This is an excerpt from the latest episode of the Holy Smoke podcast with Damian Thompson, which you can find at the bottom of this page:
It’s emerged that [Pope Francis is] going to be kept in isolation on the second floor of Santa Marta for at least two months, in what is, in effect, a hospital suite. It seems that even his top officials, such as the Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, currently fulfilling as many of Francis’s duties as possible in order to look like the next pope, will have only limited access to him. Apparently, everything will be filtered through the Pope’s Argentinian private secretary, Father Juan Cruz – now arguably the most powerful person in the Vatican next to the Pope.
It’s true, admittedly, that during his illness, Francis has continued to issue documents. For example, he signed – or was persuaded to sign, or reportedly signed – a decree extending the synodal process and Anglican style exchange of platitudes dominated by woke activists. The next session, in 2028, won’t be the current model of a synod of bishops, accompanied by a minority of lay social justice warriors. It’ll be an ecclesial assembly, something unknown to canon law, and look very obviously a Trojan horse for women’s ordination and gay blessings, subjects that Pope Francis strangely declared to be outside the remit of Synod participants.
And note that I qualified the reference to Francis signing documents in hospital on Tuesday. This week we learned from The Pillar the new Archbishop of Detroit had to be installed without the customary papal bull of appointment because, according to none other than the US nuncio, Francis was too unwell to sign it. Which raises the question being asked by lots of people: How, when he was even more ill at the beginning of March, was he well enough to sign a complicated document setting up a new fundraising body to stop the Vatican haemorrhaging funds?
Listen to the full episode here:
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