An Italian archbishop close to Pope Benedict XVI has claimed that the Obama administration may have been complicit in the “tremendous pressures” that led the former pope to resign in 2013.
It is “no coincidence” that some Catholic groups “have asked President Trump to open a commission of inquiry to investigate whether the administration of Barack Obama exerted pressure on Benedict,” said Archbishop Luigi Negri in an interview Monday, citing other revelations by Wikileaks regarding efforts by the Democratic Party to sway the direction of the Catholic Church in the United States.
“It remains shrouded in mystery for now,” he said to news outlet Rimini 2.0, “but I am sure that those responsible will be found out.”
The archbishop was making reference to a letter written by a group of American Catholics to President Trump last January requesting that the administration conduct an investigation into a possible Soros-Obama-Clinton conspiracy behind the resignation of Pope Benedict.
The letter stated specifically that “we have reason to believe that a Vatican ‘regime change’ was engineered by the Obama administration.”
Approximately a year after an e-mail conversation released by Wikileaks, the authors contended, “we find that Pope Benedict XVI abdicated under highly unusual circumstances and was replaced by a pope whose apparent mission is to provide a spiritual component to the radical ideological agenda of the international left.”
In startling revelations last October, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was found to have created phony “Catholic” organizations in order to use Church leaders to push a liberal agenda in congress and to promote the agenda of the Democratic Party.
In the midst of the hundreds of John Podesta’s emails released by Wikileaks, one contained a report by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, a faux Catholic association founded by Podesta to provoke a revolution in the Catholic Church.
The executive director of the organization, Christopher J. Hale, referred to the group’s “grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US.”
Along with efforts to infiltrate the Church hierarchy, the organization’s collusion with the Obama administration was also made apparent in Hale’s report.
“I spoke to the White House yesterday and they assure us the media’s moniker calling us ‘God Squad’ isn’t just sweet nothings, but actually a fair assessment of the substantial difference we’re making in this conversation,” he wrote.
Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput described a meeting with two members of the other “Catholic” organization that Podesta claims to have founded—Catholics United. In a published essay, the archbishop depicted a methodology eerily similar to that employed by Catholics in Alliance.
Chaput said that the two men were “obvious flacks for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party—creatures of a political machine, not men of the Church,” who showed remarkable “talents of servile partisan hustling.”
In a separate statement, the head of the U.S. Bishops Conference, Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, issued an indictment of the Clinton team, calling them out for interfering in the Church’s self-governance for “short-term political gain.”
Kurtz suggested that Podesta’s actions in creating “Catholic” lobby groups for the Democratic Party constituted a breach of religious freedom, “one of the founding principles of our republic,” which ensures the right of faith communities to “preserve the integrity of their beliefs and proper self-governance.”
In his interview Monday, Archbishop Negri said he has visited Pope Benedict “several times” since the pontiff’s resignation in 2013. Negri resigned last month as archbishop of Ferrara-Comacchio, a post assigned him by Pope Benedict, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75.
Archbishop Negri did not lay all the blame for Benedict’s resignation on the Obama administration, but said he was “certain that the truth will emerge one day showing grave liability both inside and outside the Vatican.”
In the interview, Negri was also critical of Pope Francis for failing to answer the dubia—or “questions”—made by four Cardinals regarding certain teachings in the Pope’s letter Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) that seem unclear to many in the Church.
“Amoris Laetitia needs clarification, unfortunately, the current leader of the Church still remains silent,” he said. “I think that the Holy Father should respond, although he seems to have decided to the contrary.”
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