Pope Francis was elected on March 13, 2013. Since then, he has been directly responsible for past, present and future sexual torture and brutalization of children. He has obstructed the battle for women’s and LGBTQ persons’ equal rights and appeased tyrants. The pope has also created intentional and unnecessary acrimony with Vatican employees and within his Church.

VATICAN

On Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019, Vatican police raided offices of the Secretariat of State and the Financial Information Authority, the Vatican’s money-laundering “watchdog” agency, as authorized by Pope Francis. “They seized documents, computers, telephones and passports and blocked bank accounts,” Edward Pentin reported.

The raid was the result of complaints made months before by the Vatican Bank and the Office of the Auditor General.

The next day, L’Espresso magazine reported that five employees were suspended. Four were low-level employees of the Secretariat of State. The fifth was the second highest official in the Financial Information Agency (FIA).  L’Espresso also obtained a copy of a circular issued by the Vatican police to all security personnel that these employees were banned from entering the Vatican City State.  The circular showed their photographs “designed in the manner of a ‘Wanted’ poster or mugshot.”

Also based on leaks from inside the Vatican, other members of the Italian press widely reported that the “financial transactions” referred to in the Vatican statement involved the purchase of London real estate by the Secretariat of State.(here, here, here, here and here.)

On Thursday, Pope Francis named a leading anti-Mafia prosecutor as president of the Vatican criminal court. Giuseppe Pignatone was known for his “major investigations into the Cosa Nostra and organized crime gangs in Sicily and Calabria,” although no charges had been made and no reason given for the employees’ suspension.

“The head of the Vatican police, Domenico Giani could be replaced” as part of “an internal war that has been going on for months,” Fiorenza Sarzanini reported on Saturday Oct. 12. Pope Francis was upset that the circular with the offensive “mugshot” photos had been leaked to the press. Although “no one believed that Giani was responsible,” nevertheless he was “embittered” that he would be held responsible, Sarzanini wrote.

On Monday, Oct. 14, the Vatican announced Giani resigned. “Giani understood that he was being ordered to submit his resignation letter,” noted Dr. Robert Moynihan even though Giani was acting under Pope Francis’ orders to carry out the raid.

The following day, it was announced that Giani’s deputy, Gianluca Gauzzi Broccoletti, had replaced him. Broccoletti had worked for the Vatican police since 1995. Pope Francis appointed him as deputy commander in 2018. “Over the years, he has established a relationship of trust …. where competence and professionalism were required for confidential investigations,” the Vatican stated.

The reactions were described by veteran Vatican reporters:

A “climate of poisons" in the Vatican.

“The general atmosphere in the Vatican today is marked by a feeling of being under observation physically (ubiquitous cameras) and electronically (close control of all communications by phone and computer, internal and from within the Vatican to outside the Vatican).”

“Fresh speculation sparked about [the Vatican’s] Machiavellian turf battles, power struggles and score-settling.”

“Vendettas? A serious institutional crisis because it is an attack on the institution from within the institution.”

“An attack by groups of interests is underway that did not like the attempt by the FIA to make the Vatican Bank accounts more transparent.”

The Vatican Bank director, “who is close to Pope Francis,” “piloted” the inquiry “to delegitimize the FIA …. These feuds evoke a chaos [and] lead to talk about the institutional and earthquake crisis in the Vatican.”

The FIA “had in recent months been working with its international counterparts to trace financial flows of the [outside] middlemen who were accused of defrauding the Vatican in the real estate deal, suggesting the raids were meant to stop the investigation in its tracks,” Nicole Winfield reported on Oct. 14. The Vatican still “hasn't said what, if any, evidence it has of the FIA's wrongdoing,” she noted.

On Oct. 23, the FIA Board of Directors “reaffirms its full faith and trust in the professional competence and honorability of its [suspended director, Tommaso Di Ruzza] and, moreover, commends him for the institutional work carried out in the handling of this particular case.”

On Nov. 18, the Vatican stated Rene Brülhart, president of the FIA, “would leave at the end of his five-year term.” “I resigned,” Brülhart told Reuters. Brülhart was “forced out,” John L. Allen Jr. reported.

During a Nov. 26 in-flight press conference, Pope Francis responded to a question about the acquisition of the London property. While admitting that “the case of the apartment in London is not yet clear,” Pope Francis said, “the presumption of corruption exists.”

“I signed the authorization” for the Oct. 1 raid, Pope Francis stated. “But are these five people corrupt? No. The presumption of innocence is a guarantee, a human right.”

Tommaso Di Ruzza “was suspended because … the FIA did not control others’ crimes,” Pope Francis said. Actually, the mandate of the FIA is to report “suspicious activities” it uncovers to the Vatican prosecutor.

Pope Francis also restated the “official” position that Brülhart was removed because his “term” expired on Nov. 19.

On Feb. 18 the Vatican announced that prosecutors ordered “documents and computer equipment in Msgr Alberto Perlasca’s house and office be seized …. Thus, Msgr Perlasca becomes the sixth suspect in the investigation,” confirming that the other five employees remain suspended without allegations of wrong-doing.

“As chief of staff, Perlasca administered the Secretariat of State's multi-million euro asset portfolio and played a key role in executing the London deal on behalf of his superiors.” reported Nicole Winfield.

Vatican employees are well aware that his “superiors” will never be held accountable. There has been no indication from Pope Francis that the officials responsible for selecting outside middlemen with dubious business connections to manage and broker the sale of the London property will suffer any consequences.

Additionally, these Vatican officials acted in a manner consistent with their financial predecessors' beginning in 1929 when Pope Pius XI asked the financial genius, Bernadino Nogara, to manage the equivalent of $1.3 billion in today’s money he had received from Mussolini. Nogara agreed on condition “That he not be restricted by religious or doctrinal considerations in his investment-making” according to John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican (p 163). Since then, the Vatican has invested with disreputable men and institutions without moral or ethical scruples.

The Oct. 1 raid and ensuing events are just the latest episode of Pope Francis’ maltreatment of his employees.

In February 2014, Pope Francis put “an immediate end to new hires and imposed a freeze on wage-increases and overtime in an effort to cut costs and offset budget shortfalls” making things “more difficult for many lay Vatican employees,” reported John L. Allen Jr. “In truth, new lay people are still being hired to work in the Vatican” as contract employees with no health insurance, pension or other benefits, Allen noted.

“When the freeze was set into place, employees were told they could write to Pope Francis to share their concerns, but that they had to leave their letter unsealed – ‘to make sure,’ as one jokingly put it, ‘the grovelling was proper groveling,’” Allen wrote.

In December 2016, without explanation, Pope Francis ordered Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to dismiss three of his “most professionally capable” theologian priests. Müller asked Pope Francis, “’What did they do?’ The answer: ‘I am the pope. I do not need to give reasons for any of my decisions,’” related Marco Tosatti

The priests were fired because they were accused of being critical of Pope Francis, reported Maike Hickson. As a result, there is “fear and discontent” among Vatican employees.

In June 2017, the Vatican stated Libero Milone resigned but gave no reason. Milone, a former chairman of Deloitte, a global accounting firm, was named to the newly created post of Auditor General in 2015. He was given “full autonomy and independence” to investigate the finances of all Vatican departments.

Milone told reporters he had been “forced to step down with trumped-up accusations.” “Evidently, they didn’t want me to report some things I’d seen,” Milone said. He also said that “he could not give details of the irregularities he had found because of non-disclosure agreements.”

(Milone’s position remains open as far as I know. The “Office of the Auditor” and “Auditor” referred to by the Vatican and Pope Francis in statements regarding the London real estate deal is held by Alessandro Cassinis Righini, a temporary replacement.)

Giulio Mattietti was a 20-year employee at the Vatican Bank and had risen to deputy director, the No. 3 official behind the president and general manager.

The Vatican provided no reason why the “respected” Mattietti was fired and was “escorted outside the Vatican City State” in November 2017.  The motivation behind the removal of Mattietti remains unknown.

In his 2017, Christmas “greeting” to his employees. Pope Francis said, "Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinx with a toothbrush.” When employees are "delicately" removed, the pope said "they falsely declare themselves martyrs … when in fact they should have done a mea culpa."

As seen after the Oct. 1 raid, reporters were immediately provided with confidential information from inside the Vatican. Pope Francis has created a "poisoned environment" for his employees where further leaks of damaging information to his pontificate are more than likely.

SCHISM

“I pray that schisms do not happen, but I am not afraid of them,” Pope Francis said last September.  He was responding to a question during an in-flight news conference about his recent statement that he’s honored when “Americans are attacking me” without providing an example.

“Is the risk of schism real?” asked reporters Céline Hoyeau and Nicolas Senèze. “In the canonical sense - that of the creation of a parallel Church led by an American anti-pope - no.” However, the American Catholic Church is already “deeply divided” and “communion fractured” according to Church historian Massimo Faggioli.

In his response, Pope Francis “acknowledged that the U.S. is hardly the only place from which he occasionally draws fire, noting that he also has some critics within the administrative bureaucracy of the Vatican itself,” reported John L. Allen Jr.

The criticisms and divisions began six years ago.

Pope Francis ordered that bishops from around the world attend two “Synods on the Family,” the first in 2014 followed by another in 2015.  The first synod “ended without a consensus on the question of Communion for the remarried …. A majority of synod fathers [bishops] wanted the final document to be clearer about relevant Church doctrine,” reported Francis X. Rocca.

Until Pope Francis supported it, the issue of Communion for the divorced and remarried had been of importance only to German bishops.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan stated, “I have to say, my American brother bishops and I at the synod couldn’t figure out the great fascination with this issue." In the U.S., "Most people have said, ‘I didn’t know that’s what the Church teaches,’ or ‘They have no right to teach that, so I’m not going to obey them,’ or, ‘Who cares, I don’t go [to Mass] anyway.’ And the last group is the largest one,” Dolan said.

The 2015 synod guidelines should have been written by bishops chosen by their confreres. Instead, Pope Francis wrote them himself. Thirteen cardinals – including those from Italy, Guinea, Venezuela, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Canada - wrote a letter to the pope. Among their objections were “the lack of input by the synod fathers” and that the guidelines were “designed to facilitate predetermined results on important disputed questions.”

When the 2015 synod ended, the bishops had voted 190 to 64 on the question of whether Communion for remarried Catholics (without first obtaining a Church-issued annulment of their previous marriage) should be left to private consultation with their priest or bishop. That portion “drew among the highest number of ‘no’ votes of any section of the final report,” according to John L. Allen Jr.

Traditionalists saw this as two thirds of attendees being against changing the Church’s doctrine, a doctrine based on Jesus’ very clear statements in Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:11 and Luke 6:18 that whoever marries again after a divorce is committing adultery.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis accused the bishops who voted against liberalizing the doctrine of having “closed hearts,” “blinkered viewpoints,” judging “sometimes with superiority and superficiality,” being cowardly and “burying their heads in the sand.”

“The implication was clear. Clergy who wholeheartedly supported the Communion ban were Pharisees to Francis’s Jesus. The pope was sending coded insults to at least half the world’s bishops,” wrote English journalist, Damian Thompson. Pope Frances had initiated a Catholic civil war, he concluded.

Pope Francis released his summary document on the synod, Amoris Laetitia, in April 2016. “There was only an ambiguous footnote that did not explicitly mention Holy Communion. Local bishops were invited to provide guidelines, which they did in a contradictory manner, so that what was holy in one place was a grave sin in another," explained Fr. Raymond J. de Souza.

Four cardinals – an Italian, American and two Germans – sent five questions, called dubia (Latin for “doubts”), to Pope Francis in September 2016 along with an accompanying letter “in the hope that his clarification will help clear up ‘grave disorientation and great confusion’ caused by key parts of Amoris Laetitia.” The cardinals went public with their request in November after they learned that Pope Francis had decided not to respond to their questions.

Instead, Pope Francis declared these cardinals psychologically “born from something missing, from trying to hide one’s own sad dissatisfaction behind a kind of armor” and have “a nasty spirit in order to sow division.” He said they are a “cancer of the Church” in pursuit of glory rooted in “the logic of ambition and power.”

“The Gospel is set aside, while the Vatican is trying to grab an audience. A moment when Pope Francis’s extraordinary popularity is apparently used not in order to teach the faith, but in order to create division," observed Andrea Gagliarducci. "No one speaks about the contents of the dubia, but the vast majority is hostile, mocking the four cardinals for not understanding Pope Francis’ message, or attacking them because they allegedly oppose the pope,” Gagliarducci wrote.

“This behavior shows that any request for clarity is interpreted as a declaration of war,” Gagliarducci concluded.

“Those in command are intolerant of every critical voice,” Vittorio Messori stated the week after Pope Francis said he's not afraid of schism. “Many bishops and also cardinals whom I have dialogued with in private are pulling their hair out in disagreement. But they are afraid, silent, shutting up,” Messori said. “Many Catholics are concerned, some are even desperate about the current state of the Church,” he noted.

This January, “a group of around 130 laity, including Germans, Italians, Americans, Austrians, Brazilians, Canadians and Chileans stood for an hour in silent prayer in the center of the Bavarian city of Munich to ask Pope Francis and Germany’s bishops [who support the pope] for ‘clarity and coherence’ and an end to ‘dissimulation and deception.’”

“This is the real schism,” wrote Father Thomas Weinandy, former chief of staff for the U.S. bishops' doctrinal committee. “Pope Francis effectively leads two opposing factions … divided into one loyal to the papacy yet critical of this pontificate, and the other supportive of him due to his tolerance of ambiguous teaching and pastoral practice.” It is a situation “ever growing in intensity,” he added.

Wenandy repeated the pope’s words that he is not “afraid of this schism.” “As he is in control, he would, I fear, welcome it, for he sees the schismatic element as the new ‘paradigm’ for the future Church,” he said.

(Betty Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implement Christian Nationalism in America.)