In 2016, he did it all very well to that darling of left-wing feminazi-ism in America, Hillary Rodham Clinton….. Is Steve Bannon of Breitbart News and Donald Trump fame now setting his sights somewhat higher ??? --- Does he really think that he can take out the sitting Pope of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome ????? OH, AND A JESUIT, TO BOOT…..
“The pontiff’s silence speaks volumes as powerful conservative Catholic clerics, some of them colluding with Steve Bannon, try to force his resignation.”
--- The Daily Beast, 9/7/18
But, if you think that "Daily Beast" is going to satisfy your curiosity about Bannon and/or any of his fellow conservative American Catholic co-conspirators, like Cardinal Raymond Burke --- guess again.....
This will give you a quick idea of the
slant that “Daily Beast” writer, Barbara
Latza Nadeau, intends to take: “Not long after Pope Francis took office in
March 2013, he ran into a wall. But it wasn’t the ancient Roman brickwork built
around Vatican City. It was stronger. And it came from deep within the very church he
was elected to lead. Every time he tried to introduce reforms, the wall was
there. His foes were so strong he recently equated reforming
the Catholic Church with ‘cleaning the Sphinx of Egypt with a toothbrush.’… Still, Francis persevered, relying on his
immediate popularity and innate charm, and soon the outside world began to look
at the Catholic Church in a new, positive light under his guidance. Suddenly,
it it was cool to be Catholic…. But the
traditional conservatives within the church didn’t want to be cool, and while
the new pope was hardly progressive by secular standards (he is still Catholic,
after all), they preferred the cold [old] church,
the one that protected them from the outside world behind layers of immovable
doctrine….” (See “Sex, Lies and Papacies -- The Plot
to Bring Down Pope Francis” by Barbar Latza Nadeau, 9/7/18,
The Daily Beast/ Home [https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-plot-to-bring-down-pope-francis?ref=home]).
In case you missed it --- it’s CATHOLIC CONSERVATIVES, who are the “Bad Guys” in this "Daily Beast" story
Ms. Nadeau then went
on to drive her point home with this: “It
took five long years, but the conservative powers of the Catholic Church have
finally begun to turn around the supertanker of support for the pope they seem
to hate. And they did it using the one sin the whole church is guilty of:
clerical sex abuse…. Francis
cannot be blamed for mishandling the bulk of the church’s endemic sex abuse
scandals, many of which have played out in dioceses that were run by those who
would like to see him resign. There has been no major sex abuse scandal in his
native Argentina—at least not yet—so his naysayers have had to pick a softer
target….” Then she talked
about how Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s “letter” about Pope Francis’ kid glove treatment of Cardinal McCarrick had
“blindsided” the sitting Pontiff, “… when it was
released by a string of hand-picked conservative Catholic news outlets….”
The article in the “Daily Beast” went
on to note that --- “Francis was
left speechless by the Viganò letter, and so he said nothing. In fact he told
reporters on the flight back to Rome, he would never say anything, ‘not one word’ on Viganò’s accusations, and he has so far kept that
promise…. Though Francis’ strategy of
silence may have been meant to avoid dignifying Viganò’s claims with a
response, it has mostly backfired because it was not a flat-out denial of the
content of the letter. Conservatives have been able to sow seeds of uncertainty
about Francis…. Viganò, who is quite
possibly incognito somewhere in the United States since penning the poison letter,
has been drip-feeding anti-Francis rhetoric through conservative websites and
anti-Francis journalists [including new material
about admitted lies by the Vatican honchos clustered around Pope Francis. And, t]hose close to Viganò say there is
plenty more to come.… ”
And --- Here's Where Steve Bannon Comes Into All of this…..
According to Barbara Latza Nadeau, “… [T]he plot continues to thicken. That’s especially true in the American Church, which has not only spawned one of Francis’s most fervent enemies in Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has found great support for his anti-Francis cause in American alt-right strategist Steve Bannon, but which has also given conservatives plenty of ammunition thanks to endemic clerical sex abuse and cover-ups that seemingly lead straight from the United States to Vatican City…. In particular, the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report that named more than 300 predator priests who victimized more than 1,000 children over seven decades in that state alone, produced one significant culprit: Cardinal Donald Wuerl. He is McCarrick’s successor as the archbishop of Washington, D.C. and he is a former ranking prelate in Pennsylvania, linking him to the two biggest scandals facing [Pope] Francis right now.”
The Beast’s article sort of peters out at this point --- with little more to say about Bannon or the other Catholic Conservatives who are allegedly “conspiring" against Pope Francis.
However, there is a very worthwhile rundown of recent developments in the American Catholic Church’s ongoing pedophile priests scandal
According to the
Daily Beast’s Barbara Nadeau, “…. As the palace intrigue continues in Rome,
what amounts to clerical abuse contagion continues in America as state after
state start investigations into clerical sex abuse and Catholic cover-ups after
the landmark report out of Pennsylvania. An investigation in Missouri, where
Francis critic Cardinal Burke and [Pope] Francis supporter Cardinal Timothy
Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, both served, is well underway and could
be devastating for the American church. Bishop Accountability keeps a database of all reports of predator priests by state. Missouri
has 114 listings of serial abusers across four dioceses. There are also
credible investigations of clerical sex abuse going on in Florida, Illinois and
New York, not to mention a continuation of the Pennsylvania fallout where
priests continue to be named and investigated. On Thursday, the New York state attorney
general subpoenaed all New York state dioceses for their secret records on
abuse….”
In closing, Nadeau also suggests that
Cardinal Wuerl’s long-ago tendered retirement-resignation letter to Pope
Francis might well be accepted by the Pope at any time, hopefully to rid the Pope of a now-very-much-unwanted “albatross” continuing to hang around his Papal neck.
