Bergoglio’s Marriage Annulment Rules Ten Years Later: ‘Operation Warp Speed’ Novus Ordo Style

Fast, free family wrecking!

Bergoglio’s Marriage Annulment Rules Ten Years Later:
Operation Warp Speed Novus Ordo Style

by Francis del Sarto

On May 15, 2020, the United States government launched Operation Warp Speed. Its goal? To manufacture and distribute an injection that would purportedly immunize citizens from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Operation Warp Speed is a fitting name for the accelerated procedure to obtain marriage annulments introduced by the Vatican II Church ten years ago by Argentinian apostate Jorge Mario Bergoglio (aka “Pope Francis”).

Not that the “annulment” process needed a push, mind you. In 1968 there were only 338 declarations of nullity issued in the entire United States. By 2006 roughly 27,000 marriages in the US were declared invalid. How’s that for the “New Evangelization”?

Believing that Bergoglio’s 2015 reforms affirmed traditional Catholic teaching is as naive as thinking the COVID vaccine was “safe and effective,” when it was rushed to the public by Big Pharma without rigorous testing, to say the least.

Notably, a September 2020 survey conducted by Pew Research found that half of Americans said they were not interested in taking the vaccine given its experimental nature. Said another way, they were “vaccine hesitant.”

While not all of the deaths that occurred in the years that followed the “pandemic” can definitively be attributed to the shot, in at least one case an expert in blood disorders declared it was “a medical certainty” that a Florida doctor’s death was the direct result of receiving the Pfizer jab. Reports of “turbo” cancers as well as sudden deaths of otherwise healthy professional athletes have also raised suspicions about the injections’ side effects.

Frankenchurch’s mad scientist lab in the Vatican has similarly developed a novel pathogen, one that attacks marital hosts instead of the human body. Sadly, too many Novus Ordo couples are ignorant of the harmful impact Bergoglio’s blitzkrieg has had on marriages. As such, they would be wise to adopt an “annulment-hesitant” outlook.

Francis’ Matrimonial “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE” Card

In September 2020, Novus Ordo journalist Cindy Wooden reported for Catholic News Service on the radical changes Bergoglio was making to the annulment process. Wooden summarized his changes in the most reassuring of terms:

…Pope Francis’ chief aim in reforming the process: to reaffirm the indissolubility of marriage [sic] while offering pastoral care, mercy and a welcoming hand to people whose broken unions were defective from the beginning.

In his 2015 documents reforming the process — “Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus” (“The Lord Jesus, the Gentle Judge”) for the Latin-rite church and “Mitis et misericors Iesus,” (“The Meek and Merciful Jesus”) for the Eastern Catholic churches — Pope Francis asked that “with due regard for the just compensation of tribunal employees,” the process would be free of charge to the petitioning couples.

The most recent Statistical Yearbook (published by the Vatican Secretariat of State), reporting data as of Dec. 31, 2018, said that of the 56,780 “cases for the declaration of nullity” handled globally, just over 32% were handled at no charge to the petitioners. In just over 20% of the cases, petitioners were asked to cover some of the costs, but in almost 48% of the cases, the petitioner paid in full.

(Cindy Wooden, “By the numbers: Statistics illustrate progress in tribunal reforms”, Catholic Philly, Sep. 17, 2020)

While admitting that there have been some bumps along the way in how the Vatican has implemented the “no cost” aspect of the process, Wooden expressed optimism with the overall “progress” of Francis’s “welcoming hand” to troubled couples.

Chicago Catholic editor Joyce Duriga likewise reported on Bergoglio’s reforms in March 2016. She claimed that they would make it easier for couples in less-developed nations to dissolve their marriages:

New guidelines make it simpler for the petitioner — the person seeking the annulment — to write up their testimony of what happened in the marriage. They also eliminate the appeal process and the requirement to receive permission to grant the annulment from another diocese if the other former spouse doesn’t live here.

The new norms take into consideration that in many of the less-developed parts of the world, Catholics do not for a variety of reasons have access to the annulment process. The changes that Pope Francis made reflect his commitment to justice for all God’s people.

(Joyce Duriga, “Tribunal rolling out easier annulment procedures – Changes instituted by Pope Francis take more pastoral approach to process, archdiocesan officials say”, Chicago Catholic, Mar. 20, 2016)

In January 2021, Antipope Bergoglio spoke to the Roman Rota about how his “reforms” were doing. Among other things, he boasted about the impact they were having on children:

The judgments of the ecclesiastical judge cannot disregard the memories, made up of light and shadows, that have marked the life, not only of the two spouses but also of the children. Spouses and children constitute a community of people, that is always and certainly identified with the good of the family, even when this has disintegrated.

We must not tire of devoting all our attention and care to the family and to Christian marriage: here you invest a large part of your concern for the good of the particular Churches. May the Holy Spirit, whom you invoke before every decision to be made on the truth of marriage, enlighten you and help you not to forget the effects of such acts: first and foremost the good of the children, their peace or, on the contrary, the loss of joy in the face of separation. May prayer — judges must pray a lot! — and common effort highlight this human reality, which is often painful: a family that splits up and another that, as a result, is formed, undermining the unity that was the joy of the children in the previous union.

(Antipope Francis, Address to the Officials of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota for the Inauguration of the Judicial Year, Vatican.va, Jan. 29, 2021)

With these remarks, Francis the Humble showed he believed he was being understanding and caring. As will be shown later in this article, he was actually revealing himself to have very little care for children.

The Normalizing of “Catholic Divorce”

Francis’ “merciful” changes were really part of a malicious, multi-faceted attack against the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Novus Ordo Watch has catalogued the various changes Bergoglio’s diabolical decree brought about:

• Process will be free of charge (diocese must carry the costs, can be helped by national bishops’ conference)
• One single judicial sentence suffices – no more automatic appeal of the first sentence, though a manual appeal is still possible
• If one party fails to show up after being summoned twice, taken as consent that annulment process should move forward
• A first appeal is to remain local, that is, on the metropolitan level
• A second appeal can be made to the Vatican
• There need only be one single judge, under the local bishop
• The bishop alone can be the judge, bypassing the normal process of the tribunal, under certain conditions
• Abortion is now grounds for annulment (now this is just plainly evil, as it may cause women seeking an “annulment” to have an abortion as a sure way to get their “declaration of nullity” — don’t think some could be this wicked? Oh yes, they could — go to your local abortuary and see how many cars you see in the parking lot with Rosary beads hanging from their rear-view mirrors)
• “Brevity of conjugal life” is now grounds for annulment
• “Lack of faith” is now grounds for annulment
• These reforms pertain to both the Latin and the Eastern churches
• These reforms took effect on December 8, 2015, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the first day of the “Holy Year of Mercy”

Novus Ordo Watch then aptly summarized the goal of these changes:

Obviously, what’s going on here is divorce, not annulment. Hundreds of thousands — millions, perhaps — of people over the years didn’t suddenly find out that “something essential was missing” in their marriage. Rather, their marriage ran into problems, they got themselves a new partner (or want to get one), and now they want to get rid of the nasty burden of a valid marriage because they’ve fallen in love with someone else. That is what’s going on here, let’s not kid ourselves.

(“Motu Inapproprio: Francis Streamlines Marriage Annulments”, Novus Ordo Wire, Sep. 8, 2015; italics given.)

The following infographic, published by Catholic Link, illustrates the changes:

(source link)

Liberal Media Runs Cover for Francis

Left-wing propaganda outfit National Catholic Reporter could hardly contain its glee when it discovered there was an uptick in the number of marriages being torn asunder:

After nearly 30 years of watching a decline in the number of Catholics applying for marriage annulment, diocesan officials are reporting increases following Pope Francis’ 2015 reform of church law on nullity procedures. Regardless of whether the apparent turnaround is a short-term phenomenon spurred by the canonical changes or not, some marriage tribunal staff and canon lawyers say the revised process is cultivating a “real change of culture.”

(Dan Morris-Young, “Annulment reform seems to cultivate change of culture”, National Catholic Reporter, June 5, 2017)

A “real change of culture?” Ha! Real Catholics know that more marriages are a sign of a real change of culture and a reason to rejoice. Only heretics would sing hosannas in response to news that there had been an increase in the (de facto) dissolution of them.

Now, it is one thing to be pleased that justice was done by determining that an apparent marriage had truly been invalid to begin with, but it is quite another to rejoice over the fact that the number of annulments is increasing.

Indeed, it is not like these statistics indicate that the Church is finally catching up to recognizing the nullity of hordes of pseudo-marriages. Rather, it seems that in most cases the Modernist Counterchurch is simply handing out de facto divorces so one or both of the parties can “marry again,” all while pretending that a legitimate union never existed. This is no reason to throw confetti, pop open a bottle of bubbly, and break into a happy dance.

What Does the Data Show?

In the five years leading up to Bergoglio’s “reforms”, the Novus Ordo annulment mill was thriving in the United States. This we can state unequivocally thanks to data from the Canon Law Society of America (CLSA).

The following numbers are taken from the first-instance tribunal statistics for 2014, a year the CLSA reported on 171 tribunals ranging from Albany, New York, to Youngstown, Ohio (source: Proceedings of the Seventy-Seventh Annual Convention, pp. 469-475). Annulments were gathered under the headings “Sentence in Favor of Nullity” (i.e. annulment granted) and “Sentence Contrary to Nullity” (i.e. annulment denied). Annulments granted are listed as the number on the left below while annulments declined are shared on the right:

• Albany: 70 | 3
• Allentown: 121 | 0
• Atlanta: 360 | 60
• Baltimore: 140 | 1
• Chicago: 302 | 1
• Cincinnati: 201 | 11
• Cleveland: 2o4 | 2
• Dallas: 148 | 0
• Detroit: 239 | 4
• Miami: 198 | 8
• New York: 191 | 36
• Omaha: 92 | 11
• Youngstown: 63 | 0

Notice how the New York and Atlanta Archdioceses had a rather sizable number of requests for nullification that were not granted. But even in those cases the annulments approved still far exceeded them. Again, this is data collected from before Francis made annulments far easier in 2015.

While Bergoglio’s “reforms” were readily adopted in the United States, other countries were not as quick to implement them. In May 2019, Francis excoriated the Conciliar hierarchy of Italy for not adopting his decree as quickly as others. During a speech to that country’s conference of “bishops” he raged: “It is with regret that I note that the reform, after four years, remains far from being applied in the great majority of Italian dioceses.”

For Bergoglio, it seems the tearing down of families and societies simply was not happening quickly enough.

Bergoglian “Reforms” Make Already Horrible Conciliar Changes Even Worse

In the 60 years that have followed the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), one of the most obvious signs of the massive chasm between the true Church and its Modernist counterfeit is the noticeable difference in how each views Holy Matrimony.

Whereas the former has always been the world’s staunchest defender of the marital bond, the latter is seemingly overjoyed at declaring marriages null and void. In the United States, for instance, the Novus Ordo annulment process informally became known as “Catholic divorce.” Before 1970, annulments had been a comparatively rare phenomenon, but beginning in the decade that followed, declarations of nullity were being granted at an alarming speed.

How easy was it to get an annulment in the Novus Ordo Church back then? In a July 15, 1986 article from The Athanasian entitled “Under Fire — Catholic Marriage”, Novus Ordo author Joseph P. Zwack is quoted as having been asked the following question: “But my first marriage lasted for years, and we had several children. How can I possibly receive an annulment?” He stunningly answered: “This will make absolutely no difference” (p. 3).

A 2018 Reddit post entitled “Vatican II, and the ‘get out of marriage card’” backed up Zwack’s claims. It shared the following alarming statistics about the annulment rate before Vatican II:

Between 1952 and 1955, immediately before Vatican II, there were a total of 392 annulments worldwide, or less than 100 a year. About fifteen million Catholics got married during this time, so around 1 annulment for every 40,000 Catholics who got married. By 1968, this had risen to 338 in the United States alone. By 1990, there were 120,000 annulments worldwide, including 73,000 in the US alone. In the US, 330,000 Catholics were married that year. So 1 annulment for every 4.5 Catholics married.

(“Vatican II, and the ‘get out of marriage card'”, posted by user -AveMaria-)

This is borne out by the chart below, which shows an increase in annulments from under 500 in 1968 to over 50,000 by 1985:

Amid this drastic rise, another troubling phenomenon emerged: Fewer and fewer marriages were being contracted. This seems to have been the result of more and more couples cohabiting prior to, or in place of, marriage altogether.

As time passed, the Vatican II Church became more tolerant of these sinful situations. This mentality reached its zenith when — who else? — “Pope” Francis made the astounding heretical claim in 2018 that couples who cohabitate for decades have “a true marriage [and] have the grace of matrimony”!

To the perverted Bergoglian mind, lifelong mortal sin amounts to the same thing as a lifelong chaste commitment in the grace-giving sacrament of Holy Matrimony. This is theological madness, and yet for many deluded souls such remarks are viewed as wise and insightful.

Vatican II Opened the Door to Bergoglio’s Reforms

This is all the logical result of the Second Vatican Council. Make no mistake, the Modernist orientation of Vatican II was not merely correlative with the annulment explosion, it was causative of it.

During the debates over the drafting of Gaudium et Spes, the council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” a serious (and ultimately successful) attack was launched against the Church’s perennial teaching that the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children, and that other ends are subordinate to this.

The attack was not overt, however, for procreation was still mentioned as an end of marriage. No, the enemies of the Church were much more subtle in their scheming.

In Volume 5 of History of Vatican II, Canadian contributing author Gilles Routhiers shows how this obfuscation was able to bring about the necessary changes that later enabled the Church’s traditional doctrines to be torn asunder:

Immediately after [the conservative Irish Dominican Cardinal Michael] Browne it was [Cardinal Paul-Émile] Léger’s turn to speak. While acknowledging that the new draft of the schema was better than the preceding one, he feared that in its present form its teaching would deeply disappoint the legitimate expectations of the faithful. The main defect of the schema was that it continued to describe marriage as “an institution ordered to the procreation and rearing of children,” instead of basing the description on the persons that marriage brings together into a community of life and love. According to the Archbishop of Montreal [Léger], to describe marriage as an institution in the service of procreation “is certainly both false and destructive of the dignity of love.” The need was to think within another perspective, that of “an intimate community of love.”

(Gilles Routhiers, “Finishing the Work begun: The Trying Experience of the Fourth Period”; in Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II, vol. 5 [Maryknoll, NY: ORBIS Books, 2006], p. 155.)

In 1944, the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII had condemned Léger’s perspective:

This revolutionary way of thinking and speaking aims to foster errors and uncertainties, to avoid which the Most Eminent and Very Reverend Fathers of this supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with the guarding of matters of faith and morals, in a plenary session, on Wednesday, the 28th of March, 1944, when the question was proposed to them “Whether the opinion of certain recent persons can be admitted, who either deny that the primary purpose of matrimony is the generation and raising of 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.

(Decree of the Holy Office, April 1, 1944; Denzinger 2295.)

At the end of the day, Vatican II opened the door to what Francis would turn into his full scale assault on the family.

Francis, Untier of Knots

In 1986, then-50-year-old “Fr.” Jorge Mario Bergoglio spent three months at the Jesuit Sankt Georgen Graduate School in Frankfurt, Germany, while trying to find a subject for his doctoral dissertation. He decided on Romano Guardini (1885-1968), an Italian-born German priest who authored multiple books riddled with Modernist ideas.

Here we offer a brief aside that, while off-topic, we deem to be warranted. We ask the reader’s indulgence as Guardini was one of the key progenitors of the “New Mass” — he seriously argued that, before all else, the Mass is a “commemorative meal” — and of Vatican II theology in general.

The importance of Guardini to the theological revolution that occurred at the council can hardly be overstated. Only ill health prevented him from serving as a peritus on the council’s Liturgical Commission. In 1965, “Pope” Paul VI offered to make him a “cardinal,” but he declined.

Since then, Guardini has been declared a “Servant of God,” putting him on the fast track for being declared a conciliar “saint.”

As “Pope,” Bergoglio spoke highly of Guardini. He specifically cited him on several occasions in the encyclical Laudato Si’.

Benedict XVI also admired Guardini. He said Guardini’s Vom Geist der Liturgie (published in English as The Spirit of the Liturgy) was one of the first books he had read as a theology student. It left such an impression on him that he gave one of his own books the same title in tribute. Specifically, Benedict said:

This work can rightly be considered the beginning of the liturgical movement in Germany. It made a crucial contribution to ensuring that the liturgy, with its beauty, hidden riches and grandeur that crosses time, was rediscovered as the vital centre of the Church and of Christian life. It made its contribution to having the liturgy celebrated in an ‘essential’ (a term very dear to Guardini) manner.

(Silvano Zucal, “The Intellectual Relationship between Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini”)

If one is familiar with the history of the liturgical revolution, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to realize how Ratzinger’s praise amounts to a Modernist inversion of reality. Indeed, the centrality of the liturgy to the life of the Church did not need to be “rediscovered.” It was already being offered in its “essential manner”— that is, as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass — not in the heretical manner of a meal, as proposed by Guardini.

Guardini’s relevance is notable because it was in Germany while studying Guardini’s ideas that Bergoglio came across a centuries-old painting he would go on to appropriate: “Mary, Untier of Knots” (or “Mary, Undoer of Knots”). The German title is Maria Knotenlöserin.

Created around 1700, the painting is an artistic rendition of St. Irenaeus’s teaching that the Blessed Virgin, by her fidelity to God, untied (or undid) the knots that Eve caused with her disobedience in the Garden of Eden — a thoroughly Catholic idea.

Apparently, however, it was not until the 20th century, specifically the 1980s, that there came to be a devotion of sorts to Mary Untier of Knots, one that was spread to Argentina and Brazil by none other than Jorge Bergoglio:

Although the reference to Mary as one who unites knots goes back to St. Irenaeus in the second century, the devotion to Mary Untier of Knots was not well known until recently. In the 1980’s it was brought to Argentina by Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J. (now Pope Francis), where it remains particularly popular.

(Richard Lenar, “History of the Devotion to Mary, Untier of Knots”)

One may say that his infernal campaign to make marriage annulments easier, faster, and free shows that Francis was interested in untying knots of a different sort.

Just one year after Bergoglio issued his directive, he made what were described as “off-the-cuff” comments that minimized respect and reverence for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony within the Novus Ordo. One wonders if they truly were “spontaneous” remarks or planned in advance.

In a Reuters article published on June 16, 2016 entitled, “Pope’s comments on modern marriage raise storm of criticism,” Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella wrote the following:

Pope Francis has said the “great majority” of Catholic marriages being celebrated today are invalid because couples do not fully realize it is a lifetime commitment, drawing sharp criticism from Church conservatives.

The pope, who has come under fire before for making spontaneous comments about doctrinal matters, was speaking at a question-and-answer session with priests, nuns and parish workers on Thursday night in a Rome basilica.

“We are living in a provisional culture,” Francis said in response to a man who spoke of “the crisis of marriage” and asked how the Church could better prepare young couples.

“Because of this, a great majority of our sacramental marriages are null because they (the couple) say ‘yes, for the rest of my life’ but they don’t know what they are saying because they have a different culture,” Francis said.

In the Vatican’s transcript issued on Friday morning his words were changed to read “some” instead of “a great majority.” A Vatican spokesman said the pope’s off-the-cuff remarks are sometimes edited after consulting with him or among aides…

(Philip Pullella, “Pope’s comments on modern marriage raise storm of criticism”, Reuters, June 17, 2016)

This “fixing” of Bergoglio’s statement to refer to only “some” as opposed to the “great majority” of invalid marriages is standard Vatican damage control.

Here one can’t help but recall an incident one year after Bergoglio’s election that caused conservative Conciliar columnist Damian Thompson to tweet: “Has Pope Francis just thrown a hand grenade into traditional teaching on divorcees and Communion?” (quoted here).

The incident in question took place when Bergoglio called a woman in Argentina who was living in adultery and reportedly told her it was okay for her to receive Holy Communion. Then-Vatican spokesman/spin doctor “Fr.” Thomas Rosica would only say that the call had taken place but he would not confirm or deny what the woman claimed he said. Regardless, the call received worldwide attention, and Francis was seen as condoning her behavior.

From Mortal Sin to Irregular “Situation”

Before returning to the question of Francis and invalid unions, let us remain for a moment on the topic of adulterous unions.

In 2015, Catholic News Service published a video titled: “Pope Francis on the divorced and civilly remarried”. In it, Francis says the following:

How do we care for those who, after the irreversible failure of their matrimonial bond, have undertaken a new union? The church well knows that such a situation contradicts the Christian sacrament of marriage.

Notice that in Francis Speak there is no mention of words like “sin,” “adultery,” or “transgression,” but merely a “situation.” Notice also how he speaks not only of a “failure” of the matrimonial bond — as if the bond itself could fail — but of an “irreversible” failure at that. This alone denies the indissolubility of marriage. What’s irreversible is not the failure of the bond but the bond itself, which remains intact until death.

In any case, if a situation arises in which a married couple can no longer stay together (for example, if one of the spouses abandons the other and refuses to return), then the only course of action for the faithful spouse is to live a life amounting to the single state. In the event that the abandoned spouse has not been faithful and has entered another union (“remarried”, according to the civil law) and has children to take care of, then, at the very least, all activity that is proper to the married state must cease between the two pseudo-spouses, and they must henceforth live as brother and sister. That has always been the traditional Catholic position.

Francis, however, refused to accept this. His argument, instead, was that adultery could be permitted in such circumstances for the “greater good” of raising children. But adultery is intrinsically evil: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Ex 20:14); and this is true even in the New Covenant (see Rom 13:8-10). It cannot, therefore, ever be ‘permitted’, not even if the intent is to prevent other, greater sins.

The Denzinger-Bergoglio website, a conservative Novus Ordo web site which exposed Francis’s false teachings, reported at the time that the Vatican had softened his words:

The English translation available on the Vatican site, and linked below, has ‘corrected’ the words of the Pope, using ‘after an irreversible failure of their matrimonial bond, have entered into a new union’. However, Francis’ words are clearly “tras la ruptura de su vínculo matrimonial han establecido una nueva convivencia” – which translates into English as “after the rupture of their matrimonial bond have entered into a new union”…

(Source; italics and bold print given.)

As for the “great majority” remark made by Francis, the standard Vatican spin doctoring won’t cut it. Bergoglio had said something very similar on another occasion to “Cardinal” Walter Kasper, who, in a lengthy 2014 interview with Commonweal, reported: “I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid.”

If Francis believed that at least half of marriages were invalid, that made it easy to push ahead with lightning-fast annulment! Granted, there is a difference between half of all marriages and a great majority of all marriages, but in neither case would “some marriages” convey the same idea.

At the time, Novus Ordo Watch noted that Francis’ remark was directly opposed to perennial Catholic teaching:

But there is more to be found here than a mere absurdity: Francis is undermining a fundamental principle of sacramental theology, which is that of the presumption of validity, a legal presumption that the necessary internal intention to confect the sacrament (to “do what the Church does”) is present in the minister when the matter and form of the sacramental rite have been properly applied — unless there is externally manifested evidence to the contrary:

A person who has correctly and seriously used the requisite matter and form to effect and confer a sacrament is presumed for that very reason to have intended to do what the Church does.

(Pope Leo XIII, Bull Apostolicae Curae, n. 33)

Provided the minister seriously performs all the sacramental rites, there is no need for being doubtful about the validity of the sacraments, for it is presumed that the minister has the requisite intention, unless he externally manifests the contrary.

(Rev. Raphael De Salvo, The Dogmatic Theology on the Intention of the Minister in the Confection of the Sacraments [Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1949], p. 105)

All of this is codified in ecclesiastical law. As Canon 1014 states: “Marriage enjoys the favor of law; therefore, in doubt the validity of marriage is to be upheld until the contrary is proved….”

What we see in the Novus Ordo Sect is not at all in alignment with the Church’s Magisterium or Canon Law. It couldn’t be, or the number of tribunal sentences nullifying marriages would be consistent with pre-Vatican II rulings, and not metastasizing as they have been over the past half  century.

Enter “Cardinal” Coccopalmerio

Of course the Bergoglian annulment reform has also included some surprises. The Jesuit-run America magazine reported in September 2015:

The new reform was presented at a press conference in the Vatican on September 8, and one of the main speakers at that event was the Italian cardinal Cardinal [sic] Francesco Coccopalmerio. He is president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, one of the Vatican’s top canon lawyers, and was appointed by the pope to the commission that he set up, August 2014, to study the annulment process and to come up with proposals for revision and improvement in this important area. He was the only cardinal on the commission.

Cardinal Coccopalmerio began by telling the press that he wanted to make three points in presenting the reforms issued by Pope Francis in his two letters—motu proprio (‘on his own initiative’). First, he offered a clarification of the concept of annulment for the benefit of the general public, then outlined the most significant changes introduced by the new norms and, thirdly, listed some areas that require further work.

(Gerard O’Connell, “Pope Francis on annulments: further clarification from Vatican”, America, Sep. 8, 2015)

‘Cardinal’ Coccopalmerio spoke at length detailing his three points, most of which pertained to how the annulment process would change. It was his third point, “Some prospects for future work,” where he revealed a “normative canon” in the proposed Bergoglian reform. Here Coccopalmerio revealed that:

The third intervention is on the problem of the new civil norms relating to marriage and the family, norms that are often incompatible with the doctrine and discipline of the church but in fact exist. These new civil norms inevitably have an impact on the canonical order. How does the latter order respond? Take one case, among the more simple ones: in legislations where homosexual couples can adopt, how should one proceed if a homosexual couple wants a child baptized? How does one, for example, register the baptism?

That the Vatican itself chose to tack on the notion of same-sex “families” to the topic of annulment reform, is telling.

But wait, there’s more! In 2017, Coccopalmerio released a 30-page booklet entitled The Eighth Chapter of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, printed by the Vatican’s own publishing house. (Amoris Laetitia is the infernal exhortation Francis released after the two Synods on the Family in 2014 and ’15.) In this book, he laid out the justification for giving Holy Communion to persons living in adultery. In an article published for LifeSiteNews, columnist Pete Baklinski summarized its arguments as follows:

According to Coccopalmerio, it is too much to ask cohabiting couples as well as those in adulterous unions to forgo sexual relations. Without sexual intimacy, he writes, the temptation grows to be unfaithful and find intimacy elsewhere.

(Pete Baklinski, “Vatican Cardinal: Catholics in adulterous unions ‘must be given’ Communion”, Life Site, Feb. 14, 2017)

Said another way, the Italian ‘cardinal’ believes it is too much to insist that people in adulterous unions should stop being sexually active, as this might cause them to be ‘unfaithful’ to the one who isn’t their true spouse to begin with! Who comes up with such sophistry?!

Then again, we are dealing with Francesco Coccopalmerio, a man who went on record suggesting that Vatican II theology be applied also to the notion of sacramental validity:

We say, everything is valid; nothing is valid. Maybe we have to reflect on this concept of validity or invalidity. The Second Vatican Council said there is a true communion [between Catholics and Protestants] even if it is not yet definitive or full. You see, they made a concept not so decisive, either all or nothing. There’s a communion that is already good, but some elements are missing. But, if you say some things are missing and that therefore there is nothing, you err. There are pieces missing, but there is already a communion, but it is not full communion. The same thing can be said, or something similar, of the validity or invalidity of ordination. I said let’s think about it. It’s a hypothesis. Maybe there is something, or maybe there’s nothing — a study, a reflection.

(Francesco Coccopalmerio; in Edward Pentin, “Cardinal Coccopalmerio Explains His Positions on Catholics in Irregular Unions”, National Catholic Register, Mar. 1, 2017.)

Clearly, “His Eminence” prefers to see shades of gray even where there is only black and white. Consider, for example, the following remarks he made in 2014:

If I meet a homosexual couple, I notice immediately that their relationship is illicit: the doctrine says this, which I reaffirm with absolute certainty. However, if I stop at the doctrine, I don’t look anymore at the persons. But if I see that the two persons truly love each other, do acts of charity to those in need, for example … then I can also say that, although the relationship remains illicit, positive elements also emerge in the two persons. Instead of closing our eyes to such positive realities, I emphasize them. It is to be objective and objectively recognize the positive of a certain relationship, of itself illicit”.

(Francesco Coccopalmerio; quoted in Pete Baklinski, “Cardinal linked to Vatican gay orgy emphasized ‘positive elements’ in gay lifestyle”, Life Site, July 6, 2017.)

Yes, you read that right. According to “Cocco” there can be “positive elements” in inherently sinful relationships that in biblical times caused fire to rain from Heaven to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Unfortunately, it’s an idea that has gained much wider popularity since 2014. Notice, too, how he refers to a sodomite partnership as merely an “illicit” relationship.

With such absurd and immoral theology, is it any wonder that Coccopalmerio’s secretary, “Mgr.” Luigi Capozzi, was “arrested by Vatican police for hosting a cocaine-fueled homosexual orgy in a building right next to St. Peter’s Basilica” (source)? “One of the most shocking elements of the scandal is that Capozzi’s arrest came on the verge of him being made a bishop on the recommendation of Coccopalmerio.”

An Attack on the Family Engineered by the Church’s Enemies

In an article that appeared in The Athanasian in July of 1986, contributor John Weiskittel wrote:

“Many marriages are not of God and do not please Our Lord.” This sounds very current, doesn’t it? Who among us, upon gazing out at the sorry state of the institution of matrimony in our day, doesn’t find himself echoing such sentiments? And yet these words were spoken nearly 70 years ago, being part of a message given by the Blessed Virgin Mary to Jacinta Marto, one of the three Portuguese shepherd children favored with visions of Our Lady at Fatima.

(John Kenneth Weiskittel, “Under Fire — Catholic Marriage”, The Athanasian, vol. VII, n. 5, p. 1)

The connection to Fatima is surely no coincidence. Fr. Carlo Caffarra (1938-2017), perhaps best known as being one of the four “Dubia Cardinals” challenging Francis on Amoris Laetitia, was in communication with the alleged Sister Lucia dos Santos of Fatima in the 1980s. He went on record disclosing what Sister Lucy told him then, namely: “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.”

But was it really Sister Lucy writing this? In recent years compelling evidence has been discovered that the woman who appeared in public as Sister Lucy after 1960 was not the real Fatima seer but an impostor. At the same time, it is not impossible that the impostor would have used some of the known thoughts and testimonies of the real Sister Lucy in her correspondence.

In another approved Marian apparition, Our Lady of Good Success, which occurred in 1610 in Quito, Ecuador, the Blessed Mother spoke to Franciscan nun Mother Mariana de Jesús Torres. She foretold of our times in the following way:

Thus I make it known to you that from the end of the 19th century and shortly after the middle of the 20th century … the passions will erupt and there will be a total corruption of morals…. As for the Sacrament of Matrimony, which symbolizes the union of Christ with His Church, it will be attacked and deeply profaned. Freemasonry, which will then be in power, will enact iniquitous laws with the aim of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin and encouraging procreation of illegitimate children born without the blessing of the Church. The Christian spirit will rapidly decay, extinguishing the precious light of Faith until it reaches the point that there will be an almost total and general corruption of customs.

(Source)

The 1986 Athanasian article referenced above also speaks of this:

Freemasonry took it as an obligation to further Luther’s program and was singled out by Pope Leo XIII on more than one occasion for its role in weakening the marriage bond. In Humanum Genus (1884), His Holiness writes:

What refers to domestic life in the teaching of the Naturalists (i.e., those who profess the Masons’ philosophy; namely, that nature is all that exists and that God, if He exists at all, must be identified with nature in a pantheistic way) is almost all contained in the following declarations: that marriage belongs to the genus of contracts, which may rightly be revoked by the will of those who made them; and that the civil rulers of the State have power over the matrimonial bond … These things the Freemasons … have long determined to make into a law and institution. For in many countries, and those nominally Catholic, it is enacted that no marriages shall be considered lawful except those contracted by the civil rite; in other places the law permits divorce; and in others every effort is used to make it lawful…

And in Praeclara (1894), Pope Leo warns that Masonry “strives to eliminate the Christian character from marriage and the family and the education of youth, and from every form of instruction, whether public or private, and to root out from the minds of men all respect for authority, whether human or divine.”

Similarly castigated by the popes are the goals of the socialist and communists of whom, writes Pope Leo, Masonry “greatly favors their designs, and holds in common with them their chief opinions.” Marx and Engels called for “abolition of the family!” in The Communist Manifesto, and admitted that “(e)ven the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Marriage, they charged, is a bourgeois sham, to be replaced with “an openly legalized system of free love.” When Lenin took Russia in 1917 he instituted post card divorces to facilitate the change, but the Bolsheviks soon learned that, along with religion, marriage and the family are among the toughest remnants of the “old order” for them to overcome. Pope Leo observes in Inscrutabili (1878) that “the theories of Socialism would quickly destroy (this) family life since, the stability afforded by marriage under religious sanction once lost, paternal authority over children and the duties of children to parents are necessarily and most harmfully slackened.”

(Weiskittel, “Under Fire — Catholic Marriage”, p. 2)

All of this is quite consistent what with Fr. Herman Bernard Kramer (1884-1976) wrote in his 1955 work The Book of Destiny, which is an explanation of the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation).

In his commentary on Apoc 13:6 (“And he opened his mouth unto blasphemies against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven”), which refers to a full-out assault of Antichrist against Christ and His Church, Fr. Kramer writes the following:

The hatred and malice of Satan inspiring Antichrist will reserve its most venomous shafts for the Church and especially for the Holy Eucharist. “His tabernacle” is the best translation for σκηνην because it fits in a rigid context with “those who dwell in heaven”, which as most interpreters admit means the Church; “those who dwell in heaven” would be the episcopate, priesthood and religious orders; and the tabernacle would be the dwelling place of the Lamb. The Sacred Mystery of the Real Presence of Christ has thwarted all the malice of Satan, who will inspire his vicar [i.e. the Antichrist] to exert all his efforts against that “dwelling” and the Indwelling Divinity there. “The tabernacle” and “those who dwell in heaven” stands for the whole Church and all the Church holds sacred — the sacraments, the priesthood and religious life, the Christian family, the infallible dogmas and the moral law. The whole efforts of Antichrist during the forty-two months of his reign will be directed against all that God has planted in the human heart and instituted in the world, because Satan knows it will be his last chance to wreck the work of Christ. If he could drive the Eucharistic Lamb out of the world, he might have the victory, but he cannot do this unless he wipes out the priesthood of Jesus Christ. So Antichrist’s blasphemies are only the impotent rage of Satan against God and the Church.

(Rev. Herman Bernard Kramer, The Book of Destiny, p. 314; reprint edition by TAN Books and Publishers, 1975.)

An attack upon the whole Church and all the Church holds sacred — including the family — is precisely what the Second Vatican Council accomplished.

As we have detailed in this report, the war on Holy Matrimony was significantly accelerated by “Pope” Francis, as evidenced by his “warp speed” annulment reforms, along with his tacit approval of fornication, and his non-judgmental “feel free to receive communion” remarks to public adulterers, not to mention his encouragement of transgender unions and sodomite couples adopting children.

Ultimately, we know that Our Lady will win the final victory on the side of the angels, but she does ask that we do our part by prayer, penance, good works, and devout reception of the sacraments. Above all, let us call to mind the famous words of Fr. Patrick Peyton (1909-1992) and put them into practice, insofar as we are able: “The family that prays together, stays together.”

Title image source: composite with elements from Shutterstock (LifetimeStock and Emilia Dragomir)
Licenses: paid