August-September 2023
El Tucho: Puppet from Hell
Before Christ’s second coming.... The persecution [of the Church] will unveil the “mystery of iniquity”in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. - Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 675-676 |
"To achieve world government, it is necessary - BROCK CHISHOLM, First Director General of the WHO |
On 1 July, Francis announced that 60-year-old Archbishop Víctor "Tucho" Fernández of La Plata, the notorious "kissing expert" and key contributor to heretical gems like Amoris Laetitia and Evangelii Gaudium, would replace 79-year-old Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer SJ as the new Prefect of the rebranded Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (the old CDF, now DDF).
Due to start work in August, the appointment also parachutes Tucho (as he is known) into presidency of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the International Theological Commission.
Well advanced on an altogether different topic for this edition, I changed tack. For, arguably, this development sits atop the mile-high pile of historic rock-bottom scandals that litter the current pontificate; an appointmentso outrageously problematic/portentous that we cannot let it pass without immediate comment.
The joke's on us!
As if to parade his mastery of long-march strategy for "change," Jorge has always bloviated about "dialogue," "processes," "spaces" and all that. Indeed he rapidly embedded this deceitful Marxist methodology in his exhortations and encyclicals precisely "to initiate processes rather than possess spaces" (Evangelii Gaudium, 223). Crafted to circumvent doctrinal absolutes ("occupied spaces" in Jorge-speak), the weaponised vehicle for deploying these cynical ambiguities and "process" towards every imaginable immorality, heterodoxy and heresy, is Jorge's synodal ape: the ongoing toxic talk-fests that mimic his every corrosive utterance and behaviour.
Of course, his intolerance and exclusion of those holding fast to Catholic Tradition and traditions makes a mockery of his space-making 'outreach' and 'dynamic mutual listening' to the 'marginalised'. The cringeworthy blather has always been nakedly self-contradictory and self-serving.
But the appointment of his close Argentinian compatriot to the all-important office charged with protecting Catholic doctrine now renders all such deceptive talk — of slow-walking "processes" and "spaces" to accommodate sin —redundant. Suddenly, ten years into the "100 year-programme [of] reform," as heretical Cardinal Kasper frames the Bergoglian deconstruction, he has expedited his agenda like there's no tomorrow.
A sort of deep church version of the deep state's catastrophic Operation Warp Speed, the reckless fast-track appointment smacks of Jorge keeping pace with the frantic timeline set by his global handlers to reset the world by 2030. It set off air raid sirens everywhere because the very idea of selecting El Tucho besame mucho ("El Tucho kiss me a lot": his satirical moniker in Argentinian circles!) was laughable.
Indeed, "News Italy 24 reported that Francis being ‘able to name Tucho was a rather widespread joke in the Vatican during months full of names to succeed Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer.’ In the end, that's exactly what happened: the hyperbole became reality." ["From Zanchetta to Fernández: all of Bergoglio’s men," Latoya World, 2/7/23]
DDF pornographer-in-chief
At the forefront of the many 'issues' with Tucho is his infamous book, Heal me with your mouth: the art of kissing, published in 1995. Its pornographic contents notwithstanding, the lack of wisdom and prudence reflected in the title alone should have disqualified him from holding any prominent office, never mind heading the DDF.
Faced with renewed criticism of the book in the wake of his appointment, Fernández issued a public statement online, referring to un-named "groups opposed to Francis who are enraged, and who go so far as to use unethical means to harm me. For example, for years they have been referring to a little book of mine that no longer exists, which spoke about the kiss."
In fact, although 'cleansed' from his official CV provided by the Vatican, the book is still available in English and Tucho explains (hangs) himself quite adequately therein without any need for critics to employ "unethical means" to do so. Herewith his Introduction:
I would like to clarify that this book is not written so much based on my personal experience, as based on the lives of people who kiss, and in these pages I want to summarise the popular sentiment, what people feel when they think of a kiss, what mortals experience when they kiss. To do this, I have talked at length with many people who have great experience in the matter, and also with many young people who are learning to kiss in their own way. I also consulted many books and wanted to show how poets talk about kissing. Thus, trying to summarise the immense richness of life, I have created these pages in favour of the kiss. I hope they help you kiss better, that they motivate you to release the best of your being in a kiss.
In his recent public statement he continued to insist that the book was not meant as a manual of theology but as catechetical outreach to young people "who contributed ideas, phrases, poems, etc... Well," he bristled, "what these extreme groups do is to say: ‘Look at the low quality of this theologian, look at the nonsense he wrote, look at the low level he has.’ They have been humiliating me for years now with quotes from that book."
Naturally, he omitted the actual quotes they reference: "humiliating/low level/low quality" passages of his own erotic poetry, like this:
That’s why you don’t ask that it happens to my mouth. Kill me already with your next kiss, bleed me to death, she-wolf. Give me back my peace without mercy (Tucho).
You get the picture. No need for further excruciating extracts.
The latest bad joke to join Jorge's unfunny clown show of miscreants and perverts at Casa Santa Marta, the sensuous scent of El Tucho besame mucho will diffuse into "the filth" of Occupied Rome, and embrace its erotic stench — with a filthy "she-wolf" kiss.
Beyond the porn
Exhibit #1 in the case against his appointment, the book is merely a gross symptom of far deeper and more dangerous issues at play.
Always charitable in his critiques, even lay theologian Ralph Martin, professor at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, is deeply disturbed.
A renowned author of Charismatic hue and consultor to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation, the softly-spoken Martin is not one to exaggerate. In a recent podcast titled, Unmistakably Clear Where We Are Being Led, he underlined that the kissing manual is just an outgrowth of darker theological recesses of El Tucho's mind (my transcript; speaker's emphases):
The book is pretty shocking. I've read large parts of it. And, it's gross, it's erotic. I'd say it's pornographic.
Archbishop Fernández has defended it since he's been appointed, saying he just wrote that as a catechesis for teenagers. That makes me even more concerned. It's not something that would do anything but encourage teenagers to engage in sexual relationships.
But I'm not concerned mainly about that book. I'm concerned about his views on morality, his views on salvation.
In 1995, it was reported he'd written in an article that he's totally, fully convinced that everybody's saved. There's a line in Evangelium Gaudium that he's purported to be the ghost-writer for, that says that it's against the logic of the Gospel that anybody would be lost forever. Of course that's not true. That's the heresy of universalism. You can't judge somebody just by one statement but when they start to appear here and there and everywhere, and when it is probably underlying the reason why there's less concern about the seriousness of sexual immorality, that the Church is actually really concerned about, well it kind of all goes together in a certain way.
To cite just one of Tucho's "here, there and everywhere" statements that undermine "the seriousness of sexual immorality," Catholic journalist Diane Montagna tweeted on 7 July:
In a 2006 article, written as vice-dean of the Catholic University of Argentina theology faculty, #PopeFrancis’s new doctrinal chief, Archbishop Víctor Fernández, argued that a woman’s “inflexible refusal to use condoms” could, in some cases, contradict the demands of charity.
Even partisan Wikipedia knows better!
"In September 1990," it records disapprovingly, "John Paul II visited the small town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, and gave a speech.... [He] said that condoms were a sin in any circumstance."
When a far left megaphone of misinformation and disinformation like Wikipedia is able to state a fundamental Catholic truth with more certainty than the Pope and the ecclesiastic hitherto appointed to defend and promote it, we better watch out!
Homosexual persona
The Modernist dead weight just unloaded on the DDF by Jorge was further underscored by Latin American philosopher and attorney Carlos A. Casanova.
A former fellow at Notre Dame University where he worked with renowned philosopher Ralph McInerny, in the scholarly treatise "Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor as Expositions of 'Natural Law' Contrasted with Their Irrational Rejection" (2018),Casanova explained that:
Fernández shows a very strange lack of understanding concerning the matters of spousal and romantic love. He seems to give excessive importance to physical eroticism and to conceive as true love a desire which leads to intercourse without any commitment to take care of the possible fruit of such intercourse. He also overlooks that the ignorance of this kind of moral truth is never or very rarely without guilt (see Aquinas, S. Th. I-II q. 19 a. 6). Love is not attraction or the desire to give to the other an ecstatic pleasure (as if this was an act of mercy because it gives “wellbeing” to the other). Real love... must be directed by moral truth in the sense explained by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor. It is something much deeper than the fancy flirts of disoriented youth or immature adults.
It all smacks of a homosexual persona; i.e., a personality frozen in adolescence. Which is not to say that Tucho is a sodomite. But the spiritual, intellectual and sexual immaturity noted above, which finds full expression in his catechetical-porn offering Heal me with your mouth, mirrors that of sex-obsessed homosexuals unleashed from doctrinal restraints.
If we add to this his aforementioned dissent on contraception — a prerequisite for acceptance of sterile homosexual acts — we should reasonably expect that Tucho, in line with Jorge's depraved agenda, will seek to further rationalise and downplay gravely immoral acts, providing official DDF sanction to the ongoing accommodation of active sodomites and sodomitic pairs in the life of the Church.
The studious Casanova speaks to this very point, explaining how Archbishop Fernández is intellectually joined at the hip with renowned dissenter Tony Mifsud: both "irrationally" misusing Thomism after the fashion of arch-dissident Fr. Bernard Häring (one of Jorge's favourite theologians). He writes:
Mifsud... quotes Bernard Haring holding that the fruit of the Second Vatican Council was the spirit of dissent among theologians towards the "dictates of the official Church."
... Victor Manuel Fernández's concrete reasoning is different... [b]ut the goal is very similar to Mifsud's; to open the way for the plausibility of 'righteous' (or at least not-guilty) violations of God's law.
... What Fernández means [apropos a woman’s 'uncharitable' “refusal to use condoms”] is that the lady of his example does not will what is just, because that does not conform to her concrete situation... As one can see on pp. 158 and 160 of his paper, he applies this principle to homosexuals and to spouses who 'need' to use the condom.
Disqualifying case
The direct line from waving away Humanae Vitae to welcoming homosexuality inevitably leads on to clerical sexual abuse and episcopal complicity. And so it is with Tucho whose fondness for predatory clergy is a tendency he shares with his papal benefactor and the Casa Santa Marta menagerie.
Since the management of sexual abuse cases falls to the DDF, the following introduction to a time-line provided in a 1 August report by international child abuse expert Liz Yore will give readers the gist of the stark conflict of interest created by the Fernández appointment, while adding to the sum of our necessary knowledge of Tucho (my emphases):
Bishop Accountability, a watchdog advocacy group on clergy sex abuse and episcopal cover-ups, has compiled a prodigious and jaw-dropping timeline of a high-profile clergy abuse case mishandled by now Cardinal elect Victor “Tucho” Fernández. ...
Fernández’ scandalous conduct outlined in the timeline flaunts and violates Pope Francis’ highly vaunted 2016 policy of zero tolerance for bishops who mishandle clergy sex abuse cases, and his 2019 papal decree Vos Estis Vox Mundi (“You are the Light of the World”) which set forth 19 directives for bishops to ensure transparency and justice in them.
This episcopal history provides overwhelming evidence that Bishop Victor Fernández ignored the pleas and reports of child victims who say they suffered terribly at the hands of a predator priest, prompting the question: Where is your mercy for the victims, Pope Francis?
(Not only did he ignore the victims, a left-wing outlet in Argentina reported that "Archbishop Fernández and his henchmen also tried to delegitimise the complaints made by the survivors and their families, and to this day they have not spoken out about the case, much less contacted the complainants to apologise, despite criminal justice demonstrating the multiple abuses committed by the [perpetrator]. As if that were not enough, they celebrated a Mass for him honouring his holiness, in the same place [where the crimes occurred].")
"Conveniently, Fernández now recognises his failings on the eve of his appointment to the prestigious office with his lame “I made mistakes” comment," Yore notes, pondering: "Why does “Tucho” get a papal pass while many other bishops are forced to resign for similar cover-ups?" A familiar Bergoglian pattern.
She concludes the lengthy saga of 2008 allegations against the La Plata archdiocesan priest in question, Eduardo Lorenzo, with the following details that typify what she describes as the "negligence" and "callousness" of Tucho:
December 11—The Buenos Aires Forensic Expert Office submits their psychological analysis of Lorenzo to the prosecutor. Their analysis states that the priest “has a perverse, narcissistic and manipulative personality structure” and that “the place of the other is that of a mere object to satisfy his own desires.”
December 16—The criminal court of La Plata orders the arrest of Lorenzo. He will be charged with corruption of minors and sexual abuse of at least five adolescents between 1990 and 2008.
December 17—Lorenzo kills himself the day after the judge orders his arrest. Archbishop Fernández releases a brief statement, saying that Lorenzo had taken his life “after long months of enormous tension and suffering.” He issues no words of comfort to the victims, saying only that he would pray for “those who may have been offended or affected” by the charges against the priest.
With children now abused, trafficked, tortured and murdered in industrial numbers worldwide, the above assessment of Eduardo Lorenzo's "perverse, narcissistic and manipulative personality structure" cannot help but call to mind the same traits possessed by self-absorbed 'leaders' in Church and State who have let it happen: two extreme examples among so many in the political and ecclesiastical realms being Barack Obama and one Jorge Bergoglio. Indeed the latter was accused by his Jesuit Superior General, Fr. Peter Kolvenbach, "of a series of defects, ranging from habitual use of vulgar language to deviousness, disobedience concealed under a mask of humility, and lack of psychological balance." (The Dictator Pope, Marcantonio Colonna). The constant Fernández evasions and his total lack of empathy for Lorenzo's victims speaks to the same narcissistic personality.
It makes sense, therefore, that these types gravitate to each other, protect one another, and make common cause everywhere, not least in the Casa Santa Marta compound: Narcism Central!
In any case, Liz Yore rightly concludes that the Lorenzo time-line "sets forth a prima facie case for [Tucho's] disqualification for the new DDF position."
Anticipating this charge of a clear conflict of interest, however, the "devious" pontiff simply shifted the deck chairs, leaving management of paedophilia cases to the subsection of the DDF led by Msgr John Kennedy. Voila! Conflict of interest-case closed.
To serve "the recent magisterium"
The irony of the Tucho outrage is that Jorge could not care less about the DDF! As we know he has no respect for Church law or wise and prudent Vatican chains of command, or anything or anyone that might restrict his perverse will.
Drunk on the power of the papacy, he even elevated Archbishop Fernández himself without bothering to consult Cardinal Müller's CDF about his doctrinal orthodoxy in the normal way.
And again, it was a secret 'task force' set up by Francis just prior to the first Family SINod that produced the catastrophic 'Catholic divorce'-Motu Proprio that he foisted on the Church without consulting the CDF in the process.
We could go on endlessly in the same vein. His open letter to Tucho following his appointment only amplifies this contempt for the revered purpose and history of the old Holy Office and its modern incarnations:
The dicastery which you will preside over in other times came to use immoral methods. Those were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued. What I expect from you is certainly something very different.
And it must be "very different" because the Church, he wrote, must "grow in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth. For differing currents of thought in philosophy, theology and pastoral practice, if open to being reconciled by the Spirit in respect and love, can enable the Church to grow."
Towards what 'respectful loving growth,' exactly? The untrammelled sacrilegious Communions of contraceptors, active sodomites, divorced-and-remarried?
Apparently so. Since for Francis, "This harmonious growth will preserve Christian doctrine more effectively than any control mechanism. ... There is a harmonious order among the truths of our message," he went on, "and the greatest danger occurs when secondary issues end up overshadowing the central ones."
(Translation: 'Unless you want your sorry backside kicked all the way back to La Plata, don't even think of letting Catholic truths and rules overshadow and threaten my truths and rules; especially my central rule: "Live and Let Live." For, Tucho, my little gay puppet, who are we to judge?')
Naturally, he is sure to inculcate his ruinous and heretical papacy into the Tradition he disingenuously claims to be protecting.
Such a richness of truth, he tells Tucho, necessitates "a special care to verify that the documents of your own dicastery and of the others have an adequate theological support, are coherent with the rich soil of the perennial teaching of the Church and at the same time take into account the recent magisterium."
Ah, yes, the recent magisterium. The one uncoupled from the previous one.
Talk about pristine schismatic signals!
On cue, Fernández took to Facebook on 1 July to echo Jorge's deceitful message, accepting the nomination "with much joy," even though there would be many people against him.
"There are people who prefer a more rigid, structured way of thinking at war with the world," he wrote.
This, presumably, is the same anarchic world desperately in need of the more "structured way of thinking" God demands; the world that He Himself observed "does hate me, because I denounce it for its evil doings." [Jn 7:7]
Thus, by the Archbishop's own reckoning his critics are those who think like God, not like men.
So where does that leave him?
And where does it leave us with him in the driver's seat?!
Buoyed and emboldened by the papal message-cum-instruction that effectively granted him carte-blanche to suffuse the universal Church with the sensual spirit of Heal me with your mouth, he informed his Facebook 'friends' that the pope had told him that while the dicastery was once dedicated to pursuing heretics, he wanted something very different for its future since "errors are not corrected by going after them or controlling them, but by making faith and wisdom grow. This," wrote Tucho, "is the best way to preserve doctrine."
He added that Francis assured him that as Prefect he would be tasked with "encouraging the reflection of the faith, deepening theology, promotinga way of thinking that knows how to dialogue with how people live," and "encouraging free, creative, deep Christian thought."
"I ask you as prefect to dedicate your personal commitment in the most direct way to the principal aim of the dicastery which is keeping the faith," exhorted Jorge. The Church, he urged his close collaborator, must "grow in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth."
Diabolic puppet
All this insincere, insulting, self-serving blather by the Pope and his ideological partner in doctrinal and moral crimes makes a mockery of the Faith encapsulated with glorious simplicity in the Penny Catechism.
Fortunately, Carlos Casanovaclears away the Modernist verbiage and Catholic pretence in this simple passage from his aforementioned paper:
Any person who has a minimum rational knowledge of these subjects can judge, in the light of the previous analysis, that the liberationist theologians are radically irrational and lawless, but very skilful in presenting their tenets as in agreement with “the best tradition” (those fragments of tradition which they take out of context and so taken become wild in the hands of these “theologians”) and as salvational, if convenient to the unruled passions. None of them can resist a comparison with Veritatis splendor or Humanae vitae regarding their conformity to natural reason or to Revelation.
In his commentary on the Fernández appointment, Ralph Martin also alluded to this total rupture caused by the Modernist mindset personified by Jorge and Tucho, that insists on obedience to "the recent magisterium":
[...] When Pope Benedict XVI said how do we interpret — correctly — Vatican II, we interpret it correctly when we interpret it in harmony with the Tradition of the Church. But what we have in Amoris Laetitia, and more particularly the direction that things are moving in, is actually a contradiction of a very high level magisterial document, Veritatis Splendor, that was written to clear up exactly the kind of moral confusion that we're seeing here.
So we've got a problem of conflicting, high-level, magisterial documents. And I don't know how it's going to get sorted out. It's very serious. It's going to impact people at every level of the Church.
It sure won't be sorted out by "El Tucho kiss me a lot"!A prelate who typically dismisses the "structure" of the Church as a relic "of another era," wonders "what its replacement will be," and views the Sunday Mass obligation as "not indispensable” and "something that could fall" [Religión Digital, 27/4/20].
Clearly, the moral and doctrinal sellout will only deepen and worsen from hereon.
It has taken ten years for the Dictator Pope to set his placeman in the place he covets most; the office that holds the key to fulfilling his desire for "irreversible" change in Catholic doctrine and practice. With Cardinal Müller pushed out early on, he bided time with stop-gap Cardinal Ladaria.
Now, with his day in the papal sun rapidly fading, the pontifical puppeteer has thrown caution to the wind by installing a diabolic puppet to turbo-charge his hellish demolition of the Church.
For, just as President Trump's Operation Warp Speed overturned all the accumulated knowledge and time-tested rigour of conventional vaccine research, development, trials and testing, cutting corners to provide experimental injections that enriched Big Pharma on the back of debilitated and dead bodies, so too Tucho, at Jorge's behest, will abandon the orthodox rigour, wisdom and prudence of Tradition. Instead, he will entrench Modernist ideology by still further injection of heterodoxy and heresy into the Catholic bloodstream; already hugely contaminated and now set to poison still more hearts, minds and souls with the Great Deception:
The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh. - Catechism. n. 675
What better way to compound that Endtime deceit than through a compromised and corrupt DDF: the watchdog of the true Faith.
Focus and hope
To avoid resignation and despair before this terrible trial we face, I offer readers these concluding words of the gentle and scholarly Ralph Martin, which provide much needed focus and hope amid Jorge's calculated chaos:
There's going to be bishops and priests in some places that go full-steam ahead. Saying, 'Yeah, it's okay for people to receive Communion if they're in an "irregular situation" because maybe it's the best they can do at the time.' It's one of the lines in Amoris Laetitia, that people are doing the best they can do at the time so that maybe it's God's will that they continue to live in fornication, adultery, homosexual relationships because that's the best they can do. But that's not the approach of the Church.
The approach of the Church is, you need to turn away from your sin, you need to admit that this is sinful. You need to ask God for mercy and forgiveness. And you need to ask God for the grace to be delivered from the bondage you're in, from the deception you're in. And priests and bishops need not to confirm people in their sin and their ignorance and their deception and their self-deception, in the influence that the culture's had on them, and call them to the beautiful Truth of Jesus Christ, and the death He died for the forgiveness of our sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is not literally saying cut off your wrist or cut off your foot [if it causes you to sin] but He's saying do whatever it takes to get rid of serious sin because serious sin will kill you! It's not true that the logic of the Gospel is that nobody's ever condemned forever. It's not true at all.
The Lord respects our freedom. And there can't be true friendship unless there's the possibility of saying "no" to mercy, "no" to love, and many people do. Many people do. There's a great rebellion going right now in our in culture and it's also going on in our Church. A barn door has been opened up that people are flooding through to affirm people, that it's okay to live in sexual sin and other kinds of sin as well. No. The whole thrust of the Gospel, the whole thrust of the Bible, the whole thrust of the Tradition of the Church is not to try to figure out if people are culpable or not, or to what degree they're culpable but to call them out of what's objectively wrong — because what's objectively wrong is not just offensive to God, it's harming the people who are doing these things.
The Word of God is not arbitrary, the moral law is not arbitrary, the moral law is the path to happiness, the moral law is the path to God. And yes we can't live this by ourselves by our own strength, and yes sometimes we become slaves to sin, but Jesus came to deliver us from slavery to sin. I truly recommend Chapter 6 of my book, A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward, if anybody has any concern about these issues.
I just think it's pretty clear right now, this big last dot that just fell into place with who was appointed to guard the Faith in the Church, really is confirming the direction that our leaders right now want to move the Church in. And it's moving in a direction that's departing from Scripture and Tradition. It's departing from the clear truth about moral theology spoken in Veritatis Splendor by John Paul II based on Scripture and Tradition.
What do we do? We put our trust in the Lord. We intercede for our leaders, we intercede for our Church, we intercede for our world. We need to ask God to rescue us from the confusion, rescue us from the division.
It's going to be painful going forward, it's going to be confusing, it's going to be ... it's going to be difficult. But the Lord is with us. There's nothing happe-ning that he's not permitting. He's with us. And he wants us to keep our eyes on Him. You get up every day and ask the Lord how can I please you today in my life with my responsibilities? We can't solve these problems ourselves. But we can pray for them to be solved, and we can be faithful witnesses ourselves to the revealed Word of God; that revealed the truth of God that can set people free from any kind of bondage or addiction and deliver us into the glorious kingdom of His Son, Jesus.
Amen.