Francis’s Legacy and the Path Forward: Interview with Henry Sire

Mr Sire was expelled from the Order of Malta for writing The Dictator Pope. He is also the author of Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition.

From One Peter Five

By Henry Sire, BA

Interview by Matt Gaspers

This year marks the eighth anniversary of The Dictator Pope, a groundbreaking exposé in which you explain how Pope Francis’s election was sought and achieved by the St. Gallen Mafia, a group of progressive prelates led by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini (d. 2012). How successful do you think Francis was in implementing what you call “the Martini Agenda” in your book?[1]

Henry Sire (HS): Completely successful, in the sense that that is the course he followed. I don’t mean to suggest that it has been a success in the Church.

Synods played an unusually prominent role throughout Francis’s twelve-year pontificate. The latest one, a novel three-year process, focused on the nature of synodality itself, something which Francis claimed is what “God expects of the Church of the third millennium.” Why do you think synods were utilized so much by Pope Francis?

HS: The synods were the way in which Pope Francis tried to give an appearance of democracy to his autocratic rule. In fact, from the start they were rigged to shift the Church in a liberal direction, as was shown in the first of them, the Synod on the Family. Edward Pentin exposed this in his book published in 2015. The gerrymandering became even grosser in the subsequent synods, but under Pope Francis everyone was so used to it that further books to detail it would be just flogging a dead horse. There have, however, been numerous articles accusing the synods of having been designed so as to be controlled by cliques to move the Church’s teaching in the direction ordained by the controllers. In any case, the synods are irrelevant since Pope Francis did whatever he pleased.

Various Vatican documents have connected the Synod on Synodality (2021-2024) to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Similarly, Francis connected his pontificate to Vatican II in various ways. What connections do you see between the Council, the Synod, and Francis? Do you agree with fellow historian Robert de Mattei that “Pope Francis represents Vatican II in action”?

HS: Professor de Mattei is absolutely right. The Second Vatican Council was taken by Pope Paul VI in a direction whose destination could only be the dissolution of the Church, and that is what was delivered under Pope Francis. In particular, the Council struck a serious blow at the understanding of the Catholic priesthood, with a resulting catastrophic decline in the clergy in every area, from their theological learning to their moral character. Only a Church with such a debased priesthood could have produced a pope like Jorge Bergoglio.

As you note in your book, “Pope Francis was elected with the expectation that he would reform the [Roman] Curia….”[2] In March of 2022, after nine years of consultation, he issued Praedicate Evangelium, an Apostolic Constitution intended to replace John Paul II’s Pastor Bonus (1988) and “attune [the Roman Curia’s] present-day activity more effectively to the path of evangelization that the Church, especially in our time, has taken” (PE, art. 3). How would you assess that document? Has it achieved the goal of deep curial reform?

HS: First of all, I need to challenge the assumption that reform of the Curia can be done by a document. What matters is the men who are appointed, and in that respect what Francis did was turn the Curia into the court of a South American dictator. The harm starts at the top with Cardinal Parolin, who has brought to a peak the domination of the Curia by the Secretariat of State, and thus its secularisation in outlook, which is one of the evil legacies of Paul VI’s “reforms”. It continued with Cardinal Parolin’s deputy, Archbishop Peña Parra, a man who was dismissed from his first seminary for suspect morals and who exemplifies the worst corruption of the Latin American Church. Then there is the notorious case of Archbishop Peña Parra’s predecessor, Cardinal Becciu, who has been convicted of financial corruption while in office. In fact, the real scandal is not Cardinal Becciu’s alleged crime but the show trial to which he was subjected, in which Pope Francis changed the legal rules three times to ensure his conviction. Vatican justice under Francis was as gross a travesty as in Soviet Russia, and that has its impact on the whole Curia. The clergy in Rome lived under a reign of terror in which only the sycophants and the morally corrupt thrived.

Another area of reform that Pope Francis vowed to address concerned the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, something for which the Church must have “zero tolerance,” as he said. Do you think his efforts in that area were successful?

HS: Again, I must query the premise of efforts being successful. It is not a case of “zero tolerance” but of zero efforts. This is an area in which Jorge Bergoglio was the worst offender, and his record of protecting clerical sexual offenders in Argentina was one which, if made known, would have ended the career of any bishop. The Pope who really tried to address this problem was Benedict XVI, and what Francis did was to undermine Benedict’s work. The most notorious case is that of the ex-Jesuit Fr. Rupnik, who has been protected from the consequences of horrendous sexual abuse by bare-faced Vatican cronyism. Here the case is not of abuse of minors but of religious sisters of whom Fr. Rupnik was the spiritual director.

One of Francis’s most contentious acts was his decision to impose harsh restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass. Regarding “the tensions” which surround this issue, Francis said “[t]he problematic is primarily ecclesiological,” meaning that those who object to “the liturgical reform” are out of step with “the vision of the Church so admirably described in Lumen Gentium” (Desiderio Desideravi, n. 31). What do you make of this claim?

HS: Yes, what you quote is like Cardinal Roche’s statement that the traditional Mass reflects a “perverted ecclesiology”. Those who use this language haven’t undertaken to explain exactly how the traditional Mass is incompatible with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. What it shows, however, is that its advocates (or perhaps the Council itself) have set up an anti-Church in opposition to the true Church of the first nineteen centuries. However, if it were really true that Lumen Gentium is incompatible with the liturgy that was the soul of the Church for over a thousand years, the conclusion must be that Lumen Gentium is one of the conciliar documents which a future Ecumenical Council will have to condemn as heretical.

Prior to The Dictator Pope, you wrote in another work that “it is unclear whether, under the reign of Pope Francis, Catholic doctrine will be preserved or compromised,” and further, “The question for the future of the Church is thus not so much what Pope Francis does as who his successor will be.”[3] Now that his pontificate has mercifully concluded, how do you see the prospects of electing a good pope to follow him?

HS: The death of Francis has revealed the bubble which the Bergoglians have been living in. They did not realise how totally their position was dependent on the whim of one man, and their bubble has suddenly burst. The Pope was two months in dying, and yet his death caught them unprepared. An outstanding symptom of this has been the collapse of their supposed strong man, Cardinal Parolin. A big factor conducing to the upset was that Francis spent over five weeks in the hospital, and during that time many cardinals started flocking into Rome, thus foiling his policy throughout his pontificate of keeping them from meeting each other. The result has been that the great men of Benedict XVI’s pontificate, Cardinals Sarah, Burke and Müller, whom Francis treated with contempt, have come into their own, and the new cardinals have been able to speak to them and judge them for what they are. There are two very promising signs for this conclave: one is that strong criticisms of Francis’s reign are being voiced openly, and the other is that the cardinals are showing themselves willing to listen. The spectre that many have seen for years, of a claque of Bergoglio yes-men gathering to elect a Bergoglio clone, is proving illusory. The yes-men are there, but they have lost their power base. That is not to say that I foresee a smooth conclave or a happy outcome. Unless the cardinals listen to the Holy Spirit, the danger of electing a weak nonentity as a compromise candidate is very grave.

In closing, what are a few of the most pressing issues facing the next pope? What are some practical steps he can take (assuming, please God, that a virtuous man is elected) to begin correcting the damaging done during the Francis pontificate?

HS: There are so many urgent needs that it is impossible to answer this question briefly. One of the most pressing needs is to tackle the heretical schism currently being pushed in Germany. For this, the key must be to recognise the fraud that the German hierarchy are promoting and to meet it head-on. The German Synodal Way has worked on the principle of organising packed assemblies of Modernists and pretending that they are the voice of the Church. I would suggest that the new pope write an encyclical inviting the Germans to return to Catholic fidelity, and that will give the true Catholics in Germany the opportunity to respond and make themselves known. He should then hold an authentic synod in Germany, attended by the clergy and laity who represent the real Catholicism, and especially the young who are longing for a return to Catholic truth. The Synodal Way would then be exposed for the geriatric fraud that it is.

Another enormous need is simply to re-evangelise the Church after the sixty-year chasm of ignorance and bad catechesis caused by the Second Vatican Council. A major area is that of sexuality and the Christian ideal of the family, where we need to recover a whole anthropology which has been lost in a surrender to modern paganism. But the need is across the whole range of Catholic teaching. A cardinal remarked recently that he saw only ten figures in the present conclave who could be regarded as theologians, and that ignorance is representative of the worldwide Church. The new pope will need to re-educate the entire world clergy in basic Catholic doctrine, an enormous task.

[1] Henry Sire, The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018), p. 12.

[2] Ibid., p. 58.

[3] H.J.A. Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition (Kettering: Angelico Press, 2015), pp. 453, 454.