Here is a very useful timeline concerning Father Marcial Maciel Delgollado’s life and death:

TIMELINE OF FATHER MARCIAL MACIEL DEGOLLADO - THE MONSTER

Most say they were fooled by MM. 

Our Lady of La Salette gave plenty of warning ahead of time. Most didn't heed Her warning - MM is the monster spoken of by Our Lady in 1846:

"And the monster will arrive at the end of the nineteenth century or at the latest at the commencement of the twentieth.Afterwards this peace will be disturbed by the monster" Our Lady of La Salette 19 Sept. 1846 (Published by Mélanie 1879)

"The priests, ministers of my Son, the priests, by their bad life, by their irreverences and their impiety in celebrating the holy mysteries, by love of money, love of honor and of pleasures, the priests have become cesspools of impurity. Yes, the priests are asking for vengeance, and vengeance is suspended over their heads. Woe to the priests and to persons consecrated to God, who by their infidelities and their bad life are crucifying anew my Son! The sins of persons consecrated to God cry out towards Heaven and call for vengeance, and see how vengeance is at their doors, because there is no longer found anyone to implore mercy and forgiveness for the people; there are no longer generous souls, there is no longer anyone worthy to offer the Victim without blemish to the Eternal on behalf of the world." Our Lady of La Salette 19 Sept. 1846 (Published by Mélanie 1879)

'May those who are at the head of religious communities keep themselves on guard for persons whom they must receive, because the demon will use of all his malice in order to introduce into religious orders persons devoted to sin, for disorders and the love of carnal pleasures will be spread by all the earth.’ Our Lady of La Salette 19 Sept. 1846 (Published by Mélanie 1879)

Timeline of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado:

1920 Marcial Maciel Degollado born in Cotija de la Paza, in state of Michoacan, Mexico.

1938 Maciel expelled from seminary in Mexico City for "misunderstandings," according to Legion history. Maciel entered an American seminary run by Jesuits in Montezuma, New Mexico, that was designed to educate future Mexican priests in a time of persecution against the church in that country. In 1940 he was expelled. Although no official or documented reason has been found, a Jesuit on background allegedly stated: "He was not considered apt for the priesthood...He was not emotionally or psychologically balanced."

1941 Unable to gain admittance to another seminary, Maciel began private lessons under an uncle, Bishop Francisco Arias Gonzalez of Cuernavaca, Mexico.

1941 Maciel founded a religious order with thirteen young followers, which will later be named Legionaries of Christ.

1944 Maciel ordained a priest by his uncle.

1946-48 Maciel raised money to establish Legion seminaries in Mexico, Spain and Rome.

1940’s-50’s Fr. Marcial Maciel sexually molested numerous minor children whom he recruited for the Legionaries of Christ.

1950s Maciel established Colegio Massimo, the House of Major Studies for Legionaries of Christ in Rome.

1956 Maciel was hospitalized in Rome for addiction to the morphine-based drug, Dolantin.

1956 Maciel accused of making sexual advances on youths in the Legionaries’ house in Mexico by an older seminarian and the priest-rector of the Legionaries.

1956 The Vatican prefect for Congregation for the Religious, Cardinal Valerio Valeri, under Pope Pius XII, suspended Maciel from his duties as Director-General. Valeri installed Carmelite priests to oversee the Legionaries of Christ.

1958 Pope Pius XII died and Maciel was re-instated as leader of the Legionaries.

1976 Fr. Juan Vaca, who had been sent to America by Maciel as the Legionaries’ national director, left the religious order and received faculties as a priest in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, Long Island. 

1976 Vaca sent a letter in Spanish to Maciel, accusing him of sexually abusing twenty Legionaries’ seminarians. Vaca wrote: “Using the same excuse that you were in pain, you ordered me to remain in your bed. I was not yet thirteen years old; you knew that God had kept me intact until then, pure, without ever having seriously stained the innocence of my infancy, when you, on that night, in the midst of my terrible confusion and anguish, ripped the masculine virginity from me.”

1976 Bishop John R. McGann, ordinary of the Rockville diocese, included Vaca’s letter to Maciel in a dossier of materials sent to the papal nuncio in Washington D.C., seeking action from the Vatican and Pope Paul VI against the Legion founder. The Vatican and its officials did not take any appropriate action in response to this complaint, allowing Maciel to continue in his position of power with unlimited access to children.

1978 Bishop McGann sent the same material including Vaca’s letter accusing Maciel of sexually molesting Vaca and 20 other children to the Vatican via the nunciature in Washington, D.C. Receipt of the materials was acknowledged by the Vatican, with no other action.

1979 Pope John Paul II had Maciel accompany him on his visit to Mexico.

1980 Jose Raul Gonzalez Lara was born in Mexico, the son of Blanca Gutierrez Lara and one “Raul Rivas”, the alias utilized by Fr. Maciel. On information and belief, Maciel used money and property from the Legionaries to support Raul, his mother and other children.

1987 Maciel sexually abused Jose Raul for the first time. He continues to sexually molest Jose Raul for more than a decade.

1989 Juan Vaca having left the priesthood, sent a personal letter to John Paul II, seeking dispensation from his clerical vows and included a history of Maciel’s sexual abuse of him and others and stated that he considered his ordination to the priesthood invalid, as a consequence of Maciel’s coercive tactics and aggressive sexual acts.

1990 Pope John Paul II had Maciel accompany him on his visit to Mexico.

1991 Maciel was also appointed by the Pope to the Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the formation of Candidates for the Priesthood in Actual Circumstances.

1991 Maciel was a member of the Interdicasterial Commission for a Just Distribution of Clergy.

1992 Maciel was a member of the IV General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM)

1993 Maciel was a member of the Synod of Bishops on Consecrated Life and Their Mission in the Church and the World.

1993 Pope John Paul II had Maciel accompany him on his visit to Mexico.

1994 An open letter by Pope John Paul II celebrating Maciel's 50th anniversary as a priest, appeared in major newspapers of Mexico City, as a paid advertisement, celebrating Maciel as "an efficacious guide to youth."

1998 Jose Barba and Arturo Jurado, representing eight ex-Legionaries, engaged canon lawyer Martha Wegan, a licensed practitioner in the Vatican tribunals, who filed a request at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, operated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, to have Maciel excommunicated for sexual abuse, and violating the sacrament of penance, by absolving them of their "sins."

1999 Martha Wegan, canonist in Rome, wrote to Arturo Jurado, as named complainant in petition at the C.D.F., quoting an under secretary in the office: "'For the time being' the matter is closed."

2002 Jose Barba met with Martha Wegan in Rome. According to Barba, Wegan told him that Cardinal Angelo Sodano blocked and shut down the investigation and proceedings against Fr. Maciel.

2004 Pope John Paul II gave the Legionaries of Christ administrative control of the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem, at a celebration in Rome for Maciel's 60th anniversary as a priest.

2006 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that because of Maciel’s age, there would be no trial, but that Maciel with approval of Pope Benedict had been ordered to a “life of prayer and penitence.”

2008 Maciel’s death announced by the Legionaries. Legionaries stated that Maciel went to heaven. (Timeline Of Father Marcial Maciel Degollado - The Monster.)

Another report, featured on America, of all places, provides a bit more detail about the Delgollado case:

ROME (CNS) -- Demonstrating a strong "chain of abuse," the Legionaries of Christ said its founder, the late Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, sexually abused at least 60 minors and that at least another 51 youngsters were abused by Father Maciel's victims or victims of his victims.

The Rome-based headquarters of the Legionaries released a report Dec. 21 looking at the "phenomenon of abuse of minors" by members of the order from its founding in 1941 through December 2019.

At the same time, the Legionaries of Christ in the United States released the names of four members who had been "active in ministry" in the United States and against whom there were "substantiated sexual abuse allegations."

The commission that drafted the international report "identified 175 minors as victims of sexual abuse committed by 33 priests of the congregation" in the 78 years since the order's founding, according to "available records." The commission noted, however, that it "does not claim that its study could have discovered all cases" or that all victims have come forward.

"The vast majority of the victims were boys between the ages of 11 and 16," the report said.

The report found that 111 of the 175 victims -- more than 63% -- "were either victims of Father Maciel or were victims of his victims."

Since its founding, the Legionaries said, "1,353 priests were ordained in the congregation, 367 of whom either since left or have passed away." The 33 sexually abusive priests represent 2.4% of all those ordained.

In addition, the report said, 74 Legionaries novices and seminarians abused minors; three of the 74 went on to become priests who abused youngsters, and they are included among the 33 priests who abused

Of the 74, it said, 60 never became priests of the order. The report did not give statistics on how many of the 60 decided to leave and how many were ejected from the order, although it said "most" of them were dismissed.

"Of the 14 who were ordained, two have since passed away, two have restrictions, four are under investigation, and six are no longer under the jurisdiction of the congregation," the report said. "According to the historical records, of the three that were ordained after 2005, the superiors admitted them to ordination without knowledge of the facts."

The report makes a distinction between what happened before and after 2005. After the Vatican re-opened an investigation into decades-old claims that Father Maciel was a serial abuser, the Mexican-born priest stepped down as head of the Legionaries in January 2005.

When then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI four months later, he accelerated the investigation and, in 2006, ordered Father Maciel to cease all public ministry and withdraw to "a life of prayer and penance." At the time, the Legionaries continued to support Father Maciel's claims of innocence.

The report on abuse within the Legionaries acknowledged that members became "aware, in a slow and painful process, of the abuses Father Maciel committed and of the consequences they had on the congregation."

At least twice -- in 2016 and again in February -- Pope Francis has told reporters that Pope Benedict was the reason Father Maciel finally was dealt with after decades of allegations, including some made in the 1950s.

Pope Benedict tenaciously investigated the allegations and insisted "there was a need to clean the church's dirt, the garbage," Pope Francis said in 2016.

In February, flying back from Abu Dhabi, Pope Francis again spoke about Pope Benedict's efforts to fight clerical sexual abuse. In his remarks, he did not mention the Legionaries of Christ, but it was widely presumed he was speaking of Father Maciel's case.

As prefect of the doctrinal congregation, the pope said, then-Cardinal Ratzinger "had all the papers, all the documents, about a religious organization that had internal sexual and financial corruption."

His efforts, Pope Francis said, were repeatedly blocked. After finally being able to present a report to St. John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger returned to his office and "said to his secretary: 'Put it in the archive, the other party won.'"

"We must not be scandalized by this, they are steps in a process," Pope Francis told reporters.

Finally, when Pope Benedict succeeded St. John Paul, "the first thing he said was: 'Bring those papers from the archive,'" and he began the process that removed Father Maciel from ministry, Pope Francis said.

The Legionaries' report said 14 of the 33 priests who abused others were themselves abused in the order.

The order's minor seminaries "were the most vulnerable environment" for abuse to occur, both by priests and by other seminarians, it said. Those institutions were a major focus when "safe environment policies" were implemented, beginning in 2015.

"The last known case of sexual abuse in a minor seminary of the congregation occurred seven years ago, in 2012," the report said. And the last known allegation of sexual abuse in a Legionaries school was in 2013.

"We deplore and condemn the abuses committed in our history, as well as those institutional or personal practices that may have favored or encouraged any form of abuse or re-victimization," the order said. " We ask forgiveness of the victims, their families, the church and society for the grave harm that members of our congregation have caused."

"Because of differences in national legislation and due to the ethical considerations at play, the report does not include a list of the names of priests who have credible allegations of abuse of minors," the report said. But "the Legion of Christ in the United States has decided to publish its list, according to the practice of several dioceses and religious congregations."

Two of the four Legionaries on the U.S. list have since died: Brother Francisco Cardona, who allegedly abused students at Immaculate Conception Apostolic School in Center Harbor, New Hampshire, in the 1980s; and Father Guillermo Izquierdo, who abused young men while novice director in Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1982-1993.

A third member, Father Benjamin Cieply, has been dismissed from the order, the Legionaries said, explaining "there is a high probability that he sexually abused a minor in 2016 during his probationary period in the Archdiocese of Miami. He was removed from ministry and his case was referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Judgment is still pending."

The fourth is Fernando Cutanda, a former Legionaries priest, who, like Brother Cardona, "abused students during his tenure as a formator at the Immaculate Conception Apostolic School, in Center Harbor, New Hampshire, in the 1980s." (Legionaries of Christ report ‘chain of abuse’ as victims went on to abuse others.)

But as the Vatican's unprecedented report on the career of disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick reveals in shocking detail, the first decade of the 21st century will forever be marred by John Paul's calamitous, callous decision-making.

It is time for a difficult reckoning. This man, proclaimed a Catholic saint by Pope Francis in 2014, willfully put at risk children and young adults in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., and across the world. In doing so, he also undermined the global church's witness, shattered its credibility as an institution, and set a deplorable example for bishops in ignoring the accounts of abuse victims.

As with every saint, John Paul has a vibrant cult — people across the world who celebrate his memory by encouraging devotion to him, placing his name on churches and schools, and hosting processions and parades on his liturgical feast.

Given what we know now about the long-lasting repercussions of John Paul's decision-making, the U.S. bishops, meeting next week for their annual conference, should seriously consider whether American Catholics can continue such practices. They should also discuss requesting that the Vatican formally suppress John Paul's cult. Abuse victims deserve no less.

As the Vatican's devastating report shows clearly, the late pope's decision to appoint McCarrick as Washington's archbishop in 2000 came despite severe warnings from his highest-level advisors on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Oct. 28, 1999, letter from New York Cardinal John O'Connor, which has been revealed for the first time, could hardly have been more ominous. McCarrick, O'Connor warned, had been the subject of anonymous allegations and was known to invite seminarians to sleep in the same bed with him.

About the possibility of promoting McCarrick beyond his then-role as the Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, O'Connor wrote: "I regret that I would have to recommend very strongly against such promotion."

O'Connor, who sent the letter on Oct. 28, 1999, as he was suffering from brain cancer that would lead to his death only seven months later, also said he had "grave fears" about the possibility of the promotion and the "grave scandal" it could cause the church.

Read it again. This wasn't a simple blinking red light. It was an all-alerts, final-act bulletin from one of the global church's most senior figures.

Despite that, and despite O'Connor's concerns being subsequently echoed by the Vatican's ambassador to the U.S., and the prefect for the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops, John Paul would trust McCarrick's denials about his behavior and make the appointment anyway.

What's more, to do so the pope had to personally take it under his wing — unusually instructing the Vatican's Secretary of State to tell the bishops' congregation to add McCarrick's name to the list of priests being considered for the job, and then having the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith waive the standard check for McCarrick's adherence to Catholic doctrine.

This is all the more devastating if you consider that the decision came during the same period that the Vatican was made aware of allegations of abuse by Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the once-powerful Legionaries of Christ, whose victims number at least in the dozens and possibly the hundreds.

Journalists Jason Berry and Gerald Renner first exposed Maciel's abuse of seminarians in 1997. In 1998, eight ex-Legionaries brought their case against Maciel to the doctrinal congregation.

John Paul would continue to praise the man publicly for the rest of his papacy. Maciel was not publicly punished until 2006, after John Paul's death, when Pope Benedict XVI ordered the priest to a life of penance.

There is no way anymore to escape the truth. John Paul, in many ways an admirable man, was willfully blind to the abuse of children and young people.

Suppressing the late pontiff's cult would not mean telling people they need to throw away their relics or their medals — people could still practice private devotion to him. But for abuse victims, their advocates and many others, John Paul's memory is no longer a blessing. It should not be celebrated in public. (The Memory of John Paul II is No Longer a Blessing: United States “bishops” should suppress the Cult of John Paul II.)

In 2006, a year after John Paul’s death, a Vatican investigation concluded that the previously denied accusations of molestation were true. Benedict ordered Father Maciel to retire to a life of “prayer and penitence.”

After his death, Vatican investigations found that Father Maciel had also fathered several children with at least two women, visited them regularly and sent them money. (Legionaries of Christ Denounce Founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado.)

Just minor little detours on the road to “sanctity,” I suppose.

George Weigel, who was a cheerleader for George Walker Bush’s unjust, immoral, unconstitutional invasion, occupation, destruction, and reconstruction of Iraq twenty years ago, does not realize that there is less of a difference between “Saint John Paul II” and Jorge Mario Bergoglio than he would care to admit.

All right, back to Weigel’s March 15, 2023, commentary about Jorge’s anniversary:

The financial reform of the Holy See, while not without accomplishments, has stalled far short of completion; both the Vatican’s structural deficit and its vast unfunded pension liability remain to be seriously addressed.

The German bishops openly defy Roman authority, much of institutional German Catholicism seems comfortable with apostasy, and a schism is not out of the question. The papal voice in response to this crisis is, at best, muted. Yet the authority of American bishops to provide for the liturgical nourishment of some faithful Catholics is squashed. (A somber anniversary.)

This should be more than enough to cause a Catholic to reflect upon whether that man who is presumed to a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter is indeed such.

What is very ironic about another part of Mr. Weigel’s commentary is that his rueful notation about

Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Amoris Laetitia’s overturning of the Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II’s “teaching” about marriage and the family in Familiaris Consortio, an “apostolic exhortation” issued November 24, 1981, even though Familiaris Cosortio is itself an overturning of that which exists in the nature of things—namely, the ends for which Holy Matrimony have been instituted by God Himself—and is based upon the very personalist philosophy that was condemned by Pope Pius XII himself on April 1, 1944.

Here is what Mr. Weigel wrote about Senor Jorge’s attack upon the “teaching” of “Saint John Paul II”:

And then there is the fear engendered by a systematic effort to deconstruct the legacy of St. John Paul II. The John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University has been gutted; its new, theologically woke faculty attracts very few students. The approach to the moral life that has dominated the “synodal process” thus far is a flat-out rejection of the basic (and classic) structure of Catholic moral theology that undergirds the Polish pope’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor — just as the deliberate ambiguities in the 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, undercut John Paul II’s teaching in the 1981 apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Familiaris Consortio. (A somber anniversary.)

Pardon me, I am going to have more fun right now than any Catholic should be having on a Lenten weekday.

Here goes.

Sure, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has gutted The John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and Family” and, it should be added, gutted both the “Pontifical” Academy for Life and the Pontifical Academy for the Sciences.

Granted, Amoris Laetitia’s “deliberate ambiguities” “undercut John Paul II’s teaching” in Familiaris Consortio.

So what?

Ah, why, however, should Mr. Weigel be surprised by Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s disregard for the “teaching” of his beloved Polish Phenomenologist when the latter had no disregard for the consistent and irreformable Catholic teaching on the ends of marriage that was enunciated clearly within the past century by the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law, Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, and Pope Pius XII on April 1, 1944, and again in his Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951?

Here is where I begin to have a bit fun with the folks who defend Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II against efforts by Jorge Mario Bergoglio to “disregard” the former’s “teaching” when the former, “John Paul the Great”—and Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI—before him, disregarded, discounted, and completely obliterated both the consistent and irreformable teaching of Holy Mother Church and the immutable precepts of the Natural Law about marriage on the family.

Let us start by examining the “teaching” of Wojtyla/John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has, to the great consternation of George Weigel, rejected:

Living in such a world, under the pressures coming above all from the mass media, the faithful do not always remain immune from the obscuring of certain fundamental values, nor set themselves up as the critical conscience of family culture and as active agents in the building of an authentic family humanism.

Among the more troubling signs of this phenomenon, the Synod Fathers stressed the following, in particular: the spread of divorce and of recourse to a new union, even on the part of the faithful; the acceptance of purely civil marriage in contradiction to the vocation of the baptized to “be married in the Lord”, the celebration of the marriage sacrament without living faith, but for other motives; the rejection of the moral norms that guide and promote the human and Christian exercise of sexuality in marriage.

Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they “take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.”

Similarly, the respect due to the sacrament of Matrimony, to the couples themselves and their families, and also to the community of the faithful, forbids any pastor, for whatever reason or pretext even of a pastoral nature, to perform ceremonies of any kind for divorced people who remarry. Such ceremonies would give the impression of the celebration of a new sacramentally valid marriage, and would thus lead people into error concerning the indissolubility of a validly contracted marriage.

By acting in this way, the Church professes her own fidelity to Christ and to His truth. At the same time she shows motherly concern for these children of hers, especially those who, through no fault of their own, have been abandoned by their legitimate partner.

With firm confidence she believes that those who have rejected the Lord’s command and are still living in this state will be able to obtain from God the grace of conversion and salvation, provided that they have persevered in prayer, penance and charity. (Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981.)

While it is certainly true that, in plain English, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, rejects, not simply disregards, this part of Familiaris Consortio, was it not Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger who told us that dogmatic pronouncements are true when they are pronounced but, given his claim that truth can never be expressed adequately at any one time and is thus necessarily conditioned by the limitations of human language and the circumstances of the time, can become obsolete in the “particulars they contain” over time?

See for yourselves:

The text [of the document Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.

In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time. (Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6; Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete.)

Modernists must make the "necessary adjustments" in the language of the Church, being "liberated" by their rejection of Scholasticism to use the terms of the Faith in murky and ambiguous ways that obfuscate their true sense and convey a sort of imprecision that is designed to appeal to an esoteric "love" of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ without adhering to everything that He has revealed to men exclusively through His Catholic Church as part of the Deposit of Faith.

Thus, why can’t Jorge Mario Bergoglio reject the “particulars” of Familiaris Consortio while maintaining its “nucleus”?

To accept Ratzinger’s repackaging of the dogmatically condemned and philosophically Modernist precept of dogmatic evolutionism is to render everything about the “teaching” of the conciliar “popes,” who have rejected so much of the actual patrimony of the Catholic Church and even of the Natural Law, subject to “modification” at a later date by one of their antipapal successors. This logic somehow defies the grasp of writers such as George Weigel.

In this regard, therefore, it is thus necessary to see with one’s own eyes the fact that the “sainted” Polish Phenomenologist presided over a “canonical” overturning of the ends proper to Holy Matrimony that stands Holy Mother Church’s irreformable teaching about on its hand and nullifies even the binding precepts of the Natural Law:

Compare the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law with the conciliar church’s worthless 1983 code on this subject:

856. The primary object of marriage is the procreation and education of offspring; the secondary purpose is mutual assistance and the remedy of concupiscence. (This can be found on page 205 of the following link, which is the 1917 Code of Canon Law in English:  1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law.)

Can.  1055 §1. The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized. (1983 Conciliar Code: Canon 1055.1.)

The entire fabric of the counterfeit church of conciliarism’s teaching on the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony is built on the fabric of the inversion of the ends of marriage that was condemned personally by Pope Pius XII on March 29, 1944, a condemnation that he cited and reiterated in the strongest terms possible in his aforementioned Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession:

Certain publications concerning the purposes of matrimony, and their interrelationship and order, have come forth within these last years which either assert that the primary purpose of matrimony is not the generation of offspring, or that the secondary purposes are not subordinate to the primary purpose, but are independent of it.

In these works, different primary purposes of marriage are designated by other writers, as for example: the complement and personal perfection of the spouses through a complete mutual participation in life and action; mutual love and union of spouses to be nurtured and perfected the psychic and bodily surrender of one’s own person; and many other such things.

In the same writings a sense is sometimes attributed to words in the current documents of the Church (as for example, primary, secondary purpose), which does not agree with these words according to the common usage by theologians.

This revolutionary way of thinking and speaking aims to foster errors and uncertainties, to avoid which the Eminent and Very Fathers of this supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with the guarding of faith and morals, in a plenary session on Wednesday, the 29th of March, 1944, when the question was proposed to them: “Whether the opinion of certain writers can be admitted, who either deny that the primary purpose of matrimony is the generation of children and raising offspring, or teach that the secondary purposes are not essentially subordinate to the primary purpose, but are equally first and independent,” have decreed that the answer must be: In the negative. (As found in Henry Denzinger, Enchirdion Symbolorum, thirteenth edition, translated into English by Roy Deferrari and published in 1955 as The Sources of Catholic Dogma–referred to as “Denziger,” by B. Herder Book Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and London, England, No. 2295, pp. 624-625.)

Pope Pius XII amplified this condemnation when he delivered his Address to Italian Midwives on the Nature of their Profession, October 29, 1951:

"Personal values" and the need to respect such are a theme which, over the last twenty years or so, has been considered more and more by writers. In many of their works, even the specifically sexual act has its place assigned, that of serving the "person" of the married couple. The proper and most profound sense of the exercise of conjugal rights would consist in this, that the union of bodies is the expression and the realization of personal and affective union.

Articles, chapters, entire books, conferences, especially dealing with the "technique" of love, are composed to spread these ideas, to illustrate them with advice to the newly married as a guide in matrimony, in order that they may not neglect, through stupidity or a false sense of shame or unfounded scruples, that which God, Who also created natural inclinations, offers them. If from their complete reciprocal gift of husband and wife there results a new life, it is a result which remains outside, or, at the most, on the border of "personal values"; a result which is not denied, but neither is it desired as the center of marital relations.

According to these theories, your dedication for the welfare of the still hidden life in the womb of the mother, and your assisting its happy birth, would only have but a minor and secondary importance.

Now, if this relative evaluation were merely to place the emphasis on the personal values of husband and wife rather than on that of the offspring, it would be possible, strictly speaking, to put such a problem aside. But, however, it is a matter of a grave inversion of the order of values and of the ends imposed by the Creator Himself. We find Ourselves faced with the propagation of a number of ideas and sentiments directly opposed to the clarity, profundity, and seriousness of Christian thought. Here, once again, the need for your apostolate. It may happen that you receive the confidences of the mother and wife and are questioned on the more secret desires and intimacies of married life. How, then, will you be able, aware of your mission, to give weight to truth and right order in the appreciation and action of the married couple, if you yourselves are not furnished with the strength of character needed to uphold what you know to be true and just?

The primary end of marriage

Now, the truth is that matrimony, as an institution of nature, in virtue of the Creator's will, has not as a primary and intimate end the personal perfection of the married couple but the procreation and upbringing of a new life. The other ends, inasmuch as they are intended by nature, are not equally primary, much less superior to the primary end, but are essentially subordinated to it. This is true of every marriage, even if no offspring result, just as of every eye it can be said that it is destined and formed to see, even if, in abnormal cases arising from special internal or external conditions, it will never be possible to achieve visual perception.

It was precisely to end the uncertainties and deviations which threatened to diffuse errors regarding the scale of values of the purposes of matrimony and of their reciprocal relations, that a few years ago (March 29, 1944), We Ourselves drew up a declaration on the order of those ends, pointing out what the very internal structure of the natural disposition reveals. We showed what has been handed down by Christian tradition, what the Supreme Pontiffs have repeatedly taught, and what was then in due measure promulgated by the Code of Canon Law. Not long afterwards, to correct opposing opinions, the Holy See, by a public decree, proclaimed that it could not admit the opinion of some recent authors who denied that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of the offspring, or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinated to the primary end, but are on an equal footing and independent of it.

Would this lead, perhaps, to Our denying or diminishing what is good and just in personal values resulting from matrimony and its realization? Certainly not, because the Creator has designed that for the procreation of a new life human beings made of flesh and blood, gifted with soul and heart, shall be called upon as men and not as animals deprived of reason to be the authors of their posterity. It is for this end that the Lord desires the union of husband and wife. Indeed, the Holy Scripture says of God that He created man to His image and He created him male and female, and willed—as is repeatedly affirmed in Holy Writ—that "a man shall leave mother and father, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh".

All this is therefore true and desired by God. But, on the other hand, it must not be divorced completely from the primary function of matrimony—the procreation of offspring. Not only the common work of external life, but even all personal enrichment—spiritual and intellectual—all that in married love as such is most spiritual and profound, has been placed by the will of the Creator and of nature at the service of posterity. The perfect married life, of its very nature, also signifies the total devotion of parents to the well-being of their children, and married love in its power and tenderness is itself a condition of the sincerest care of the offspring and the guarantee of its realization.

To reduce the common life of husband and wife and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of seed would be but to convert the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory. Therefore, in Our allocution of September 29, 1949, to the International Congress of Catholic Doctors, We expressly excluded artificial insemination in marriage. The conjugal act, in its natural structure, is a personal action, a simultaneous and immediate cooperation of husband and wife, which by the very nature of the agents and the propriety of the act, is the expression of the reciprocal gift, which, according to Holy Writ, effects the union "in one flesh".

That is much more than the union of two genes, which can be effected even by artificial means, that is, without the natural action of husband and wife. The conjugal act, ordained and desired by nature, is a personal cooperation, to which husband and wife, when contracting marriage, exchange the right.

Therefore, when this act in its natural form is from the beginning perpetually impossible, the object of the matrimonial contract is essentially vitiated. This is what we said on that occasion: "Let it not be forgotten: only the procreation of a new life according to the will and the design of the Creator carries with it in a stupendous degree of perfection the intended ends. It is at the same time in conformity with the spiritual and bodily nature and the dignity of the married couple, in conformity with the happy and normal development of the child".

Advise the fiancée or the young married woman who comes to seek your advice about the values of matrimonial life that these personal values, both in the sphere of the body and the senses and in the sphere of the spirit, are truly genuine, but that the Creator has placed them not in the first, but in the second degree of the scale of values. (Pope Pius XII, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession, October 29, 1951.)

Yet it is that Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI not only defended the very errors condemned by Pope Pius XII and the Holy Office in 1944, but he also used them as a means to justify what became known as “natural family planning,” thereby ceding ground to the contraceptive mentality that Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968, aimed to oppose.

Humanae Vitae was not, however, an orthodox statement of the Catholic Faith. It is, much like everything else in the false "pontificate" of Paul VI, a revolutionary document that inverted the ends proper to marriage as the phenomenology of philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and the theology of Father Herbert Doms were used to assert that the "unitive" end of marriage was primary. 

Humanae Vitae was also a revolutionary document in that it continued Paul VI's acceptance of a nonexistent "population crisis" as the foundation for expanding the conditions to use "natural" methods to avoid conceiving children. The hideous false "pontiff," who appointed and promoted all manner of lavender types as "bishops" throughout the conciliar structures, wrote the following in Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967, that laid the groundwork for the further inversion of the ends of marriage to be found in Humanae Vitae by means of an more expansive view of the reasons that married couples could avoid children than provided in Pope Pius XII's Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession in that wonderful year of 1951:

37. There is no denying that the accelerated rate of population growth brings many added difficulties to the problems of development where the size of the population grows more rapidly than the quantity of available resources to such a degree that things seem to have reached an impasse. In such circumstances people are inclined to apply drastic remedies to reduce the birth rate.

There is no doubt that public authorities can intervene in this matter, within the bounds of their competence. They can instruct citizens on this subject and adopt appropriate measures, so long as these are in conformity with the dictates of the moral law and the rightful freedom of married couples is preserved completely intact. When the inalienable right of marriage and of procreation is taken away, so is human dignity.

Finally, it is for parents to take a thorough look at the matter and decide upon the number of their children. This is an obligation they take upon themselves, before their children already born, and before the community to which they belong—following the dictates of their own consciences informed by God's law authentically interpreted, and bolstered by their trust in Him. (39) (Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, March 26, 1967.)

Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI was a Marxist sympathizer, if not a Marxist himself. Indeed, Father Michael Roach, who taught Church History at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, said in a class lecture in the Fall of 1981 that he had been with the then rector of the seminary, Monsignor Harry Flynn, who would later denounce Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., as an "anti-Semite" (see Disconnects), in his capacity as the conciliar "archbishop" of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the time of the death of Montini/Paul VI on August 6, 1978. According to Father Roach, the then Monsignor Flynn, a priest of the Diocese of Albany, New York, said, "Ah, yes, Paul VI. A marvelous man. A Marxist, but a marvelous man nonetheless."

The point is this: Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, who betrayed the identity of Catholic priests behind the Iron Curtain when serving at the Vatican's Secretariat of State under Pope Pius XII, accepted the Malthusian myth of "overpopulation" and "depleted resources" to assert that it is parents who decide how many children they are to welcome into the world. Wrong. God decides this, not parents. God can see to it that children are conceived despite the more careful "precautions" taken against their conception, something that is as true of the use of what is called today "natural family planning" as it is of artificial contraception. God decides this matter. No one else. God is alone the Sovereign over the sanctity and the fecundity of marriage. No one else.

Pope Pius XI, writing in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, stated this quite explicitly:

10. Now when We come to explain, Venerable Brethren, what are the blessings that God has attached to true matrimony, and how great they are, there occur to Us the words of that illustrious Doctor of the Church whom We commemorated recently in Our Encyclical Ad salutem on the occasion of the fifteenth centenary of his death:[9] "These," says St. Augustine, "are all the blessings of matrimony on account of which matrimony itself is a blessing; offspring, conjugal faith and the sacrament."[10] And how under these three heads is contained a splendid summary of the whole doctrine of Christian marriage, the holy Doctor himself expressly declares when he said: "By conjugal faith it is provided that there should be no carnal intercourse outside the marriage bond with another man or woman; with regard to offspring, that children should be begotten of love, tenderly cared for and educated in a religious atmosphere; finally, in its sacramental aspect that the marriage bond should not be broken and that a husband or wife, if separated, should not be joined to another even for the sake of offspring. This we regard as the law of marriage by which the fruitfulness of nature is adorned and the evil of incontinence is restrained."[11]

11. Thus amongst the blessings of marriage, the child holds the first place. And indeed the Creator of the human race Himself, Who in His goodness wishes to use men as His helpers in the propagation of life, taught this when, instituting marriage in Paradise, He said to our first parents, and through them to all future spouses: "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth."[12] As St. Augustine admirably deduces from the words of the holy Apostle Saint Paul to Timothy[13] when he says: "The Apostle himself is therefore a witness that marriage is for the sake of generation: 'I wish,' he says, 'young girls to marry.' And, as if someone said to him, 'Why?,' he immediately adds: 'To bear children, to be mothers of families'."[14]

12. How great a boon of God this is, and how great a blessing of matrimony is clear from a consideration of man's dignity and of his sublime end. For man surpasses all other visible creatures by the superiority of his rational nature alone. Besides, God wishes men to be born not only that they should live and fill the earth, but much more that they may be worshippers of God, that they may know Him and love Him and finally enjoy Him for ever in heaven; and this end, since man is raised by God in a marvelous way to the supernatural order, surpasses all that eye hath seen, and ear heard, and all that hath entered into the heart of man.[15] From which it is easily seen how great a gift of divine goodness and how remarkable a fruit of marriage are children born by the omnipotent power of God through the cooperation of those bound in wedlock.

13. But Christian parents must also understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God's household,[16] that the worshippers of God and Our Savior may daily increase.

14. For although Christian spouses even if sanctified themselves cannot transmit sanctification to their progeny, nay, although the very natural process of generating life has become the way of death by which original sin is passed on to posterity, nevertheless, they share to some extent in the blessings of that primeval marriage of Paradise, since it is theirs to offer their offspring to the Church in order that by this most fruitful Mother of the children of God they may be regenerated through the laver of Baptism unto supernatural justice and finally be made living members of Christ, partakers of immortal life, and heirs of that eternal glory to which we all aspire from our inmost heart.

15. If a true Christian mother weigh well these things, she will indeed understand with a sense of deep consolation that of her the words of Our Savior were spoken: "A woman . . . when she hath brought forth the child remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world";[17] and proving herself superior to all the pains and cares and solicitudes of her maternal office with a more just and holy joy than that of the Roman matron, the mother of the Gracchi, she will rejoice in the Lord crowned as it were with the glory of her offspring. Both husband and wife, however, receiving these children with joy and gratitude from the hand of God, will regard them as a talent committed to their charge by God, not only to be employed for their own advantage or for that of an earthly commonwealth, but to be restored to God with interest on the day of reckoning. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubi, December 31, 1930.)

God decides how many or how few children a Catholic married couple will have. No one else. Men may try to the thwart the natural end of marriage. They may be able to be "successful," as they count "success," perhaps even more often than not. No human means of deliberately frustrating the natural end of marriage is infallible, and no carefully planned use of the gift proper to the married state in those times during a month when a woman is more apt it to be infertile than others will avoid the conception of a new child in all instances. God is the Sovereign of the fecundity of marriage.

As a Modernist and a socialist who was, as noted earlier, at the very least sympathetic to Marxism, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria/Paul VI, however, thought and spoke in naturalistic terms that were tinged with vestigial after-effects of the Holy Faith. He accepted the myths of "progress" and "world peace" represented by the United Masonic Nations Organization, about which Pope Pius XII, although at first supportive of the organization, began to sour in the 1950s, and accepted the myths of "overpopulation." It was for this reason that he continued the work of the aforementioned "Pontifical Commission for the Study of Population, Family and Births so that its members could study the biological operation of the "birth control pill" to determine if it could be used morally to prevent the conception of children, especially in areas of endemic poverty,. A member of that commission, Archbishop Albino Luciani of Venice, Italy, the future "John Paul I," is said to have voted to endorse "the pill," which, apart from the denying the Sovereignty of God over the sanctity and fecundity of marriage, is a chemical abortifacient, because of his concerns for "the poor."

Montini/Paul VI was open to "the pill" to deal with the nonexistent problem of overpopulation. Unable to endorse its use, though, he used Humanae Vitae to expand the conditions outlined by Pope Pius XII in his Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession in 1951 to invert the ends of marriage, an inversion that would be institutionalized later by the "personalist phenomenologist" named Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and the hideously disgusting “theology of the body” that he explicated over the course of several years in his "general audience" talks in the early-1980s (talks he was giving at the time he was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca on Wednesday, May 13, 1981, by the way), thus paving the way for the propagation and acceptance of the cottage industry that became known as "natural family planning" as the expected norm for married couples, who must be "educated" in matters that violate modesty of speech and detract from the sanctity of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

Montini/Paul VI prefaced Humanae Vitae's expanded conditions for the use of a woman's infertile periods as the basis of avoiding the conception of children upon with yet another reference to the myth of overpopulation:

1. The most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

At all times the fulfillment of this duty has posed grave problems to the conscience of married persons, but, with the recent evolution of society, changes have taken place that give rise to new questions which the Church could not ignore, having to do with a matter which so closely touches upon the life and happiness of men.

2. The changes which have taken place are in fact noteworthy and of varied kinds. In the first place, there is the rapid demographic development. Fear is shown by many that world population is growing more rapidly than the available resources, with growing distress to many families and developing countries, so that the temptation for authorities to counter this danger with radical measures is great. Moreover, working and lodging conditions, as well as increased exigencies both in the economic field and in that of education, often make the proper education of a larger number of children difficult today. A change is also seen both in the manner of considering the person of woman and her place in society, and in the value to be attributed to conjugal love in marriage, and also in the appreciation to be made of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to that love.

Finally and above all, man has made stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature, such that he tends to extend this domination to his own total being: to the body, to psychical life, to social life and even to the laws which regulate the transmission of life.

3. This new state of things gives rise to new questions. Granted the conditions of life today, and granted the meaning which conjugal relations have with respect to the harmony between husband and wife and to their mutual fidelity, would not a revision of the ethical norms, in force up to now, seem to be advisable, especially when it is considered that they cannot be observed without sacrifices, sometimes heroic sacrifices?

And again: by extending to this field the application of the so-called "principle of totality," could it not be admitted that the intention of a less abundant but more rationalized fecundity might transform a materially sterilizing intervention into a licit and wise control of birth? Could it not be admitted, that is, that the finality of procreation pertains to the ensemble of conjugal life, rather than to its single acts? It is also asked whether, in view of the increased sense of responsibility of modern man, the moment has not come for him to entrust to his reason and his will, rather than to the biological rhythms of his organism, the task of regulating birth.

4. Such questions required from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection upon the principles of the moral teaching on marriage: a teaching founded on the natural law, illuminated and enriched by divine revelation. (Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.)

It is upon these false premises that the hideous friend of the lavender collective, of which he may very well have been a charter member, handed so many Catholic couples over to the devil so that they could immersed in considerations of physicality that have never had any place in Catholic teaching. Although Montini/Paul VI re-stated the immutable teaching of the Church concerning the begetting of children, this was part of the "bait and switch" game as he used his own text to place what he called the "unitive" end before that of procreation:

And finally this love is fecund for it is not exhausted by the communion between husband and wife, but is destined to continue, raising up new lives. "Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the begetting and educating of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute very substantially to the welfare of their parents."⁸

10. Hence conjugal love requires in husband and wife an awareness of their mission of "responsible parenthood," which today is rightly much insisted upon, and which also must be exactly understood. Consequently it is to be considered under different aspects which are legitimate and connected with one another.

In relation to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means the knowledge and respect of their functions; human intellect discovers in the power of giving life biological laws which are part of the human person.

In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means that necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.

In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.

Responsible parenthood also and above all implies a more profound relationship to the objective moral order established by God, of which a right conscience is the faithful interpreter. The responsible exercise of parenthood implies, therefore, that husband and wife recognize fully their own duties towards God, towards themselves, towards the family and towards society, in a correct hierarchy of values.

In the task of transmitting life, therefore, they are not free to proceed completely at will, as if they could determine in a wholly autonomous way the honest path to follow; but they must conform their activity to the creative intention of God, expressed in the very nature of marriage and of its acts, and manifested by the constant teaching of the Church.

11. These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy, and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the Council recalled, "noble and worthy,"and they do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund, since they always remain ordained towards expressing and consolidating their union. In fact, as experience bears witness, not every conjugal act is followed by a new life. God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births. Nonetheless the Church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by their constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act (quilibet matrimonii usus) must remain open to the transmission of life.

12. That teaching, often set forth by the magisterium, is founded upon the inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning. Indeed, by its intimate structure, the conjugal act, while most closely uniting husband and wife, capacitates them for the generation of new lives, according to laws inscribed in the very being of man and of woman. By safeguarding both these essential aspects, the unitive and the procreative, the conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its ordination towards man's most high calling to parenthood. We believe that the men of our day are particularly capable of seeing the deeply reasonable and human character of this fundamental principle. (Giovanni Montini/Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968.) 

Who had been calling for "responsible parenthood" for five decades prior to her death on September 6, 1966?

The nymphomaniac, racist and eugenicist named Margaret Sanger, the founder of the Birth Control League that became known as Planned Parenthood, that's who. Her followers continue to champion this shopworn slogan that found its way into the text of an alleged "papal" encyclical letter. Montini/Paul VI's acceptance of "responsible parenthood" slogan of Margaret Sanger and her diabolical minions, coupled with the inversion of the ends of marriage propagated by Dietrich von Hildebrand, constitutes a revolution against the ends of marriage that have "baptized," if you will, a supposedly "natural" form of contraception that is to be used as a matter of routine, not in truly extraordinary cases, where is it only lawful, that is, permissible, and never mandated.

The inclusion of "psychological" reasons to abstain from the conception of children by the use of "knowing" the physicality of a woman's body has been interpreted rather broadly, shall we say. In plain English: the use of "psychological" reasons to abstain from the conception of children has been used to reaffirm the "consciences" of those who are "not ready" for children. This is no different whatsoever than those who have chosen the use of artificial means to prevent the conception of children because they are "not ready" to have them. They have careers. They have poor finances. They have elderly parents for whom to care. They have "plans." They have to get through school. And on and on on. Everybody's got a "serious reason." These are nothing other than excuses and rationalizations that consider marriage in purely naturalistic and materialistic, if not utilitarian, terms without any true love of God and thus of trust that He will send married couples all of the supernatural and temporal helps that they need to provide for the children that God sees fit to send them.

The "teaching" that led to what is called today as "natural family planning" is not to be found in Pope Pius XII's October 29, 1951, Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession. It is to be found in Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, devoted to the "responsible parenthood" slogan of Planned Parenthood and the United Nations and environmental groups. (See Fifty Years After Humane Vitae and Life, Death, and Truth: Under Attack by Medicine and Law.)

Truly responsible Catholic parenthood is founded in a love for God's Holy Will and by training however many or few children in the truths of the Catholic Faith, which require parents to eschew worldliness and to arm them with the supernatural and natural means to live in a "popular culture" devoted to the glorification of the very thing that caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and that caused those Seven Swords of Sorrow to be pierced through and through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, that is, sin. That's truly responsible Catholic parenthood. Not that which is represented by "Paul the Sick" and Humanae Vitae.

Montini/Paul VI further undermined the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony by radically expanding the grounds on which a ratified and consummated marriage could be declared null, thus providing his true son in all things heretical and sacrilegious, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the ability to expand such grounds to the point of absurdity. Indeed, the Argentine Apostate has made procured abortion a grounds for obtaining a conciliar decree of nullity, which the conciliar authorities themselves describe as a “morally certain decision” by a diocesan marriage tribunal that a true marriage had never existed. How does a procured abortion prove such a thing? It does not.

George Weigel does not nor can he cannot admit that the nature of the errors about Holy Matrimony that were embraced and propagated by Montini and Wojtyla were bound to produce Bergoglio’s “case-by-case, internal forum” policy for those Catholics who are divorced and have “remarried” in civil ceremonies in order to make it possible for them to receive what purports to be Holy Communion in the Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical abomination. The nature of error is such that it leads to future errors that were not intended by its progenitors.

There is quite an irony in this, of course, as Mr. Weigel is so focused on the “tree” that is Amoris Laetitia that it impossible for them to see the “forest” of heresy and error that was propagated by the “Second” Vatican Council that has served as the fountainhead of the multiplicity of errors that have been taught by each of the postconciliar “popes.”

To wit, admitting that Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s false teaching on the Sixth and Ninth Commandments in Amoris Laetitia is very clear, there has been nothing unclear about his mockery of the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Commandments. Indeed, there has been nothing unclear at all about the mockery of those Commandments by Montini/Paul VI, Wojtyla/John Paul II, and Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as each of these mockeries is no less displeasing to the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Blessed Trinity, than those contained in Amoris Laetitia and “Pope Francis’s” subsequent comments about it.

One cannot build a defense of Catholic doctrine upon an admixture of error and truth. The “teaching” of the “Second” Vatican Council and the encyclical letters or exhortations of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI and Karol Josef Wojtyla/John Paul II can never be used to as a defense of any part of the Catholic Faith, including Catholic doctrine on marriage and its indissolubility. Men who have had a contempt for the very nature of dogmatic truth and have used that contempt to undermine almost every element of Catholic teaching are deserving of contempt from believing Catholics, not respect.

If Mr. Weigel wants a solid defense of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and its indissolubility they would have relied upon the Catholic wisdom of Pope Leo XIII in Arcanum and that of Pope Pius XI in Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930:

41. In the great confusion of opinions, however, which day by day is spreading more and more widely, it should further be known that no power can dissolve the bond of Christian marriage whenever this has been ratified and consummated; and that, of a consequence, those husbands and wives are guilty of a manifest crime who plan, for whatever reason, to be united in a second marriage before the first one has been ended by death. When, indeed, matters have come to such a pitch that it seems impossible for them to live together any longer, then the Church allows them to live apart, and strives at the same time to soften the evils of this separation by such remedies and helps as are suited to their condition; yet she never ceases to endeavor to bring about a reconciliation, and never despairs of doing so. But these are extreme cases; and they would seldom exist if men and women entered into the married state with proper dispositions, not influenced by passion, but entertaining right ideas of the duties of marriage and of its noble purpose; neither would they anticipate their marriage by a series of sins drawing down upon them the wrath of God.

42. To sum up all in a few words, there would be a calm and quiet constancy in marriage if married people would gather strength and life from the virtue of religion alone, which imparts to us resolution and fortitude; for religion would enable them to bear tranquilly and even gladly the trials of their state, such as, for instance, the faults that they discover in one another, the difference of temper and character, the weight of a mother's cares, the wearing anxiety about the education of children, reverses of fortune, and the sorrows of life.

43. Care also must be taken that they do not easily enter into marriage with those who are not Catholics; for, when minds do not agree as to the observances of religion, it is scarcely possible to hope for agreement in other things. Other reasons also proving that persons should turn with dread from such marriages are chiefly these: that they give occasion to forbidden association and communion in religious matters; endanger the faith of the Catholic partner; are a hindrance to the proper education of the children; and often lead to a mixing up of truth and falsehood, and to the belief that all religions are equally good.    

44. Lastly, since We well know that none should be excluded from Our charity, We commend, venerable brothers, to your fidelity and piety those unhappy persons who, carried away by the heat of passion, and being utterly indifferent to their salvation, live wickedly together without the bond of lawful marriage. Let your utmost care be exercised in bringing such persons back to their duty; and, both by your own efforts and by those of good men who will consent to help you, strive by every means that they may see how wrongly they have acted; that they may do penance; and that they may be induced to enter into a lawful marriage according to the Catholic rite. (Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum, February 10, 1880.)

32. In the first place Christ Himself lays stress on the indissolubility and firmness of the marriage bond when He says: "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder,"[31] and: "Everyone that putteth away his wife and marrieth another committeth adultery, and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery."[32]

33. And St. Augustine clearly places what he calls the blessing of matrimony in this indissolubility when he says: "In the sacrament it is provided that the marriage bond should not be broken, and that a husband or wife, if separated, should not be joined to another even for the sake of offspring."[33]

34. And this inviolable stability, although not in the same perfect measure in every case, belongs to every true marriage, for the word of the Lord: "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder," must of necessity include all true marriages without exception, since it was spoken of the marriage of our first parents, the prototype of every future marriage. Therefore although before Christ the sublimeness and the severity of the primeval law was so tempered that Moses permitted to the chosen people of God on account of the hardness of their hearts that a bill of divorce might be given in certain circumstances, nevertheless, Christ, by virtue of His supreme legislative power, recalled this concession of greater liberty and restored the primeval law in its integrity by those words which must never be forgotten, "What God hath joined together let no man put asunder." Wherefore, Our predecessor Pius VI of happy memory, writing to the Bishop of Agria, most wisely said: "Hence it is clear that marriage even in the state of nature, and certainly long before it was raised to the dignity of a sacrament, was divinely instituted in such a way that it should carry with it a perpetual and indissoluble bond which cannot therefore be dissolved by any civil law. Therefore although the sacramental element may be absent from a marriage as is the case among unbelievers, still in such a marriage, inasmuch as it is a true marriage there must remain and indeed there does remain that perpetual bond which by divine right is so bound up with matrimony from its first institution that it is not subject to any civil power. And so, whatever marriage is said to be contracted, either it is so contracted that it is really a true marriage, in which case it carries with it that enduring bond which by divine right is inherent in every true marriage; or it is thought to be contracted without that perpetual bond, and in that case there is no marriage, but an illicit union opposed of its very nature to the divine law, which therefore cannot be entered into or maintained."[34]

35. And if this stability seems to be open to exception, however rare the exception may be, as in the case of certain natural marriages between unbelievers, or amongst Christians in the case of those marriages which though valid have not been consummated, that exception does not depend on the will of men nor on that of any merely human power, but on divine law, of which the only guardian and interpreter is the Church of Christ. However, not even this power can ever affect for any cause whatsoever a Christian marriage which is valid and has been consummated, for as it is plain that here the marriage contract has its full completion, so, by the will of God, there is also the greatest firmness and indissolubility which may not be destroyed by any human authority.

36. If we wish with all reverence to inquire into the intimate reason of this divine decree, Venerable Brethren, we shall easily see it in the mystical signification of Christian marriage which is fully and perfectly verified in consummated marriage between Christians. For, as the Apostle says in his Epistle to the Ephesians,[35] the marriage of Christians recalls that most perfect union which exists between Christ and the Church: "Sacramentum hoc magnum est, ego autem dico, in Christo et in ecclesia;" which union, as long as Christ shall live and the Church through Him, can never be dissolved by any separation. And this St. Augustine clearly declares in these words: "This is safeguarded in Christ and the Church, which, living with Christ who lives for ever may never be divorced from Him. The observance of this sacrament is such in the City of God . . . that is, in the Church of Christ, that when for the sake of begetting children, women marry or are taken to wife, it is wrong to leave a wife that is sterile in order to take another by whom children may be hand. Anyone doing this is guilty of adultery, just as if he married another, guilty not by the law of the day, according to which when one's partner is put away another may be taken, which the Lord allowed in the law of Moses because of the hardness of the hearts of the people of Israel; but by the law of the Gospel."[36]

37. Indeed, how many and how important are the benefits which flow from the indissolubility of matrimony cannot escape anyone who gives even a brief consideration either to the good of the married parties and the offspring or to the welfare of human society. First of all, both husband and wife possess a positive guarantee of the endurance of this stability which that generous yielding of their persons and the intimate fellowship of their hearts by their nature strongly require, since true love never falls away.[37] Besides, a strong bulwark is set up in defense of a loyal chastity against incitements to infidelity, should any be encountered either from within or from without; any anxious fear lest in adversity or old age the other spouse would prove unfaithful is precluded and in its place there reigns a calm sense of security. Moreover, the dignity of both man and wife is maintained and mutual aid is most satisfactorily assured, while through the indissoluble bond, always enduring, the spouses are warned continuously that not for the sake of perishable things nor that they may serve their passions, but that they may procure one for the other high and lasting good have they entered into the nuptial partnership, to be dissolved only by death. In the training and education of children, which must extend over a period of many years, it plays a great part, since the grave and long enduring burdens of this office are best borne by the united efforts of the parents. Nor do lesser benefits accrue to human society as a whole. For experience has taught that unassailable stability in matrimony is a fruitful source of virtuous life and of habits of integrity. Where this order of things obtains, the happiness and well being of the nation is safely guarded; what the families and individuals are, so also is the State, for a body is determined by its parts. Wherefore, both for the private good of husband, wife and children, as likewise for the public good of human society, they indeed deserve well who strenuously defend the inviolable stability of matrimony.

38. But considering the benefits of the Sacrament, besides the firmness and indissolubility, there are also much higher emoluments as the word "sacrament" itself very aptly indicates; for to Christians this is not a meaningless and empty name. Christ the Lord, the Institutor and "Perfecter" of the holy sacraments,[38] by raising the matrimony of His faithful to the dignity of a true sacrament of the New Law, made it a sign and source of that peculiar internal grace by which "it perfects natural love, it confirms an indissoluble union, and sanctifies both man and wife."[39] (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.)

Trying to oppose Bergoglio’s heresy by using other the work of heretics (Montini, Wojtyla) is insanity.

Yes, violate the First and Second Commandments, good readers, and everything else will follow thereafter, including the Third Commandment (promulgation of a sacrilegious liturgy and other sacramentally invalid rites), the Fourth Commandment (separation of church and state, religious liberty) and the Fifth Commandment (conciliar "popes" have decried the death penalty and Bergoglio has said that there is no such thing as a just war). Why should any particular respect be given to the binding precepts of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments when the honor and glory and majesty of the Most Blessed Trinity have been undermined and mocked with complete impunity?

The veritable “house of cards” that has been constructed out of the constant erosion of the sensus Catholicus by the documents of the “Second” Vatican Council and the “magisterium” of the post-conciliar “popes” has fallen down by the septuagenarian juvenile delinquent from South America, a man who delights, absolutely delights, in “making a mess” as he springs “surprises” that he dares so blasphemously to represent as coming from God when they are nothing other than the phantasms of his heretical imagination.

No, this did not all begin with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his agenda of sin that has many Catholics in the conciliar structures who follow these developments to the point of wondering how to deal with a supposed “pope” who preaches heresy. Obviously, such a "pope" is no pope at all, and Bergoglio's heresies, including those contained in Amoris Laetitia, are just a "papal" stamp-of-approval on what he has believed and taught throughout the course of his career as a lay Jesuit revolutionary.

Fall from the Faith in one thing, fall from it entirely. It is really that simple.

Folks, conciliarism is nothing other than Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry all rolled into one on the theological and social levels. That Mr. Weigel does not realize this is entirely unsurprising.

One area, however, where I would find some agreement with Weigel concerns Bergoglio’s refusal to speak out firmly in defense of his “bishops” and other clergy when they have come under attack from the Communists in Nicaragua and Red China:

The somber mood in Rome these days also reflects embarrassment over the dramatic decline of the Vatican’s moral authority in world affairs: the result of both inept papal commentary and Vatican policies that create the impression that the Church is abandoning her own. Very few senior churchmen are enthusiastic about the Holy See’s kowtow to the Marxist mandarins of the People’s Republic of China, whose communist party now plays a prominent role in naming bishops. The Holy See’s accommodating approach to the brutal thugocracies in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela breeds more embarrassment. When opposition leaders plead for the Holy See to vigorously defend the persecuted Church and imprisoned Catholic dissidents in those countries, their requests often go unanswered — or they’re told by a (very) senior Vatican official that, while he is personally sympathetic, the Pope insists on a different approach. (A somber anniversary.)

Bergoglio’s preferential option for Communist thugs globally has been discussed on this site many times (some of those articles were included in Vanquished by Our Lady: Comrade Bergoglio. Other articles include: Believing Catholics Pose No Threat to a Just Social Order, Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Ten Years of Antichrist's Viceroy and Spokesman,  Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part one, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part two, Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" With Diocletian, part three, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio Would Have Urged Catholics to "Dialogue" with Diocletian, part four). What Mr. Weigel does not admit in his recent commentary is that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is just carrying on the work of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul VI’s Ostpolik with Communists in general and is only putting the finishing touches of the Karol Joseph Wojtyla/John Paul II’s and Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s incremental sellouts to the Red Chinese ( Bergoglio the Red Surrenders Faithful Catholics to Their Persecutors, Neville Bergoglio's Appeasement of the Chicom Monsters, Doubly Betrayed by Jorge and His False Church, Red China’s Burgeoning Hegemony Over the West and the Conciliar Vatican), although Bergoglio’s softness for the Castros is sui generis, shall we say ("Respect and Consideration" For Fidel Castro? and Jorge Grieves for Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz),

Suffice it to say once again that, as noted in  Jorge Mario Bergoglio: Ten Years of Antichrist's Viceroy and Spokesman, for Jorge Mario Bergoglio to claim “shock” about Daniel Ortega’s brutality is to ignore this Communist dictator’s long history of warfare against believing Catholics from 1979 to 1990 that resumed in 2007 after he had regained the confidence of a one-time ally turned critic, Miguel Obando “Cardinal” y Bravo, in the early 2000s and made noises about a “reconciliation” with what purports to be the Catholic Church. The following article provides a decent summary of Ortega’s long history of persecuting those Catholics who refuse to support and/or have been critical of the Sandinista revolution, which is nothing other than Cuban Marxism-Leninism with non-bearded faces:

In November 1979, the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference published a pastoral letter titled “Christian Commitment for a New Nicaragua” that, among other things, saw this “revolutionary process” as an opportunity for the country and called on the population to make the necessary sacrifices and to experience a “profound conversion of heart.”

The bishops also called for “ample space for freedom allowing it (the Church) to carry out its apostolic work without interference.”

Shortly after Somoza’s fall, a five-member National Reconstruction Governing Junta was established: three from the FSLN and two independents, including Violeta Chamorro (widow of Pedro Chamorro, director of the newspaper La Prensa, who was assassinated by Somoza) and Alfonso Robelo. The coordinator was Daniel Ortega.

Violeta Chamorro resigned from the Junta in April 1980 due to the socialist direction the FSLN was taking and the influence of Cuba in the government. Robelo resigned for the same reasons and later joined the political directorate of the Nicaraguan Resistance (called the “Contras” for “counterrevolutionaries”) that, financed by the United States, fought a civil war with the Sandinistas throughout the decade.

The Junta governed Nicaragua until 1985 and handed over power to Ortega, who had won the 1984 presidential elections with the FSLN, which had become a political party.

Priests in the government and the intervention of John Paul II

With the inauguration of the Junta, three well-known priests who promoted Marxist liberation theology assumed positions in the Sandinista government: Miguel D’Escoto was minister of foreign affairs (1979-1990); Ernesto Cardenal was minister of culture (1979-1987); and Edgar Parrales was vice minister deputy director general of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (1979-1980), minister of social welfare (1980-1982) and Nicaraguan ambassador to the Organization of American States (1982-1986).

The participation of these priests in the government caused tensions with the bishops. Although the episcopate initially authorized this participation, in January 1980 the bishops’ conference decided that they could no longer be part of the Sandinista government.

In April of that year, Pope John Paul II received the Nicaraguan bishops at the Vatican and told them in an address that “an atheist ideology cannot be the guiding instrument of the effort to promote social justice, because it deprives man of his freedom, of spiritual inspiration, and of the strength to love his brother, which has its most solid and operative foundation in the love of God.”

A few weeks later, the bishops asked the priests to resign from their positions in the Sandinista government, but they refused.

In February 1984, John Paul II suspended ad divinis the three priests and Father Fernando Cardenal, Ernesto’s brother, who also participated in the Ortega regime. From that year until 1990, Fernando Cardenal was minister of education.

A courageous archbishop and an ambushed priest

During the first Sandinista period, one of the members of the Catholic Church who stood out for his denunciations of human-rights violations was the archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo (1926-2018), whom John Paul II made a cardinal in 1985.

The archbishop was already known for denouncing human-rights violations during the Somoza dictatorship and didn’t remain silent in the face of the abuses of the Ortega regime.

In addition, his role was decisive in preventing the spread of the so-called “people’s church” promoted by priests and religious subscribing to Marxist liberation theology.

The FSLN government retaliated and targeted prominent pastors. In August 1982, agents from the regime dressed as police officers arrested Father Bismarck Carballo, who was then a spokesman for the Church and the director of a Catholic radio station.

The agents entered a house where the priest was and fabricated an alleged sexual scandal with a woman. They stripped him naked, took him out on the street, and published the false story in all the official media.

In February 1986, the U.S. secretary of state published the testimony of former Sandinista lieutenant Álvaro Baldizón Avilés, a defector who stated that the scandal involving Carballo was staged by the Ortega regime.

Another of Ortega’s outrages against the Church was the expulsion of 10 foreign priests in July 1984. The priests were accused of violating national laws and participating in anti-government activities for attending a march called by Obando y Bravo in solidarity with Father Luis Amado Peña, a priest accused of terrorism by the regime.

In the 1980s, clashes between the FSLN and the resistance or the “Contras” left tens of thousands dead. On Aug. 7, 1987, the Esquipulas II Peace Accord was signed in Guatemala to end the civil war in Nicaragua and achieve a “lasting peace” in Central America. The document called for free multiparty elections and the establishment of a National Reconciliation Commission.

Obando y Bravo and the then auxiliary bishop of Managua, Bosco Vivas Robelo, participated in this commission.

Ortega ran for president in the February 1990 elections and was defeated by Violeta Chamorro. Ortega ran again unsuccessfully in 1996 and 2001.

On Oct. 18, 1996, two days before the elections, Obando y Bravo told a story — which the press called “the parable of the viper” — exhorting Nicaraguans to be prudent and think about what is best for the country.

Ortega makes peace with the Catholic Church

After losing the elections, Ortega — who was then leading the opposition — apparently made peace with the Catholic Church. In July 2003, the former guerrilla apologized for the “excesses” and “errors” of his government against Catholics in the 1980s.

In June 2004, Ortega proposed nominating Obando y Bravo for the Nobel Peace Prize, “in recognition of his struggle for national reconciliation” and the signing of the peace accords that ended the civil war.

That month, Obando y Bravo accepted Ortega’s request to offer the Sandinista-sponsored Mass for the thousands of dead in the civil war.

In July 2004, as part of the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, Ortega publicly apologized for the abuses against the Catholic Church during his first government and explicitly referred to Carballo.

Ortega returns to power in 2007

Ortega won the 2006 elections with 38% of the vote thanks to an electoral reform that lowered the percentage to win the presidency to 35% of the vote if there is a 5% margin over second place.

In February 2007, Ortega invited Obando y Bravo, then archbishop emeritus of Managua and 81 years old, to preside over the National Council for Reconciliation and Peace created by his new government. The cardinal accepted the position on a “personal basis” and had the support of the episcopate.

However, in September 2008, the bishop of Matagalpa, Jorge Solórzano, warned that while relations with the government seemed friendly, measures against the work of the Church were anticipated, such as the elimination of state subsidies for Catholic schools. 

In November of that year, violence broke out again in the country after allegations of fraud in the municipal elections that gave 62% of the mayor’s offices throughout the country to the FSLN. The bishops made a strong call for peace.

Ortega attacks the Catholic Church again

In early 2009, tensions resumed between the Sandinista government and the Catholic Church. At the end of April, an email from the Nicaraguan presidency sent a document to the media that described the Nicaraguan bishops as corrupt, prompting a formal reaction from the episcopate.

In June, Ortega tried to silence the criticism that several bishops made about his government by calling them to pray instead of commenting on politics. The prelates responded that it’s not enough to pray if one doesn’t work for justice.

In April 2010, when the possibility of Ortega running for re-election in 2011 was being debated, the bishops called on the country to dialogue and denounced the “acts of transgression” against the constitution that specifically prohibited successive presidential terms.

However, the Supreme Court of Justice, with Sandinista members, allowed Ortega to run in the elections held on Nov. 6, 2011.

In this context, the auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio José Báez, warned that Nicaragua was on the way “to a visible or covert totalitarianism” and requested the presence of international observers.

The secretary of the bishops’ conference, Bishop Sócrates René Sandigo, said that with this candidacy, the country lacked the rule of law and that distrust among the population had grown.

Almost a month before the elections, several bishops reported receiving threats.

The Sandinista leader won the elections with more than 62% of the votes cast, amid allegations of fraud. The Carter Center report said that, according to the assessments of national and international observers, the elections “were not transparent.”

In a statement, the bishops said that the legitimacy of the results was “totally questionable.”

Catholic Church opposes indefinite re-election

After his third term, in which there was also friction with the bishops, Ortega decided to run for a fourth term.

In January 2014, the Sandinista majority in the National Assembly approved the constitutional amendment to allow Ortega’s indefinite re-election, which the bishops criticized. The legislature also gave the presidency the power to issue decrees with the force of law.

In June 2016, the episcopate called on Ortega to guarantee that the Nov. 6 elections would be transparent and with the presence of national and foreign observers.

However, Ortega won the elections again under allegations of fraud.

‘We are a persecuted Church’

The current crisis in Nicaragua began in April 2018, during Ortega’s fourth term. The reform of the health and pension system triggered numerous protests throughout the country, which were violently repressed by the police and during which numerous bishops and priests received death threats.

In this context, the archbishop of Managua, Cardinal Leopoldo José Brenes; his auxiliary, Bishop Silvio José Báez; and the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Waldemar Somertag, were beaten by a pro-government mob while making a pastoral visit to the Minor Basilica of St. Sebastian in Diriamba, 25 miles from the capital.

On July 13, 2018, police and paramilitaries shot up Divine Mercy parish in Managua, where young people who had protested against the regime had taken refuge.

Báez condemned the “criminal repression” of civilians on Twitter and asked the international community not to be indifferent. The prelate said that “we are already beginning to be a persecuted Church.”

Shortly after, the Catholic Church agreed to participate once again as a mediator in the national talks to resolve the crisis that had already left hundreds dead, but the negotiations were suspended.

In 2019 there was another attempt at talks between the government and the opposition, but this time the Nicaraguan Bishops’ Conference declined to participate and asked that “the laity be the ones who directly assume responsibility” for this process.

In March 2019, Pope Francis received Báez in a private audience at the Vatican. Two weeks later, Brenes reported that the pontiff asked Báez to move to Rome. Currently the bishop resides in the United States.

A year later, on July 31, 2020, one of the most symbolic attacks against the Church occurred. An unidentified individual entered one of the chapels inside the Managua Cathedral and threw a firebomb that destroyed the famous image of the Blood of Christ, a 382-year-old crucifix beloved by Nicaraguans.

When the presidential elections were held on Nov. 7, 2021, the main opposition candidates had already been imprisoned. Days before, the bishops’ conference said that each citizen should act considering what was the most just and best for the country.

It is estimated that absenteeism was 81.5%. The bishop of León, René Sándigo, was the only prelate who went to the polls. Ortega was re-elected for the fourth consecutive time with 75% of the votes.

A bishop under house arrest

After ordering the dissolution of 100 NGOs, the expulsion of the Missionaries of Charity and the closure of several Catholic media outlets, the government now has the bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, one of its strongest critics, in its sights.

Since Aug. 4, the prelate has been kept under house arrest at the chancery along with five priests, two seminarians, and three lay people.

That day, when the Church celebrated the feast of St. John Mary Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, Álvarez came outside the chancery with the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance and denounced that the police sent by Ortega wouldn’t let his priests and collaborators enter his chapel to celebrate Mass.

After almost an hour of calling for dialogue and respect for the Catholic Church, the prelate returned inside the chancery and celebrated the Eucharist with his assistants.

However, that same afternoon, riot police blocked access to the chancery and would not let Álvarez, who had invited the faithful to go to the Matagalpa cathedral to celebrate the holy hour and Mass, leave the building.

The Sandinista regime has threatened to imprison the bishop, who has received expressions of solidarity only from the local episcopate and from a few other countries.

Attorney Martha Patricia Molina Montenegro, a member of the Pro-Transparency and Anti-Corruption Observatory, recently published an investigation titled “Nicaragua: a Persecuted Church? (2018-2022),” which documents 190 attacks and desecrations committed against the Catholic Church up to May of this year.

For experts like Molina, there is no doubt that the “dictatorship” of Ortega “has a frontal war against the Catholic Church of Nicaragua and its objective is to completely eliminate all those institutions related to the Church."

In the past, Ortega has called the bishops “terrorists” and “devils in cassocks.”  (The history behind the persecution of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. The appendix below contains the testimony of a Nicaraguan “bishop,” Pablo Antonio Vega, who was expelled from his native land by the Ortega regime on July 3, 1986.)

No, Daniel Ortega is not acting like a Bolshevik in 1917 or a Hitlerite in 1935, to paraphrase comments Senor Jorge made in an interview that aired last week. He is acting like the Daniel Ortega of 1979, and no amount of the conciliar penchant for “dialogue” (which the apostate Wojtyla/John Paul II sought with non-Catholics of all persuasions without once urging anyone to convert to the Catholic Faith) will ever change a Communist such s Daniel Ortega.

Mr. Weigel’s “somber anniversary” is a commentary not only about the anti-papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but it is also a fit way to describe each anniversary of his five antipapal predecessors, who have made unremitting warfare against Catholic Faith and Worship.

For those of us who recognize the conciliar church to be but the counterfeit ape of the Catholic Church whose Roman Rite is devoid of sacramentally valid liturgies and rites of episcopal consecration and priestly ordination, though, it is enough to remember that God has from all eternity appointed this time to be the one in which we would be alive to give Him honor and glory as the consecrated slaves of His Co-Eternal, Co-Equal Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

May it be our singular privilege, therefore, to endure the sufferings of the moment with joy as we beg Our Lady, especially by means of her Most Holy Rosary, to send us the graces necessary to sanctity and thus to save our immortal souls while also seeking to plant a few seeds for the restoration of a true and legitimate pope on the Throne of Saint Peter and thus of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that will follow thereupon.

Vivat Christus Rex!

Vivat Regina Mariae Immaculate!

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for  us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us. 

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.'

Saints Cosmas and Damian, pray for us.

Appendix

The Expulsion of “Bishop” Vega by Daniel Ortega in 1986

Crisis Magazine

Crisis Magazine Editor’s Note: On July 3, 1986 Nicaragua’s Sandinista Government expelled from the country Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, vice president of the Nicaraguan bishops’ conference, for criticizing the Sandinistas and, allegedly, for statements supporting the contras. The expulsion was condemned by John Paul II and the U.S. Catholic Conference. In a statement to the press in Rome on August 4, Bishop Vega responded to the Government’s allegations against him, discussed the persecution of the Church in Nicaragua, and described his expulsion.

In a telex sent by President Ortega to the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences worldwide on July 25th, 1986, we may find well known fallacies of the ideological framework which the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional) attempts to impose on the Nicaraguan people with disturbing repercussions throughout the Central American region.

President Ortega wants to make us believe that the confrontation between his Government and the attitudes of alertness and suspicion would be the result of whatever the Bishops denounce in Nicaragua or abroad.

Nevertheless, he does not contradict the fact on which we base our denunciations. He really does not try to open paths respectful of the freedom of conscience and of the individual and of the collective rights of the Nicaraguan people as well; he does not show respect for the sovereign rights of other peoples either. His warmongering language constantly invites to “crush and terminate” all opponents. It cannot be said that one wants peace who insults his own people and others as if they were his most despicable enemies.

The Nicaraguan people have their own Christian and historic identity. They refuse to have imposed on them, through force and deceit, a materialistic model which disregards that identity and the fundamental rights in-alienable to every man and national community. It is in view of such materialistic ideas and abuses against human rights and values, that the Church cannot but raise her voice, in fulfillment of her redeeming and liberating mission.

It is well known that there exists an opposition between a totalitarian, materialistic worldview and the Christian revelation, and that such a conflict has an unavoidable impact on the concrete states of life in history. The totalitarian, materialistic worldview attempts to organize everything through use of force, disregarding spiritual values. Totalitarian materialism seeks to wipe out the unpredictability of the expressions originating in a free consciousness and a free critical spirit, both of which make every man a responsible actor of his own personal and collective history. Hence my own position vis-à-vis the FSLN: not for the traditional opposition “per se,” by way of power groups, the being “anti” whatever; I have emphasized that those pendular confrontations are neither the proper Christian path nor the path towards a truly humane revolution for the benefit of our peoples.

I have wanted to search for a path conducive to economic, political, and social change through a dialectic between material and spirit. As I understand, it is for this that Christ told his Apostles: “Go, then, to all peoples everywhere”; as if he were telling us that it is not enough to awake man to the mystery of his individual dimension, but also to the duty to organize social coexistence. Our Latin American peoples, and all those of the Third World as well, show the common human fault of not having spiritually assumed their own historic fulfillment. The Gospel has not been sufficiently preached in its historic social dimension; we have preferred to emphasize doctrinal abstraction — undoubtedly necessary but insufficient. Faith is not submission to a culture or a system of domination, it is to enter into an effective, free, and responsible participation of the sovereign kingdom of the Divine Spirit.

Still, religious persons and tourists who appear to limit their concept of justice to the mere material aspects of life, continue to arrive in Nicaragua. There is a “material justice” that if separated from its human integrity may result in serious human injustice — if the food is poisoned, a dish is not made good just by being appetizing or filling. The campaign of alphabetization was viewed with suspicion not because it taught people to read and write, or because it stimulated contacts between students from the cities and people in the countryside, but for its materialistic indoctrination and the class hatred that was spread.

Shortly after the “revolutionary victory,” one of the nine commanders was telling the bishops how the Church could greatly contribute to the revolution by taking charge of feeding a significant number of political prisoners and impoverished guardsmen, whom they did not know what to do with. There was a moment of silence among the bishops, and I came forward to answer: “It is not a bad idea! But, it seems to me that the mission and presence of the Church should go deeper. The Nicaraguan revolution was made for us to live in freedom and fraternity, not to make life more bearable in the prisons. The Church has been in this revolution as a liberating sign. Your idea seems to be a humane one, but we would rather have less prisoners and more free men.” He, then, moved the discussion to another subject.

I bring up these examples for the sake of a better understanding of the first and indispensable role of the Church in human liberation. The economic and social factors are part of the historic dimensions of life, but they are not enough for a man to preserve his freedom and dignity as a son of God; it is not justifiable to keep a man in prison because he may be well fed, it is more important to evaluate whether or not he deserves to be in prison instead of in full possession of his freedom.

This is a brief summary of some points which I have emphasized in my talks with the faithful, and in public statements made outside of Nicaragua.

(1)         No party or group, whatever its ideology, has the right to impose its ideological framework, therefore violating the rights and legitimate fundamental freedoms of its fellow citizens.

(2)         The Nicaraguan people have the right to defend themselves from any abuse of totalitarian nature by those in power.

(3)         As a Church, we have always asked from the FSLN a civil alternative that may enable the Nicaraguan citizenry to elect its own form of government, free of either internal or external military oppression.

I have said that the different pressures and intimidations that seek to push the Christian faithful away from their pastors and their religious education are detrimental to freedom of conscience. Church workers are threatened with being labeled as contras if they refuse to serve as “informers” or as activists to form cadres of political action, and thus pressure is put on them to separate them from their duties with the Church. Those who resist this pressure are labeled contras, supposedly deserving prison and threatened with death; evidently, not all of this is followed to its bitter end, but the intimidations remain. In my diocese there have been at least three people killed after receiving these types of threats.

Alfonso Galeano. Regardless of the fact that we had been facilitating the use of chapels for the campaign of alphabetization in the countryside, once the peasants became aware of the repeated abuses by Cuban teachers, who used the chapel for political meetings and other questionable purposes, it was necessary to discontinue the practice. Alfonso Galeano, a layman leader of an ecclesial community, refused to allow the chapel of his region to be used as a school for alphabetization. He received many threats; on June 10, 1982, at 4 P.M., while visiting his father, he was killed, allegedly during a robbery. Later, it was known that the “robbers” were draftees in the Army, but it was not possible to obtain any further clarification.

Daniel Sierra-Ocon. He was an active member of the movement of Encuentros Matrimoniales; he visited the peasants’ communities together with his wife who worked in my office as secretary. Accused of allegedly listening to clandestine radio broadcasts, he was labeled a contra and arrested. Although Daniel was publicly cleared of guilt, his wife was informed that he had “committed suicide” in prison on December 21, 1982. We never knew the true cause of his death. I saw his dead body. It had a bullet wound in the left temple and blood at the right of the nape of the neck where the bullet exited; it appeared evident that the bullet penetrated the upper left temple, following a downward trajectory to exit at the right side. All those who were arrested with him for similar reason were later freed; but the talk remains that Daniel Sierra-Ocon had been killed for refusing to sign a statement against the Church. Others active in the work of the Church have had the experience of being coerced to sign documents which they are not allowed to read; some have been forced to sign a blank paper.

Yamilet Sequeira de Lorío She had informed me of her fears. She was under pressure to become a member of State Security, probably in view of her influence with lay ministers in the countryside, where she was in charge of evangelization in the small town of San Miguelito. She was arrested at her home on July 19, 1983, at 2:00 A.M.; her husband and a neighbor who happened to witness the arrest were also taken in the same car, driven by the local Chief of Security. We assumed that they were in jail, but later their bodies appeared on the shoulder of a road in construction, the three corpses half burned and partly covered with dirt.

These occurrences in three separate locations within the territory of a certain diocese created fear in people active in the pastoral work organized through our ecclesial base communities. It is alleged that these assassinations were politically motivated, but I am a witness that the threats were religiously motivated.

We bishops are being accused of complicity by silence with the alleged crimes of the contras and the policy of Reagan. However, it is forgotten that the silence was imposed on us by the FSLN itself. Firstly, we cannot accept at face value the news spread by the media outlets under the control of the FSLN; secondly, we are not allowed to express publicly our own opinion; we are under pressure to side unconditionally with the FSLN.

A typical case was that of the reported assassination of Msgr. Salvador Schlaefer, Bishop of Bluefields. At that time, I was president of the Bishops’ Conference, when the Secretary of the Government Junta informed me officially of the news of Msgr. Schlaefer’s assassination, which he attributed to a group of Misquito Indians who were in the contras forces. He said that the bishop’s destroyed car had been found, but not his body.

Afterwards, he asked me immediately to call the bishops so that we might get together and make a strong statement against such crimes and those who were sponsoring them with their aggressive policy. I suggested that it would be better if he could inform each bishop. I assured him that I would call a meeting, and begged him to confirm the news, and if possible provide more precise details. When the bishops got together early the next morning, we tried to confirm the official news; however, it developed into what we now know, that Msgr. Schlaefer had not been killed and that the Misquitos were instead protecting him. Msgr. Schlaefer has suffered other attacks, none of which have been fully clarified.

Cardinal Obando y Bravo, Bishop Bosco Vivas, and myself have been victims of aggression by groups claiming to be members of the so-called “popular church,” and by those known as “divine goons” as well. Curiously, we have verified that in all those groups there were “visiting internationalists” mixed with known police agents and state security plainclothesmen. My car was stoned after Christmas Mass. Those who did it shouted that I was not siding with the poor; they were recognized as young Army draftees. However, the news was biased against me, and religious men and nuns thought that I had been the agent provocateur, and occasionally I received an insulting letter from Holland and other places — “If they do these things in the green wood, what will happen in the dry?” Nobody seems either to know about or to comment on whatever is done to the poor and the peasants in the mountains.

In the previous regime, if somebody was tortured by the National Guard, that person would ask me to denounce the violation. Today, on the contrary, after telling me of their torture they ask me to keep it a secret of the confessional for the sake of their personal safety and that of their families. Silence is, therefore, imposed on us by the regime, not because we want it or because we are against every form of military or police violence, but because we cannot approve such procedures which blame the oppressed people for the faults of the ruling system.

Dynamic Presence of the Church for Social and Political Changes

The Church in Nicaragua was present with her moral authority throughout the process of change to stimulate civil responsibilities among the citizenry, to improve the living conditions, personal and collective, of our people. The Church articulated her position via Pastoral Letters.

In 1974, we said that there will be social unrest “as long as the authorities seek to ban and/or repress fundamental rights instead of guaranteeing and regulating the exercise of such rights. War against man is rooted in the disregard of his rights.” And we added, “There is only one way to avoid war, and that is to recognize human rights by implementing their full exercise.”

Later, we addressed ourselves, as bishops, to the issue of dissent. We said. “When, as a result of ideological and physical power, the citizens find themselves civilly, morally, and politically abused, then the right to dissent becomes a duty of moral resistance.” We also emphasized that ” . . the Church promotes political duty, but it is not linked to political power; therefore, it is not our mission to support those in political power.” We qualified our position as follows: “Political parties exist for the common good, not for their own good nor to dominate the citizens. Nobody can be forced to vote against his conscience. Elections that use the vote to demand submission simply do not elect.- Based on these principles, we acted during the previous regime.

On the occasion of the inauguration of President Ortega, on January 10, 1985, I gave the invocation and explained the rationale for our presence in the event:

The Church — expert in humanity, in the words of Pope Paul VI — must be present in the anguish and the hopes of the people, which reflect the creative dynamism of the Spirit. At this moment, we do not want to disguise nor deepen our confrontations. By the path of dialogue we want to say No to war, No to violence, repression, and arrogant absolutisms. Dialogue means that we all should be actively, critically, dialectically, and freely present in implementing the aspirations, needs, and values of our own people.

Nevertheless, the FSLN has assumed the publicity- seeking strategies of the so-called “popular church,” and has persisted in its campaign to discredit the Catholic Church. In this regard, the FSLN attempts to substitute for the saints political heroes; it seeks to appropriate for itself the most sacred symbols of real faith in the true and living God. Today the FSLN likes to repeat that “the one who is not a son of Sandino is a son of Reagan.” To those who have tried to identify us with such alternatives, I respond: Happily, we Christians are neither sons of Sandino nor of Reagan, we are sons of God. Therefore, we seek the sovereignty of our people above partisan preferences.

In my recent visits to the United States, such as that of March 5, 1986 to Washington, I said that to stop international armed aggression it is necessary to stop the internal oppression thrust upon the Nicaraguan people. I also said that it wasn’t enough to substitute one dictatorship with another dictatorship, one imperialism with another imperialism, one “class” with another “class.” The wrongdoing is in the attitudes of arrogance and oppression detrimental to the necessary respect for individual and collective human rights.

In my subsequent visit to New York and Washington, on June 4 and 5 of this year, I said that in view of the worsening increase of armed international pressure and of internal repression as well, the Church had to serve as a bridge to promote dialogue, candidly and realistically, in order to avoid a holocaust for the Nicaraguan people. War-fare by itself does not bring a solution. As Christians, we support neither regimes of the extreme left nor of the extreme right. Under the lights of our faith, we are for a social order based on the inalienable rights of man and society. Any form of external support, including military assistance, should be directed to promote the common good, not to promote de facto regimes.

It is inappropriate for the FSLN to pretend to dictate to us whom we should speak with, or how we should address ourselves to our many questioners. When I had the opportunity to talk to President Fidel Castro, the FSLN praised me unabashedly. But when I talked to groups on the right, they condemned me as if I were the most despicable contra chieftain.

We do not make mediations, we favor and promote them, and if allowed to do so, we help to implement a mediation. But it is up to the groups in conflict to decide; they are supposed to be mature enough to make their own decisions. There can be no dialogue without the mutual acceptance and recognition of the parties concerned.

My Expulsion

On Thursday, July 3, 1986, at approximately 9:00 P.M., I received a phone call from Mr. Agustin Lara, Political Chief of the Region. He told me that he wanted to see me urgently, if possible that night. I said I did not feel well, but that I would be pleased to go see him the next morning. We agreed to hold the meeting at 8:00 A.M.

I arrived at approximately 8:05 A.M. at the residence of the Political Chief of the Fifth Region. The Chief of Security of the Fifth Region was also there, joined by other officers and plainclothesmen, and a TV cameraman; all of them came forward to meet me.

As we shook hands, Mr. Lara told me: “I have summoned you to inform you that you are under arrest by order of the Government. This is the officer who will be in charge of your custody.” I greeted the Chief of Security, Mr. Fernando Caldera, and then I was introduced to a medical doctor who would assist me if needed. Immediately, two plainclothesmen ushered me into a double cabin pick-up truck, the officer took a seat next to the driver, and we sped up a dirt road, avoiding the main highway where people could see me or recognize me. They drove me to a prison called “Sistema Penitenciario”; I thought they would keep me there, but they didn’t. Instead, I was asked to board one of two large helicopters stationed on the sports field. We lifted off immediately.

We flew over the highway towards Managua, but soon I realized we had changed course towards the north, over the mountains. I did not ask questions. Finally, at about 10:00 A.M., we landed at what I thought was a military base; there were many soldiers on alert surrounding the place. Two officers asked me to go with them. We got into a jeep, followed by an entourage of six or eight cars with military guards, and drove to the old Casa de Aduana (Customs House) near the border with Honduras, also known as El Espino, but today renamed La Fraternidad.

Only then did they inform me that I was expelled from the country, that I should look for another motherland among the contras or with Reagan, because they no longer admitted me in Nicaragua. I replied that the motherland can be neither given nor taken away, that it is something one carries deep in one’s soul, that someday they would understand the meaning of true love for their motherland. They repeated that I was only interested in Reagan and the contras. I said that there was no need to argue anymore. They gave me a new regular passport without a visa to enter Honduras.

I was asked to wait for a vehicle to take me to the border itself. It was a tractor-trailer. The military ordered it to stop and asked me to step into the cabin next to the driver, which I did. I gave them the Blessing — some of them looked on smiling, while others seemed to accept it with surprise. The truck driver, a Guatemalan citizen, was puzzled and later disapproved of the proceeding when he understood what it was all about.

When we arrived at the border, the soldiers on the Honduran side were mystified that my passport did not have a visa. A soldier from the Nicaraguan side told them that I was being expelled, that it was up to them to receive me.

What was the legality (if any) of this expulsion? Were there any laws recalled to carry it out? If so, I was not informed. Documentation: Why I Was Expelled From Nicaragua.)