Save the “Soldier” Tornielli. Will Bergoglio Cut Off Another Head after Enzo Bianchi?

5 Marzo 2021 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti

Dear friends and enemies of Stilum Curiae, Americo Mascarucci sent us this comment on the latest arguments related to the “Ratzinger Case,” however, not concerning himself with the principal character in the story, but focusing on a very intriguing backstage story…happy reading.

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Save the “soldier” Tornielli. After Enzo Bianchi, will Bergoglio cut off another head?

Among the many curious reconstructions of the recent interview of Corriere della Sera with Benedict XVI signed by Massimo Franco, the most curious, intriguing and decisively original, in addition to that of our most esteemed Monsignor X, is certainly the one given to us by Dagospia. The website of Roberto D’Agostino puts forward an unique interpretive key to the story, which has the protagonist as, needless to say, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Ratzinger’s personal secretary, who according to the author of the article was attempting by the interview to undertake a sort of “relaunching operation” of his own image, which has for some time been considered interesting only by “second-rate magazines.”

Dagospia writes: “Is the clean up of his image [Ganswein’s] thanks to the leading Italian daily newspaper perhaps a captatio benevolentiae by Massimo Franco, who aspires (so say the gossips who wear the cassock) to be the editor of Corriere? Or is it an attempt by Andrea Tornielli, the long time press agent of the vain German prelate, to land as a Vaticanista in Via Solferino [the office of Corriere], since, as far as it seems, Pope Francis doesn’t want to see him, not even in a photograph? Ah, to know it!”

And here I must admit, dear Tosatti, that I am stunned. Because it is not possible that having dumped “poor” Enzo Bianchi on the spot, to the point of ordering him to leave forever the monastery of Bose which he founded and led for 50 years, that now he wants to also liquidate the editorial director of Vatican media. I can’t honestly believe it, just as I struggled to believe that Francis could have been an accomplice of operation “go away” Enzo Bianchi, who was labeled for years as his trusted theologian. Now even the most “papist” of the Italian vaticanistas (papist in the sense of being on the side of all the popes independently of who they are or what their names are) is basically in danger of being pushed out, to the point of having to rebuild a career, perhaps as the vaticanista of Corriere as Dagospia speculates? We do not know if the indiscretion is reliable, but if it is, then it really would be true that “there is no more religion.”

Because Tornielli, with a past at the weekly of Communion and Liberation, Il Sabato, along with Antonio Socci, and later a vaticanista in the Berlusconian Il Giornale (again along with Socci), and who then later relocated to La Stampa and then finally entered the Sacred Palaces, has a reputation as a great “papist.” So papist that he always felt obliged to defend the popes and to dispel all the shadows that have gathered over them.

Like, for example, Tornielli’s effort to dismantle the extremely clear hostility of John XXIII towards Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, to the point of denying that John XXIII was behind the great persecution which the Friar with the stigmata endured during Roncalli’s pontificate; a persecution that was owed, in our opinion, solely to the envy of the “diabolical” Don Umberto Terenzi, the rector of the Sanctuary of Divino Amore in Rome, who on his own initiative and without informing everyone allegedly placed recorders in the friar’s confessional. But it appears truly unbelievable that Padre Pio could have undergone all of the restrictive measures that the Vatican imposed on him without the consent of the pope. It is credible that John XIII was effectively not involved in the affair of the microphones in the confessional, but to say that he had no active role in the plot of persecution strains belief.

Or Tornielli’s effort to deny the image of “antipope” that the media constructed for Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini during the years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, generated according to Tornielli by misunderstandings and erroneous interpretations of texts and interventions by the former archbishop of Milan, who instead had a great esteem for both of them and wished them well (certainly for Wojtyla, since he testified against his canonization).

Or again, Tornielli’s effort to dismantle the “traditionalist propaganda” in support of Father Stefano Maria Manelli and to demonstrate that the Commissioner of the Franciscans of the Immaculate [imposed by Francis] did not have any persecutory intentions on the part of the Vatican, but that he was decided on by Bergoglio with all the right motivations and received with favor by the overwhelming majority of the friars (only to find himself disproven on several occasions).

With his blog Vatican Insider at La Stampa, Tornielli gave the “enemies of Bergoglio” a good dressing-down, carefully denying each time that there was any disagreement between the reigning pope and the pope emeritus, and even attempting to validate the idea that there is total harmony between the two.

Can it be coincidence that in the Corriere interview, which seems to resemble an informal chat completely managed and directed by Archbishop Gänswein even in the answers, Ratzinger spoke with contempt for traditionalists, to the point of calling those who still consider him as the legitimate pope “fanatics”? He who has always rejected labels, who has always looked with favor on the groups that are most traditionalist, committing himself to the end [when he was Prefect of the CDF] to warding off the excommunication of Marcel Lefebvre by John Paul II, and as pope to bringing the Society of St. Pius X back into the Church? Would someone like Benedict XVI ever have limited himself to such a severe judgment in such an approximate, banal, and superficial way like any priest, and without entering into the merit of the controversy? The suspicion that behind the improbable interview of Ratzinger there may be other strategies hidden, including those reported by Dagospia, seems completely reasonable to us. But pending confirmation or denial in this regard, please at least save the “soldier Tornielli.” May it never be that, after Enzo Bianchi, he too ends up on the ever-growing list of “seduced and abandoned” Bergoglians.

Americo Mascarucci – journalist and writer