When facing imminent defeat, a Prince must present a public face of confidence and appear to be powerful in order to assure his wavering subjects and confound the hopes of his adversaries. - Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

I pray every day for Bergoglio to die. He is the greatest threat to the Church in its history. - Catholic Cardinal Raymond Burke to fellow Knights of Malta members, October 2017

After he came to office, Pope Francis realized how much he needed the Vatican money men to sustain his controversial rule. So he feigned an inquiry into the IOR (Vatican Bank) to conceal the extent of its looting and protect the usual gang of thieves under a smokescreen of liberal rhetoric. But the looting is massive. Even the Russian oligarchs have used the IOR to hide the billions they stole from their country. From Vladimir Putin on down, lots of people justifiably want Francis taken out. - Italian journalist to the author, June 19, 2018

Like a mythic curse, a violent madness has descended on my homeland. From the village of Knock to Dublin’s sprawl along the Liffey, Ireland is being militarized and regimented as if the civil war has returned. More than a thousand poor families and their children have been shoved into police prisons, roadways are being cordoned off and homes are being searched by the Gardai, and a “terrorist watch” network is harrassing suspected dissenters. Why? Apparently because a convicted criminal who thinks he is a god is coming to town, at a cost to an already-impoverished country of 32 million Euros. But the reason for the madness runs deeper.

The Pope Francis Road Show arrives in Ireland on August 25, with all the usual media-contrived gloss and fake ecstasy of any Vatican carnival routine. But even church commentators agree that this latest papal visit is unusual by the degree of security and sheer armed might that will surround Jorge Bergoglio. As a particularly obtuse cleric in Kerry remarked to a reporter last week,

“Why would a pope require such protection from his own people?”

Well saints preserve us, numb nuts! Maybe massive criminality and institutionalized child torture has something to do with it! Or how about that mass grave of dismembered baby corpses in Tuam, Ireland, concealed by a direct order from Jorge Bergoglio himself?

But leaving crimes against the innocent aside, as we usually do, there is the little matter that the Church of Rome is collapsing from within, especially and ironically in its traditionally most “devout” regions. We saw that displayed dramatically in Chile last year when twenty two catholic churches were burned to the ground and protesters besieged Pope Francis in Santiago. Ireland, another third world economic basket case, is as riddled with discontent towards Rome as is Chile. One Dublin commentator told me recently,

“All them cops around the pope will be shielding him from the worshipers, not the protesters. Lots of catholics despise the guy.”

One of the top despisers is Cardinal Raymond Burke from America, the Knight of Malta who has said openly that he wants Pope Francis to die. Burke heads the Dump Bergoglio faction in the Roman Curia that is angling to have Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria, or a similar conservative, named as the new Pontiff once Bergoglio is forced out.

This faction is guided not so secretly by the convicted felon former Pope Benedict, Joe Ratzinger, still hiding out in the Vatican ever since we forced him there in February 2013. Church insiders tell us that Ratzinger is not acting alone but has Russian backing, since Vladimir Putin wants among other things all of his country’s looted currency returned from the cellars of the Vatican Bank. Ratzinger will so oblige the Russkies in return for their help in winning him back the papal tiara.

Ah, the oldest game in history: the tangled web of Vatican corruption. And of course there’s more. Encouraged by our common law prosecutions and attempted arrest of Jorge Bergoglio in Geneva on June 21 of this year, human rights lawyers in America, Argentina and Spain are now seeking a new international arrest warrant against him that they feel can only succeed once he is removed from office. Bergoglio’s Dirty War association with the Argentine military junta, his membership in the child-killing Ninth Circle cult, his alienation of traditional Cardinals and his kowtowing to Vatican Bank mobsters have all combined to unite his many enemies into the common cause of removing him. Hence the armed camp around him.

Back in the fifteenth century, Nicolo Machiavelli made a good living out of advising popes. His chief remedy for a Pontiff under seige was to generate the kind of permanent appearance of confidence and humilty that Jesuit-trained Jorge Bergoglio is so adept at feigning. But Machiavelli was ultimately a realist, as is a political survivor like Bergoglio. The latter knows only too well that in a time of crisis even the smallest threat can undo the most powerful ruler: including the threat of an idea. And the idea that We the People have the power and obligation to be the law and arrest those who are killing our children has mushroomed and taken hold across our world: including in Ireland. It is that idea, so fatal to any tyrant, that must in the latter’s mind be stamped out, either by guile or terror. And Jorge Bergoglio is an expert at both.

Guile and terror are the best weapons of both Church and State, of course, and whether pro- or anti-Bergoglio, every faction needs to keep the church masses cowed in case their whole bloody arrangement is revealed and toppled. And so the present militarization of Ireland in these days leading to Bergoglio’s arrival serves the interests of all the factions concerned. Whether or not Bergoglio is replaced, the regime of institutionalized child trafficking and murder will be preserved. Popes are mere passing figureheads atop the permanent murderous arrangement called the Church of Rome.

In the meantime, for all those ostensibly devout Irish papists who will be lining up to catch a glimpse of their celestial superstar on August 25^th and 26th, there is as always the simple choice of whether a lifetime of ingrained subordination and fear will outweigh their natural impulse to protect their children from the most predatory power in history. For the rest of us, our responsibility is to awaken the flock before they and their young are sheared and slaughtered; and to kill the Beast that preys on them.