From Chris Jackson, at Hiraeth in Exile:
If anyone still needed proof that the Bergoglian court operates like a patronage machine, this little Argentine episode should settle it. Daniel Pellizzón was handed a soft, polished landing in one of Buenos Aires’s elegant and well-heeled settings after years spent attached to the right men, above all Víctor Manuel Fernández.
Pellizzón had already worked with Jorge Bergoglio in organizing his personal archives. He then became secretary to Fernández when Fernández was rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. Later, when Fernández was elevated to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pellizzón went to Rome as part of the package. These men did not merely know each other. Pellizzón was one of Tucho’s own. He belonged to the inner circle.
That is what makes this appointment so nauseating. The same system that rewards doctrinal wreckers also takes care of their friends. Pellizzón was ordained only in 2018, with Fernández preaching the homily at his first Mass, and Francis himself sending a warm handwritten note urging him to “continue being merciful.”
The message was unmistakable. This was a favored man. A protected man. A man moving through the Church not by the ordinary logic of proven sanctity or sound doctrine, but by personal sponsorship from the most corrupt faction in Rome and Buenos Aires.
Then comes the part that makes the whole thing smell even worse. Reports state that Pellizzón had previously been expelled from the Buenos Aires seminary, under circumstances that were left deliberately veiled. The same reporting says Cardinal Mario Poli ordained him only reluctantly and only through “papal mercy.”
If that account is accurate, then this is the story of a cleric with serious question marks hanging over his past still being carried upward by powerful protectors, then deposited in a prestigious parish as though nothing were amiss.
And what sort of parish was he given? He was reportedly placed in an elegant, wealthy parish in Belgrano and even made a monsignor. That looks a reward package. A well-funded landing spot for one of the household men.
This is how the modern Roman system works. Tucho helps gut doctrine, muddy morals, and normalize every kind of ambiguity, and yet somehow the people around him do not suffer for it. They are protected by the same smiling mafia of mercy that has spent years destroying what remained of Catholic clarity while draping its operations in the language of accompaniment and compassion.
This is a window into how the regime functions. Fernández leaves behind a network. Clients. protégés. loyalists. men whose careers rise because they are useful to the machine and close to its masters. Pellizzón’s plush return to Buenos Aires looks very much like one more favor granted inside that closed world.
And that is the ugliest part of all. In a healthy Church, association with men like Tucho Fernández would stain a reputation. In this Church, it seems to improve one.
Infovaticana reports that in a new book, Synodal Church on the Move: A Pastoral Reinterpretation of the Final Document of the Synod of Bishops 2023-2024, he proposes modifying canon 212 so as to stress the “relative duty and right” of the faithful to cooperate even in ecclesial governance.
The current canon begins in a very different place. It first speaks of Christian obedience to sacred pastors, and only after that of the faithful making their needs and opinions known. Coccopalmerio wants to push the accent in the other direction.
This is the real game. Words like participation and co-responsibility are tools for a constitutional rewrite of Catholic instincts. Francis already prepared the ground in Praedicate Evangelium by stating that “any member of the faithful can preside over a Dicastery or Office,” depending on the power involved and the competence required. Coccopalmerio is now trying to give that drift a more explicit canonical rationale.
And that is precisely what makes his reappearance so revolting. This is not a man whose record invites confidence. In 2017, reports tied one of his closest collaborators, Msgr. Luigi Capozzi, to a lurid scandal in an apartment in the Holy Office building.
| Another example: Casa Santa Marta, run by a known homosexual predator priest, Battista Ricca, was the set of homosexual debauchery not seen in Rome since Caligula : |
The National Catholic Register reported that Vatican gendarmes raided the flat, found hard drugs and men engaged in homosexual activity, and Capozzi was reportedly taken to the Pio XI clinic for detox treatment for cocaine use before being sent away to a monastery.
The same report said other residents had complained of a steady stream of young male visitors and noisy late-night parties, and that Coccopalmerio had reportedly tried, unsuccessfully, to have Capozzi made a bishop. So this was a filth-ridden scandal attached to the cardinal’s own immediate circle.
Whether one calls it Coccopalmerio’s apartment, his secretary’s apartment, or an apartment in the Holy Office tied to his household, the point does not change. This was a drug-and-sex scandal so grotesque that even relatively cautious Catholic reporting treated the core of it as credible while noting that the Vatican refused to speak plainly.
A prince of the Church had a close aide caught up in a cocaine-soaked homosexual debauch in one of the most symbolically charged buildings in Rome, and yet the man now returns to public view not in disgrace, silence, or penance, but as a canonist proposing new ways to dilute hierarchy.
If Rome possessed even a trace of moral self-respect, a prelate with this kind of corruption hanging over his household would not be presented as an architect of the future. He would be finished.
Nor did the humiliation teach him caution. In 2024 he reportedly called for a “permanent” dialogue with Freemasonry, despite the Church’s repeated teaching that Masonic principles are irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine.
So the same elderly canonist whose circle became associated with one of the foulest Vatican scandals of recent years also wants warmer institutional conversation with the lodges. This is a pattern. Moral putrefaction below, doctrinal dissolution above.
But even that is not the deepest problem. Personal scandal is hideous enough. Institutional vision can be worse, because it helps normalize the conditions in which scandal thrives. Coccopalmerio’s proposal tells us that synodality is not just a style, but a jurisprudence. It seeks to convert the Church from a divinely constituted hierarchy into a managed field of consultation, influence, and shared governance.
The clerical office remains on paper, but the atmosphere changes. Authority grows embarrassed to command. The laity are summoned in, not first to be sanctified and led, but to help administer a structure whose rulers no longer speak with the old Catholic confidence about order, office, and obedience.
This is what happens when a Church forgets that order is not oppression. It is charity arranged according to truth. And it is what makes Coccopalmerio such a fitting figure for the synodal age: a compromised churchman from a compromised circle, still busy rewriting the rules while the building fills with smoke.https://bigmodernism.substack.com/p/cardinal-linked-to-cocaine-fueled
ReplyDeleteLove Father Reppenger he tells it like it is. He is so inspirational.
ReplyDeleteAmen 🙏 he is right!! The heaven need to convert all !! The Covid vaccine 💉 is the test for all .. how people never asked… they comply right away. Can you imagine when the chips starting to rolling.. they comply right Antichrist..
ReplyDeleteTHANKYOU FR RIPPENGER
I LOVE SSPX
Where did the quote on the SSPX come from? There's a four hour interview linked above. Is it in that video? To Whomever wrote the blog, please tell us where you got that quote.
ReplyDelete"If I were the Pope, the first thing I would do is call the head of the SSPX and say, ‘You’re to be in my office at 8:00 in the morning. And when he showed up I would write it out myself: ‘You’re canonically regularized. Here, go home and we’ll figure out the rest later."
"If I were the Pope, the first thing I would do is call the head of the SSPX and say, ‘You’re to be in my office at 8:00 in the morning. And when he showed up I would write it out myself: ‘You’re canonically regularized. Here, go home and we’ll figure out the rest later."
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteOh Father Reppenger I thank God for you. You speak and I listen.
ReplyDeleteI mean, maybe these are fair points, but you have to be especially thick to think that homosexuals have only been in the church since the 1950s… 😬…
DeleteByron Harvey who thinks that? Surely you're not denying there's been an exponential increase in homoheretics - especially uncloseted - in the clergy since the '50s?
ReplyDeleteI watched it on the Shawn Ryan show Episode #285. Great information.
ReplyDelete🙏🕊⛪️