Tag: Pope Francis

Civilizational decline via institutional capture

Gary Kilgore North (1942-2022)

In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:

Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3]  Continue reading “Civilizational decline via institutional capture”

“Six Popes”: One of “The Six” Gets His Copy

Monsignor Hilary C. Franco presenting a copy of “Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers” to Pope Francis during a private audience in the Apostolic Palace, the papal residence, Vatican City, on September 4, 2021. Published here with the permission of Monsignor Franco.

Last May in “Monsignor Hilary C. Franco’s wonderful life,” I announced the launch of Six Popes:  A Son of the Church Remembers (Humanix Books, 2021), which I ghostwrote after interviewing him in late 2019, early 2020.

This morning he sent me several photos taken last Saturday during his audience with one of The Six, Pope Francis, in the papal residence. The one you see on the left is posted here with his permission.

Edward Pentin, the National Catholic Register Rome correspondent who has speculated about Francis’s successor in The Next Pope, has this to say about Six  Popes:

With a life spanning six pontificates, Monsignor Hilary Franco’s new book offers insights into current crises within the Church and society, highlighting his work with Venerable Fulton Sheen, and even helping Mother Angelica during EWTN’s first days … Now in his eighties, the Bronx-born priest has just completed Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers, a fascinating and colorful memoir of a life that has included attending the Second Vatican Council as an expert adviser, working as an official at the Congregation for Clergy for 24 years and, most recently, serving as an adviser at the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations in New York.

Since last May, Six Popes has almost continuously numbered among the top ten in Amazon’s “Clergy” category. The stats, as of this posting, are:

Best Sellers Rank: #5,919 in Books

    • #2 in Religious Leadership (Books)
    • #2 in Christian Leadership (Books)
    • #2 in Christian Popes

Take a peek at its product page to see if you’d like to help it climb higher. The first chapter’s text is appended to that page’s About the Author section. (Click on Read more.)