Why I Wrote The Disastrous Pontificate

The author of a new book from Os Justi Press, subtitled Pope Francis' Rupture from the Magisterium, explains why he wrote it.

From Rorate Cæli

By Dominic J. Grigio

Prefatory note: On January 7, 2026, a major new book, The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis' Rupture from the Magisterium, was released by Os Justi Press. Endorsed by a constellation of luminaries including Rev. Gerald E. Murray, Edward Feser, Eduardo Echeverria, Philip F. Lawler, John Rist, Michael Sirilla, Claudio Pierantoni, and Josef Seifert, the work has already attracted international attention for its comprehensive research and bold claims. Today, in an exclusive for Rorate Caeli, the author, Dominic Grigio, tells us why he wrote it. If you'd like to hear it being read aloud, go here, or scroll to the bottom.—PAK

During his last general audience before his abdication Pope Benedict XVI declared his confidence in the barque of the Church weathering the storms of history, ‘Nor does the Lord let it sink; it is He who guides it, surely also through those whom He has chosen.’[1] Yet amid the escalating crises of his successor's pontificate, it seemed to me that the barque was being deliberately steered onto the rocks. Good and faithful Catholics—those who simply cherished the Traditional Latin Mass and the Church's perennial doctrines and moral teachings—were being cast overboard, incurring scornful ire and punitive measures merely for their fidelity.

Pope Francis was inexplicably sanguine about the chaos that he was inflicting on the Church, declaring in response to those raising valid concerns about his words and actions, 'In the Church there is always the option for schism, always. But it is an option that the Lord leaves to human freedom. I am not afraid of schisms…I pray that schisms do not happen, but I am not afraid of them. ’[2] His offhand, arrogant disregard for the divisions he was sowing deeply troubled me. I watched faithful Catholics walk away in distress—some turning to the Orthodox, others to sedevacantist sects, and many simply abandoning the Church altogether, utterly disillusioned.

However, sharing Pope Benedict’s confidence that our Lord would not let His Church sink and that He was steering the ship, irrespective of the reckless irresponsibility of the human pilot, I asked myself ‘where are you Lord in this Bergoglian storm?’ In early Christianity the anchor was a potent symbol of hope and steadfastness during the storms of persecution, as expressed in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, “That by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have the strongest comfort, who have fled for refuge to hold fast the hope set before us. Which we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm” (Heb 6:18-19).

My former lecturer in Dogmatic Theology once told my classmates and me that through the faithful, prayerful study of doctrine we would develop a ‘Catholic nose’ that would become increasingly sensitive to the presence of true and erroneous doctrine. During the Bergoglian pontificate the almost weekly onslaught of heresy and weaponised ambiguity was overwhelming and deeply distressing, to the point that, at times, I couldn’t sleep knowing the personal cost being inflicted on the faithful. During the rigged Synods on the Family, one of my friends wrote to the Holy See. She pleaded that the Church not alter her doctrine barring Holy Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried who live in adultery. She had been deserted by her husband, and left to raise their children, but remained faithful to her marriage vows. It was unbearable to see her sacrifice denigrated. Pope Francis undermined marriage and the sacraments through the manipulative and devious provisions of Amoris Laetitia. The storm intensified dangerously when he adamantly refused to answer the reasonable dubia of four senior cardinals—Carlo Caffarra, Raymond Burke, Walter Brandmüller, and Joachim Meisner — who questioned the glaring disparities between Amoris Laetitia and Pope St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor. He thereby jettisoned the time-honored means of resolving magisterial confusion.

I urgently needed to find an anchor because it appeared to me that everything was falling apart with this brazen abandonment of the rightful exercise of teaching authority in the Church. I found the hope and steadfastness I needed for peace of mind, and soul, in the perennial doctrine of the Church expressed in five books — The Catechism of Pope St. Pius X, The Baltimore Catechism,The Penny Catechism, Fr. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (1957) and Fr. Heinrich Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum de rebus fidei et morum (2010).

Though Pope Francis castigated doctrine as 'cold,' 'abstract,' and 'a pile of dead stones to be thrown at others,' I found the opposite: the Church's sacred doctrines alive with the divine fire of the Holy Spirit, preserving Our Lord's apostolic teaching from corruption by human sin, ego, or ideological agenda.

The more I compared and contrasted Pope Francis’ innovative, ideologically driven teaching with the Church’s perennial sacred doctrines the more obvious it appeared to me that he was attempting to shoe-horn his own personal opinions, idiosyncrasies and prejudices into the Church. All the while, Pope Francis and his accomplices insisted that this new religion was in continuity with magisterial teaching when in reality it signified a stark, and at times absurd, rupture. One of Pope Francis’ closest collaborators, Cardinal Parolin, inadvertently exposed the reality of the rupture when he stated that Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia was ‘Un cambiamento di paradigma’ [a paradigm shift][3].

According to Thomas Kuhn, the originator of the phrase, a ‘paradigm shift’ represents a revolutionary, discontinuous break from the preceding discipline of knowledge[4]. It was incomprehensible to me that only 143 years after the First Vatican Council promulgated Pastor aeternus that a pope would so wantonly transgress one of the most solemn constraints on papal teaching authority, “For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.”[5]

Faced with a pope who was radically implementing the modernist agenda of giving personal experience priority over Divine Revelation I turned to Vatican II’s Dei Verbum to help me understand what was going wrong. In Dei Verbum, paragraph 10, the Council Fathers describe the essential balancing of sacred Scripture, sacred Tradition and the Magisterium to ensure the faithful, and truthful, transmission of Divine Revelation:

This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed. It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls. (DV 10)

During Pope Francis's pontificate, we were subjected to a Supreme Pontiff dissolving the inextricable union of Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium in the solvent of his personal experience — often justified under the euphemism 'the God of surprises’. That experience was shaped by a mélange of anti-Catholic influences: liberal Protestantism, the progressivism of Jesuits such as Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and Fr. Karl Rahner, and the secular globalist agenda. The resulting eisegesis and violence to the sources in his personal magisterial teaching embodied the quintessence of heresy in the original Greek sense of haíresis: a wilful, divisive choice of beliefs that contradicted—and at times repudiated—the Deposit of Faith entrusted by Our Lord to the Church. As Prof. Claudio Pierantoni expressed it in his endorsement of my book, we witnessed ‘what has certainly been the most disastrous pontificate, from the doctrinal point of view, in the entire history of the Catholic Church.’

In his Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum [1992] Pope St. John Paul II explicitly stated that all the faithful, clergy and laity, have been entrusted by the Lord with the responsibility of ‘guarding the deposit of faith’[6]. I wrote The Disastrous Pontificate to fulfil this duty personally and to help my fellow Catholics discern the gravity of the threat posed by Pope Francis's erroneous teaching. My aim is to anchor my readers firmly in authentic doctrine, so that they and their families may weather the storm now shaking the Church to her foundations. I am confident that by observing God’s providential design — which inextricably unites Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium — we may guard the deposit of Faith and thereby, through the grace of God, save souls.

Spanning the breadth of sacred doctrine—from anthropology to soteriology—my book The Disastrous Pontificate rigorously juxtaposes the teachings of Pope Francis with Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial Magisterium. Its core section, The Errors of Pope Francis, delivers a piercing doctrinal analysis, inspired by Fr. Ludwig Ott’s seminal work, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. This analysis is elucidated by the exhaustive compendium Sources: The Errors in the Light of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, inspired by Fr. Heinrich Denzinger’s Enchiridion. Together, they expose a profound rupture in the exercise of the papal teaching office.

Further, a chronological section, The Questionable Words and Deeds of Pope Francis and His Appointees, exposes the full scope of these aberrations in action: their pervasive influence on the Church and the far-reaching consequences for the faithful. This section is guided by our Lord’s advise, ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them.’ (Mt 7: 15-16).

The introduction, Safeguarding God’s Truth During a Time of Error, examines the ecclesial, theological, and pastoral implications of this disastrous pontificate.

To conclude, I would like to acknowledge my profound sense of debt to, and respect for, the courageous Cardinal Pell whose famous Demos Memorandum inspired the title, The Disastrous Pontificate. Cardinal George Pell anonymously distributed his succinct summation of Pope Francis’ pontificate among his fellow cardinals during Lent 2022 in preparation for a future conclave. Cardinal Pell was in a position to observe the full extent of the disaster rocking the Church due to his role as the Vatican’s Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy and a member of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinal Advisers. Cardinal Pell introduced his highly critical assessment of Pope Francis’ pontificate with the following observation, ‘Commentators of every school, if for different reasons, with the possible exception of Father Spadaro, SJ, agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe.’[7]

My book, The Disastrous Pontificate, like Cardinal Pell’s Demos Memorandum, is no mere critique, but a clarion call. A call to every member of the faithful to stand vigilant, anchored in grace and truth, while trusting that, in God’s providence, a future Successor of St. Peter will restore the Church that Pope Francis has so disastrously confused and disrupted.

Dominic J. Grigio is the pen-name of a Catholic clergyman in good standing with the Church who cannot reveal his identity for fear of reprisals against himself and his diocese. 

The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis' Rupture from the Magisterium (876pp.) is available in hardcover, paperback, or ebook from the publisher, Os Justi Press, or on any Amazon site across the world. The full endorsements, table of contents, and introduction may be viewed here.

 

NOTES

[1] Pope Benedict XVI [2013] General Audience Address, 27 February 2013 [Online] Available at: www.vatican.va [Accessed on: 8 January 2026]

[2] Pope Francis [2019] Pope Francis' in-flight press conference: full text [Online] Available at: www.vaticannews.va [Accessed on: 8 January 2026]

[3] Gisotti, A [2018] Card. Parolin: il 2018 di Francesco all’insegna di giovani e famiglia [Online] Available at: www.vaticannews.va [Accessed on: 8 January 2026]

[4] Kuhn, T [1962] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Online] Available at: www.lri.fr [Accessed on: 8 January 2026]

[5] First Vatican Council [1870] Vatican I's Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus, on the Church of Christ, Chap 4, para 6 [Online] Available at: www.ewtn.com [Accessed on: 8 January 2026]

[6] Pope St. John Paul II [1992] Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum [Online] Available at: www.vatican.va [Accessed on: 9 January 2026]

[7] Demos [2022] The Cardinal Pell memo in full [Online] www.cal-catholic.com [Accessed on: 25 March 2025]

This article being read aloud, with additional comments:

https://youtu.be/1A-6zFLGq74