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Wednesday 9 May 2018

The New York Times, a.k.a. "Hell's Bible" reveals to us the betrayal by Gänswein, Marini

If it were already not enough of a scandal that Timothy Dolan participated in the abomination, sacrilege and blasphemy which took place in New York City now the New York Times reveals the backstory.

Gänswein (who has previously welcomed "gay" couples to the Vatican and ushered them in to see the Bishop of Rome) and Marini, Papa Ratzinger's Secretary and Master of Ceremonies were both involved and responsible.

They are traitors, puffed up in finery. They are filthy frauds.


This is how bad it is friends; that even those whom we thought were the good guys turn out to be just as rotten and filthy effing scum as the rest.

They betrayed Papa Ratzinger and they betrayed us.

I find it impossible to pray for their conversion. I leave their judgement to God.




By Jason Horowitz

May 3, 2018
VATICAN CITY — Archbishop Georg Gänswein said yes to the dress.

The dashing former right-hand man to Benedict XVI, the fashion-plate pope, he is now prefect of the papal household under the more austere Pope Francis. In May 2017, Archbishop Gänswein sat in his stately Apostolic Palace office as Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showed him a look book of couture masterpieces that Mr. Bolton felt matched with certain Vatican treasures.

Archbishop Gänswein, in a soutane with purple sash, indifferently flipped pages of designer frocks until he lingered on a luxurious Madame Grès dress inspired by a Franciscan habit.  

“They all love that,” Mr. Bolton said of the dress.

The archbishop gradually became enthusiastic as he and Mr. Bolton discussed the role of beauty in the church and Mr. Bolton explained his vision for the project that would explore the way the Catholic church had served as an inspiration to designers through the centuries. Then things really started rolling.

Mr. Bolton received authorization from senior Vatican officials to borrow the vestments. He was also granted full access to the Sistine Chapel Sacristy and became so close with its custodian priests in his 10 trips to Rome that they entrusted him with the hidden chamber’s keys and opened secret doors, behind which elderly nuns ironed the pope’s white vestments. 

Gänswein, Papa Ratzinger's Prison Warden
The show that would ultimately become “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” the biggest exhibit the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum has ever held, opening May 10, was on the verge of becoming a reality.

It was the culmination of years of negotiations, two stalled visits to Rome, and walking the tightrope between Anna Wintour, the powerful editor of Vogue and a Met trustee, and the many powers in the Vatican.

While the Vatican may be enthusiastic about “Heavenly Bodies” now, it took years for it to warm to an exhibit that Mr. Bolton first envisioned as including many religious traditions. Dealing with one church proved to be enough.

In June 2016, a colleague of Mr. Bolton’s in the Met’s European paintings department put him in touch with Arnold Nesselrath, a Vatican museum curator. Mr. Nesselrath arranged for Mr. Bolton to visit the Sistine Chapel Sacristy, a chamber of rooms within rooms containing a hive of numbered wooden doors and drawers bearing embossed strips and containing shawls and stoles, papal tiaras, papal rings and pectoral crosses. 

Mr. Bolton tried to explain the concept of the exhibition to the keeper of the sacristy, a quiet Slovakian priest named Pavel Benedik.

“He wasn’t quite sure what the request was,” Mr. Bolton said of Father Benedik. “He was confused.”

Monsignor Marini the Fraud, with Bergoglio 
To expedite the process, Mr. Nesselrath suggested that on his next visit, Mr. Bolton meet with Barbara Jatta, now the director of the Vatican museum. For that trip, Mr. Bolton brought along Ms. Wintour. Ms. Jatta arranged several tours for them, including another trip to the Sacristy, where this time Father Benedik’s assistant, Antonio, showed them around.

Ms. Jatta asked how many items the Met intended to borrow, and Mr. Bolton responded: about eight. Ms. Wintour said he needed to ask for at least twice that, prompting a skeptical laugh from Ms. Jatta. (The Met eventually got more than 40.) Ms. Jatta then informed the curator that the lending of the pieces was, anyway, out of her hands.

“These vestments don’t belong to the Vatican Museum,” she said, according to Mr. Bolton. “They belong to the Sistine Chapel Sacristy.”

Ms. Wintour was less than pleased. 

“She turned around to me and said, ‘This isn’t your finest moment, Andrew,’” Mr. Bolton recalled.

So he came back. Again and again. 

“He was quite the dandy,” Mr. Bolton said.

And Father Benedik warmed to him. Nevertheless, the priest lacked the power to authorize a loan and suggested that Mr. Bolton talk to Archbishop Gänswein.

“He’s like a movie star, it’s like meeting George Clooney,” Mr. Bolton said of the archbishop, often called “Gorgeous George.” Archbishop Gänswein, apparently on board, told Mr. Bolton to send an official request to Msgr. Guido Marini, the papal master of liturgical celebrations and the keeper of the sacristy.

The Met’s head of exhibitions, Quincy Houghton, did just that, and Monsignor Marini’s office asked for approval — a “nihil obstat” in Vatican parlance — from the first section of the Secretariat of State, which is responsible for general church affairs. 

“This is not a procedure where the pope gets involved, or has to give his O.K.,” said the Vatican spokesman Greg Burke.

When permission was granted, Mr. Bolton returned for many more trips and, with Father Benedik, refined the list of objects to borrow, including a papal tiara with 19,000 precious stones, including 18,000 diamonds. (It will fly to New York with its own bodyguard.) During one 10-day stretch of 12-hour days inside the Sacristy with Katarina Jebb, who scanned the objects for the catalog, the custodians entrusted Mr. Bolton with the keys to the Sacristy.  

With the loans secured, Mr. Bolton asked David Tracy, a highly regarded Catholic writer — Mr. Bolton called him “the J.D. Salinger of the theological world” — to contribute an essay to the catalog to lend it intellectual heft.

It took a year before he agreed. Then Mr. Bolton tackled the New York side of the equation, trying to ensure he wasn’t accidentally touching any third rails.

He asked Emily Rafferty, a former president of the Met with connections to New York’s Catholic community, for a hand. She suggested Mr. Bolton work with James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large for America Magazine, who was appointed last year by Pope Francis as a consultor to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications.

Father Martin said that one day, after embarrassingly spilling hummus on his pants earlier, he went to a Met conference room to review the storyboards the curators had pinned to the walls with thumbtacks. He was impressed by what he described as the “real attention to Catholic sensibilities” behind the pairings.

Asked by Mr. Bolton and colleagues if he thought the presentation would prompt any blowback, Father Martin said there may be some complaints about “celebrity culture being grafted onto the church,” but that he thought it would be minor. “They will see something beautiful, and that’s part of the Catholic imagination,” he said.

It was also Father Martin who, reviewing the gift catalog, noticed that one necklace was described as adorned with a “winged man,” and told the Met: “It’s O.K. to say ‘angel.’”

He also suggested asking Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the de facto minister of culture for the Vatican and an erudite former prefect of the Biblioteca-Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, to contribute to the exhibit catalog. Cardinal Ravasi had gotten to know many of the great designers during his time in the fashion capital, including Miuccia Prada, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, and Giorgio Armani.

In February, the Met delegation, including Mr. Bolton and Ms. Wintour, traveled to Rome to officially announce the exhibit alongside Cardinal Ravasi, who not only participated in the news conference, but also rubbed shoulders with Donatella Versace. She told him she thought his crimson vestments were beautiful.

He said he replied: “The purple is even better.”

Still, in a church where Pope Francis’s dressing down has made dressing up out of style,  questions remain about how a lush exhibit and its related gala, organized by Ms. Wintour, squares with the pope’s desire for a less ostentatious, poorer church.

“Francis with his simple clothes expresses another concept. It’s not combative with the others,” said Cardinal Ravasi, who said he considered fashion a critical cultural language and the lent vestments expressions of the church’s power, beauty and splendor through the centuries.

The cardinal said fashion had biblical origins (“It was God who dressed us. God was the tailor in Genesis”) and that he saw a common thread between the dress code for a gala and the otherworldliness of ecclesiastical vestments. Both of them signified, he said, a distinction from the mundane and quotidian.

As for those who consider the accessorizing of papal vestments with modern fashion a blasphemous exploitation, Cardinal Ravasi said it at least shows those Christian symbols still touch a nerve.

“They aren’t using the symbols of the Roman Empire,” he said with a chuckle.

14 comments:

Dan said...

Selling out the Church to win the title "Miss Popularity" and losing souls along the way.

M. Prodigal said...

The desire for pretty, fussy clothes is not normative masculinity.

Kathleen1031 said...

This event puts an exclamation point on the fact that the men who are in power in our church have no regard at all for the sacred articles of our faith, or, our faith. The fashionista Bolton is a homosexual, and the guy who runs the Vatican collection is a homosexual, so no doubt there are lots of new connections now made between Rome and New York! Ganswein had no right to lend these articles to these pagans, this is an absolute outrage. But what's outrageous anymore, these men are in power, they use the church for what it gives them, a career, money, travel, and certainly opportunities. It's all just a money maker for them.
Faithful Catholics have to face some hard truths and find solace in private devotions and prayer. In this world there is no solace.

Anonymous said...

The writing is on the wall,as in Daniel.

JTLiuzza said...

When Cardinal Burke wears the traditional vestment of a man in his office, a finery that points to the dignity and splendor of the office, not the occupant, these same poofs ridicule him.

Dress up two bit trollops in the same vestment and they throw a party.

A nun wearing a habit? Knock it off and go put on the pantsuit. A half naked "model" wearing a mockery of the habit and traipsing down the runway? Pass the champagne.

Anonymous said...

Thank God the Holy Robe is not at the Vatican!

Anonymous said...

Can you add this picture of the apostate Georg Ganswein welcoming the homosexual "couple." http://traditioninaction.org/RevolutionPhotos/A724-Homo-Vat.htm

Anonymous said...

"They betrayed Papa Ratzinger and they betrayed us. I find it impossible to pray for their conversion. I leave their judgement to God."

They betrayed "Jesus of Nazareth" a long, long time ago--but so did Papa Ratzinger. Funny you can't see it (blind). Maybe that's why you're so willing to join their ranks. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. Remember His words from the cross, "I thirst;" and those of Our Lady at Fatima: "So many souls go to hell because there is no-one to pray for them." Comfort Him & make yourself eternally happy: Pray for poor sinners and do penance and don't put your faith in men--they will soon die and all their thoughts will vanish.

http://angelqueen.org/2017/04/13/georg-ganswein-welcomes-homosexual-pairing-to-the-vatican/

Johnno said...

Should've lent them the Shroud of Turin or the Tilma of Juan Diego while they were at it.

But that might actually uncomfortably remind them that God does actually exist...

I note that they didn't lend the event that Communist cross Chavez gave Francis... I guess there are some things that are too sacred for Francis after all.

I wonder if everyone who attended got a free Order of St. Gregory Medal. Lord knows, most of the attendees are on board with the abortions.

Unknown said...

How can you be so sure Ratzinger himself is innocent?

Michael Dowd said...

This blasphemy looks like the work of the Vatican's homosexual mafia which was intended to outrage Traditional Catholics with drama queen performances. I sure they found conservative Catholic consternation quite amusing.

Vox Cantoris said...

Unknown said...
How can you be so sure Ratzinger himself is innocent?

He spoke and wrote of the "filth" referring to the perverts and the abuse of boys, remember the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum a week before the death of John Paul II.

No Pope, no Bishop or Cardinal did more to clean up the filth than he. When at the CDF he did what he could with restraint. As Pope, he removed more bishops than any Pope in history.

He would not have approved of this abominable act.

Vox Cantoris said...

Anonymous said...
"They betrayed Papa Ratzinger and they betrayed us. I find it impossible to pray for their conversion. I leave their judgement to God." They betrayed "Jesus of Nazareth" a long, long time ago--but so did Papa Ratzinger. Funny you can't see it (blind). Maybe that's why you're so willing to join their ranks.

Go find another blogger to slander. I won't tolerate it. Vox.

Anonymous said...

@ Paul Morphy

Gaenswein could well be a practicing homosexual. And he could be subject to being blackmailed.

Ratzinger when he became pope did move against prelates involved in paedophilic and homosexual conduct. Would he have appointed a practicing homosexual as an assistant? I don't know. I simply don't know.