Open Tabernacle blog
June 1, 2019
By Betty Clermont
In February 2017, posters appeared around Rome denouncing Pope Francis’ “decapitation” of the Knights of Malta. At the heart of the pope’s sacking of the Grand Master is a multi-million dollar donation. WikiLeaks provided critical information about what Vatican officials knew and when they know it.
Of course, the sexual torture of hundreds of thousands of children is the Catholic Church’s worst scandal and, of all pontiffs, Pope Francis is the worst offender from the very first days of his pontificate when he appointed already well-known pedophile-priest-protectors Cardinals George Pell and Francisco Javier Errazuriz to his Council of Cardinals, to his leaving Archbishop Joseph Wesolowski and Fr. Nicola Corradi free men even after being informed of their crimes, to his present protection of Cardinals George Pell, Luis Ladaria Ferrer, Phillipe Barbarin and Ricardo Ezzati and most recently, his “toothless,” PR mandate that priests and nuns report clerical sex abuse to bishops and not the police.
However, the January 2019 release by Wikileaks of confidential documents regarding the Sovereign Order of Malta remind us that Pope Francis is not the moral authority he claims to be in finances either.
The first report that money might be the underlying issue in the pope’s dismissal of Grand Master Fra Matthew Festing, who was “elected for life,” was published on Jan. 7, 2017 by the well-connected Vatican reporter, Edward Pentin writing for the National Catholic Register. He stated that those opposed to Festing and favored by the Pope Francis “have been involved with a very large bequest to the order made by a benefactor resident in France, worth at least 120 million Swiss Francs ($118 million).”
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