The Story Behind Archbishop Vigano’s Polemic Against Pope Francis Just Got More Complicated

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By The Week. A letter from Archbishop Carlo Mari Vigano accusing Pope Francis of covering up disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s alleged sexual misconduct with men training to be priests was released Sunday morning, on the final day of the pope’s visit to Ireland. That was on purpose, Italian journalist and conservative blogger Marco Tosatti tells The Associated Press, saying he persuaded Vigano to go public with his allegations, helped write and edit his 11-page letter, and found conservative Catholic outlets that would publish it on Sunday morning.

Vigano claims that Pope Benedict XVI quietly ordered McCarrick to a life of secluded prayer and penance but that when Benedict stepped down, Francis rehabilitated the cardinal and lifted the sanctions until news of McCarrick’s alleged sexual misconduct became public. “Vigano called for Francis to resign over what he said was complicity in covering up McCarrick’s crimes,” AP says. “There is ample evidence, however, that the Vatican under Benedict and St. John Paul II also covered up that information, and that any sanctions Benedict imposed were never enforced.” (Read more from “The Story Behind Archbishop Vigano’s Polemic Against Pope Francis Just Got More Complicated” HERE)

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The Sneering Contempt of Pope Francis

By The Week. . .It is almost impossible to the overstate the significance of this letter. If Viganò is lying, he is guilty of one of the greatest slanders in the history of the Church. If he is telling the truth, the Eternal City is mired in filth unseen since the days of the Borgias, and Francis is among the worst wretches who has ever besmirched the Chair of Peter.

Asked on Sunday whether the accusations were true or false, Francis demurred. “I will not say a single word about this.” He then smugly invited the journalists who were present on the papal airplane to investigate the facts for themselves, as if he were a philosophy professor teaching a seminar to a roomful of eager graduate students instead of the Vicar of Christ. This is the same man who, despite endless PR about his commitment to victims, his hatred of clericalism, and his belief in treating gay and lesbian people with dignity, only a few months ago dismissed complaints made about his handling of sexual abuse allegations in Chile as the worthless gossip of “left-wingers,” a word that, according to Viganò, is synonymous in the pope’s vocabulary with gay people. It is not surprising that even churchmen named alongside Francis in the dossier have responded with what amount to non-denials that make no attempt to defend Francis. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., has said Viganò has provided no “objectively verifiable proof” of his claims.

Whatever the truth of Viganò’s numerous accusations — and the detailed chronology and references to documents in his letter mean that sooner or later it will be possible to prove or disprove them definitively — there are other truths that require facing now. This is true especially for those of us who have defended the Holy Father against slander and caricature in the past. Francis has revealed himself as an old-fashioned clericalist who views the faithful with contempt. It is not my place as a layman to tell the Holy Father his business, but I can make no secret of the fact that I long for an end to his gaslighting pontificate. (Read more from “The Sneering Contempt of Pope Francis” HERE)

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Mattis Makes Announcement on the Future of Military Exercises With South Korea

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U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. is preparing to resume military exercises with South Korea after they were briefly suspended this past summer.

“We took the step to suspend several of the largest military exercise as a good faith measure,” Mattis said at the Pentagon. “We have no plans at this time to suspend any more exercises.”

“We will work very closely … with the Secretary of State and what he needs done, we will certainly do to reinforce his effort,” he added. “But at this time there is no discussion about further suspensions.”

Following a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June, President Trump suspended war games with South Korea as a gesture of good faith in the denuclearization process. . .

However, relations with North Korea have recently stalled. President Trump cancelled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s planned trip to North Korea last week, citing the lack of progress in the goal of denuclearization.

(Read more from “Mattis Makes Announcement on the Future of Military Exercises With South Korea” HERE)

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Head of U.S. Bishops Conference Issues Shocking Statement on Pope Francis; Pope Refuses to Directly Answer Allegation Question

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By Daily Wire. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), will not defend Pope Francis following Archbishop Viganò’s explosive claim that the Roman Pontiff participated in the covering up of disgraced D.C. Cardinal McCarrick’s crimes of sexual abuse against seminarians.

Responding to Viganò’s 11-page letter alleging that Pope Francis lifted sanctions that had been imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict, DiNardo did not take the Catholic left’s line of characterizing the Archbishop as a right-wing conspiracy theorist; instead, the prelate openly called for an investigation to uncover the truth.

“The questions raised deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence,” DiNardo said in a Monday statement, according to Crux Now. “Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusation and the guilty may be left to repeat sins of the past.” . . .

“I am eager for an audience with the Holy Father to earn his support for our plan of action,” said DiNardo earlier this month. “That plan includes more detailed proposals to: Seek out these answers, make reporting of abuse and misconduct by bishops easier, and improve procedures for resolving complaints against bishops.” (Read more from “Head of U.S. Bishops Conference Issues Shocking Statement on Pope Francis” HERE)

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This Abuse Scandal Leads All the Way to the Vatican

By NY Post. An ecclesial straight shooter. A reliable character. A serious man. That’s how sources familiar with Carlo Maria Viganò describe the Italian archbishop, who served as the Vatican ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016. His reputation makes the publication Saturday of Viganò’s written “testimony” about the Theodore McCarrick affair all the more inconvenient for those in the Catholic hierarchy who tried to bury the truth about the disgraced American prelate.

The core claim in the 11-page document is that a high-powered circle of silence for years abetted McCarrick’s career, despite his well-known penchant for sexual abuse. The circle of silence, Viganò says, included the current successor of Saint Peter. In a cryptic statement to reporters on Sunday, Pope Francis refused to confirm or deny the allegations, instead urging them to “read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves.”

The Viganò testimony bears the mark of a man seething with anger and perhaps facing the mystery of death. “It is in moments of great trial that the Lord’s grace is revealed in abundance and makes His limitless mercy available to all,” the 77-year-old churchman writes near the end. “But it is granted only to those who are truly repentant.”

Either Pope Benedict XVI imposed private sanctions against McCarrick in 2009-10, barring him from celebrating public Masses and cavorting with seminarians, or he didn’t. Either McCarrick’s successor as cardinal-archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, was aware of the sanctions, or he wasn’t. (Read more from “This Abuse Scandal Leads All the Way to the Vatican” HERE)

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Vegan Festival Canceled Over Fears of Butchers Seeking Revenge on ‘Radical Non-Meat Eaters’

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Fearing a beef with butchers, the French city of Calais has canceled a vegan festival that was scheduled for September 8.

The office the Calais mayor said the festival had to be banned to “guarantee public safety” and protect organizers and visitors from the “risk of an outbreak of public disorder,” The Telegraph reported.

Officials learned of what the announcement termed an unspecified “series of operations aimed at stirring up trouble.”

Farplace, the association that was planning the festival, said city officials told it that “hunters and farmers had come together to make very clear threats about what might happen if the event was held.”

Laurent Rigaud, who leads the butchers’ federation in the region, said plans were in the works to make an anti-vegan statement that day.

“We were ready to organize a big barbecue (in Calais), along with hunters, farmers, and restaurateurs,” Yahoo News reported.

He said about 400 people would have attend the barbecue, but insisted the event would have been peaceful.

“We wanted to… show that we are not the violent ones, but that there are extremists among the vegans,” he said.

In June, the butchers appealed to the government for support.

“We count on your services and on the support of the entire government so that the physical, verbal and moral violence stops as soon as possible,” Jean-François Guihard, head of a group representing 18,000 French butchers, wrote in a letter to Interior Minister Gerard Collomb, The Local reported.

“It’s terror that these people are seeking to sow, in their aim of making a whole section of French culture disappear,” he wrote, according to the BBC.

Guihard blamed the medias for enabling the spread of vegan ideas.

“The vegan way of life has been over-hyped in the media,” he said.

At that time, several butcher shops were vandalized. Others were sprayed with fake blood, the group said.

The butchers’ group said vegans wanted “to impose on the immense majority of people their lifestyle, or even their ideology.”

A spokesman for vegans said that the truth is simply that France is catching up with the rest of Europe.

“French consumers are finally waking up, decades after everybody else,” said Geoffroy Le Guilcher, according to Bloomberg. “A new generation of activists is making people realize that even in the land of meat, there is very little that makes the case for having it.”

A 2016 survey on the issue reported that 3 percent of French citizens were vegetarians. (For more from the author of “Vegan Festival Canceled Over Fears of Butchers Seeking Revenge on ‘Radical Non-Meat Eaters’” please click HERE)

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Netanyahu Slams $57 Million EU Aid to Iran to Offset U.S. Sanctions

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not happy with millions of dollars of foreign aid the European Union is handing over to Iran, slamming the aid package as a “big mistake.”

On Thursday, the EU Commission announced it would give Iran €18 million ($20.8 million), the first payment in what will be a €50 million ($57.9 million) payment meant to offset sanctions imposed by the United States and save the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by former President Obama and his European counterparts.

Netanyahu believes Iran will use the aid for weapons development and the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“I think that the decision yesterday by the EU to give 18 million euros to Iran is a big mistake,” Netanyahu said at a press conference in Lithuania, i24 News reported.

“It’s like a poison pill to the Iranian people and the efforts to curb Iranian aggression in the region and terror beyond the region.”

“Where will the extra money go?” Netanyahu asked. “It’s not going to solve the water problem in Iran, it’s not going to go for Iranian truck drivers, it’s going to go to the missiles and Revolutionary Guard in Iran and Syria and everywhere else in the Middle East.”

Announcing the earmarks for Iran, EU high representative for foreign affairs Federica Mogherini said the aid “will widen economic and sectoral relations in areas that are of direct benefit to our citizens.” (For more from the author of “Netanyahu Slams $57 Million EU Aid to Iran to Offset U.S. Sanctions” please click HERE)

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Trump Tells Mike Pompeo to Cancel His Trip to North Korea

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President Trump directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel his upcoming trip to North Korea Friday, citing stalled progress with denuclearization and the current U.S. trading relationship with China.

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(Read more from “Trump Tells Mike Pompeo to Cancel His Trip to North Korea” HERE)

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No Negotiation: U.S. Rejects Peace Talks With Taliban

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The United States has rejected an invitation to join Russia-led talks on Afghanistan because they are unlikely to help bring peace, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday, as the Trump administration prepared to appoint a diplomatic veteran as a new special envoy for the war-battered nation.

Russia said that the Taliban will be joining the Sept. 4 talks in Moscow, along with representatives of several neighboring countries. It will be one of the insurgent group’s biggest diplomatic forays since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Sibghatullah Ahmadi told The Associated Press in Kabul that the government will not attend the meeting in Moscow, saying the peace process should be Afghan-led. He also said that “a peace process without the cooperation of the Afghan government would not be successful.”

The State Department official said that as a matter of principle, the U.S. supports Afghan-led efforts to advance a peace settlement. And, based on previous Russia-led meetings on Afghanistan, the Moscow talks are “unlikely to yield any progress toward that end.” The spokesman was not authorized to be quoted by name and requested anonymity.

The Taliban seemed unfazed by Washington and Kabul’s refusal to attend the Moscow meeting.

“Kabul and U.S. refusal to attend the Moscow meeting has no importance to us. We will attend,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told The Associated Press.

That decision comes as the group escalates attacks across Afghanistan. It has refused direct talks with Kabul, even as it seeks to raises its diplomatic profile in the region and calls for talks with the U.S. which it views as the real power behind the Afghan government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intends to appoint a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, to a special envoy post that would deal with the Afghan-Taliban peace process and Afghanistan’s integration into the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, according to two U.S. officials and a congressional aide briefed on the plan.

Khalilzad, who did not respond to queries about his potential new role, is expected to visit South Asia soon, according to the officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A native of Afghanistan who was educated at the American University in Beirut and the University of Chicago, Khalilzad is a diplomatic veteran in Republican foreign policy circles and has also served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations. He was considered for secretary of state by the Trump transition team, notably after introducing then-candidate Donald Trump at his first major foreign policy speech during the campaign.

Despite escalating violence in Afghanistan, the top U.S. commander there said Wednesday that the U.S.-led coalition sees hope in Taliban statements in recent months indicating interest in negotiations to end the 17-year war, and Afghan public and religious clerics’ desire for peace. He contended that could lead to political reconciliation.

“We have an unprecedented window of opportunity for peace now,” Gen. John Nicholson told Pentagon reporters from Kabul. His comments came just a day after rockets slammed into the heart of Kabul as Ghani delivered a speech for the Eid holiday, highlighting the precarious security even in the heavily protected capital.

Nicholson did not address the Russia talks. U.S.-Russian ties are increasingly strained. Washington has eyed Russian engagement in Afghanistan and its links to the Taliban with suspicion. Moscow says it is encouraging the insurgents to abandon hostilities and engage in a dialogue with the Afghan government.

Nicholson, who is slated to turn over command of the war next month, said the Taliban launched major assaults to take control of two provincial centers this year, and after tough battles the Afghans regained control. But he also acknowledged that the military campaign led by the Afghans and backed by the coalition is largely at a stalemate, and that the Afghan government has made little progress taking back additional population centers from Taliban control.

Nicholson took over the war effort in March 2016. In May of that year, 34 percent of Afghanistan’s districts were contested or under militant control or influence, compared with 44 percent as of May 2018, according to U.S. military figures. He will leave as the longest-serving U.S. commander of the coalition.

Nicholson’s time in charge included a key reversal in U.S. policy on the war — stretching from the troop drawdown ordered in the final years of the Obama administration through President Donald Trump’s endorsement last summer of a new strategy to increase U.S. and coalition presence, beef up the training and push for reconciliation.

Nicholson said that the Afghan Air Force and special operations units are growing in numbers and abilities, and that progress will have an increasing impact over the coming year. (For more from the author of “No Negotiation: U.S. Rejects Peace Talks With Taliban” please click HERE)

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ISIS Claims Responsibility for Deadly Attack Near Paris

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A man with severe psychiatric problems killed his mother and sister and seriously injured another woman in a knife attack Thursday in a Paris-region town, officials said.

Police shot and killed the man soon afterward.

The Islamic State group, which has a history of opportunistic claims, swiftly claimed responsibility.

French prosecutors weren’t treating the attack in Trappes, west of Paris, as a terrorism case, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said. He noted the attacker suffered from serious mental health issues although he had also been flagged for glorifying terrorism.

Collomb said that the man killed his mother at her home and stabbed the other women outside.

Still wielding the knife, he then ignored police warnings and was shot and killed, the minister said after meeting officers and prosecutors in Trappes.

He described the man as “unstable, rather than someone who was engaged, someone who could respond, for example, to orders and instructions from a terrorist organization, in particular from Daesh.” Daesh is another name for IS.

A long-time friend of the attacker identified him as Kamel Salhi, 36.

The friend, Said Segreg, said Salhi had no obvious problems, didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol and wasn’t fervently religious.

A government official confirmed Salhi’s name and age. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss such details publicly.

Salhi was divorced and living with his mother, said Adama Traore, another of his acquaintances in Trappes.

The Islamic State group, via its Aamaq news agency, claimed responsibility.

The agency said the attack was motivated by calls from the IS leadership to attack civilians in countries at war with the extremist group.

Hours earlier, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urged followers to attack enemies everywhere.

The Islamic State group, which has lost most of the territories it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, has been known to make opportunistic claims in the past, even when there was no established link between an attacker and the extremist group. (For more from the author of “ISIS Claims Responsibility for Deadly Attack Near Paris” please click HERE)

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Men Who Shot at U.S. Embassy in Turkey Were Drunk and Angry at Trump

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The two men accused of firing shots at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, reportedly confessed to being under the influence of alcohol and angry at President Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Turkey. . .

According to Turkish Minute, the two suspects, Ahmet Çelikten and Osman Gündaş, have criminal backgrounds and decided to shoot at the embassy after getting angered during a conversation.

“We were driving around the city in Osman’s car and drinking. We were talking about the Turkish lira, Trump’s threats and remarks. Under the effect of the alcohol, we got angry and decided to act,” Çelikten said. . .

The attack comes amid increased tensions between the two countries over the U.S. applying pressure to Turkey to free North Carolina Christian Pastor Andrew Brunson, who Turkey claims supported Kurdish militants and assisted in the 2016 coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The dispute has resulted in the U.S. applying sanctions to Turkey’s steel and aluminum imports, and Turkey boycotting U.S. electronic goods. (Read more from “Men Who Shot at U.S. Embassy in Turkey Were Drunk and Angry at Trump” HERE)

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Mueller Comes up Empty on Trump-Russia

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Lost in the drama surrounding Tuesday’s news — Paul Manafort’s convictions and Michael Cohen’s plea deal — is the reality that special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to unearth a single piece of evidence demonstrating collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Mueller’s team of Democrat prosecutors, which is supposedly tasked with investigating Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election, secured highly publicized guilty pleas from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on entirely unrelated matters. The same applies to the convictions against short-lived Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort.

Nonetheless, many in the media have heralded the Manafort-Cohen news as proof that Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is justified. The Washington Post declared Tuesday’s news as Trump’s “worst day of the Russia investigation.”

In his appointment of Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein instructed the former FBI chief to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

Mueller has entirely failed to find proof of coordination or collusion and has seemingly prioritized the latter vague, open mandate that he received from DAG Rosenstein in targeting individuals currently and previously associated with the president.

We have been told for over two years now, through a narrative crafted with targeted leaks in the mainstream media, that former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and low-level foreign policy aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were essential to Russian collusion efforts. Their alleged collusion with Russia continues to be the justification that Obama intelligence community officials give for their massive, rights-violating espionage operation against the Trump campaign.

Yet through all of the noise on cable news and in the legacy press, the public has not been presented with a single piece of evidence — other than the Steele dossier, a political opposition research and propaganda document sourced to Russia that was funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC — that any members of the Trump campaign or transition team colluded with the Kremlin. The Comey FBI declared Carter Page a Russian spy, yet Page remains free. Both Gen. Flynn and Papadopoulos appear to have been strong-armed into guilty pleas to charges unrelated to collusion and have long maintained that they did not conspire with the Kremlin. Papadopoulos is now reportedly reconsidering his guilty plea, while Mueller constantly delays Flynn’s sentencing hearing.

Mueller has charged several Trump campaign officials with offenses that have nothing to do with coordination with Russia, providing the legacy media with the fodder it needs to propagandize the public and repeatedly conflate the unrelated charges with Russian collusion. This has given the president’s detractors the ammunition they need to continue demanding that the special counsel stay afloat — and to continue challenging President Trump’s duly elected mandate, benefiting the Kremlin’s mission to further sow discord in the United States.

It has been 462 days since Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Since then, he has come up entirely empty on Russian collusion. Mueller now has two options: Produce the evidence, or concede that he has come up empty and put himself out to pasture. (For more from the author of “Mueller Comes up Empty on Trump-Russia” please click HERE)

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