In 2006 Catholic Family News editor John Vennari wrote an article purporting to refute the Siri Thesis, which I actually find to be rather weak.
http://www.cfnews.org/Siri.htmThis post is a point-by-point counter refutation. For reasons of space it can't be totally comprehensive, but I'll do the best I can.
1. "The fact that a Cardinal receives the necessary votes in a conclave does not in itself make him Pope. The Cardinal must accept the office in order to become Sovereign Pontiff."
The Siri Thesis proposes that Siri did in fact accept, & chose the papal name Gregory XVII, but was then persuaded to step aside; so Vennari's objection here has no meaning. Since Vennari himself alludes to this alleged chain of events, his statement is even more mystifying.
2. "Cardinal Tisserant reportedly admitted that irregularities did indeed occur at the 1958 conclave."
This statement actually works against Vennari's theory.
3. "These irregularities were also alluded to by Cardinal Siri in an oft-quoted 1985 interview: 'I am bound by the secret. This secret is horrible.' While this indicates that 'serious things have taken place' at recent conclaves, it also reveals that Cardinal Siri was certainly not the Vicar of Christ. As one astute priest observed, only the Sovereign Pontiff is not bound by conclave secrets, so the fact that Siri said, 'I am bound by the Secret' demonstrates he was not Pope."
...unless the secret that Siri referred to was not the secret of the '58 Conclave, but the secret of the confessional. We've established that V2 & the NO Mass were planned well in advance to be deceptively perpetrated on the Church-- but neither of those events could have come about in the absence of a pope to promulgate them. So a necessary part of this conspiracy is the previous installation of an antipope. Nor could an antipope be installed without the use of a mechanism to compel dissenting Cardinals to keep silent-- hence the use of the confessional.
4. "After the 1958 election, Cardinal Siri gave public obeisance to Pope John XXIII and recognized him as Vicar of Christ. He did likewise with Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. If Cardinal Siri were truly a 'Secret Pope', what sort of scoundrel was he to give public obedience to men whom he knew to be impostors?"
I don't propose Siri for sainthood, I merely suspect-- not "know", but suspect-- that he may have been validly elected pope in 1958. A weak man? Probably. But by what mechanism would he have been persuaded to step down in 1958? Explanations have included threats against his life & the lives of his family, persecutions against Catholics in Eastern countries, and so forth & so on. So once he even considers stepping aside, what's the very next step? You turn to the camerlengo & ask, 'Is this canonical? Can I even
do this?' And if the camerlengo says, 'Sure you can;' then as an ultra-Traditionalist Cardinal, Siri was strongly predisposed to accept the ruling of the camerlengo. It may have been years before he even began to suspect he'd been lied to-- a conclusion that at first he can be expected to have strongly resisted. After all-- it's an idea that I resisted for 30+ years.
...and once you've accepted John 23 as the legitimate pope, once years later you begin to suspect otherwise, at what point do you develop enough certainty to go public & openly oppose him? Especially when you have no proof? What do you say? "Oops-- I made a mistake?"
Siri may have thought-- in fact he probably did think-- that by remaining silent & recognizing the successors of John 23 as legitimate he was practicing humility & making a huge personal sacrifice to prevent the biggest schism since the Avignon popes. Maybe he thought that adhering to a false pope was better than dividing the Church by having 2 or 3 of them running around excommunicating one another. Can you honestly say that the present situation is materially worse than that would have been?
5. "...Cardinal Siri participated in all the post-1958 conclaves: 1963 and the two in 1978. Why would Pope Gregory XVII take part in false conclaves when he was already Pope?"
For the reasons given above.
6. "Cardinal Siri participated in the Second Vatican Council, which was called, if the Siri Thesis is correct, by a Holy Father who was neither Holy nor the Church’s Father. Siri accepted the decisions of Vatican II if interpreted in the light of Tradition."
Again, for the reasons given above. I have reference to a detailed refutation of Vennari's article--
http://www.thepopeinred.com/defense.htm "(Siri’s) many interventions during the Council were all directed to block progress & promote the passage of conservative statements. (Siri) stated that the Vatican II Council... was a terrible suffering for him. He termed the Council 'the greatest mistake in history', as docuмented in the book by Benny Lai, The Unelected Pope (1993:296-97). The UPI reported more than 10 years after V2 that 'Cardinal Siri suffered from a...nervous condition specifically at the Council.'"
Vennari himself agrees that, "Cardinal Siri recognized Vatican II to be a disaster. He said, 'If the Church were not Divine, the Council would have buried her.'"
7. "He adopted the reforms, celebrated the Novus Ordo Mass, ordained priests in the New Rite, and consecrated bishops in the New Rite."
Ah-- but did he really?
"The Remnant Newspaper reported that churches in Genoa looked the same in 1989 as they had in 1940. (Priests offered Mass facing the altars with no conciliar tables in sight.) Siri was Genoa's active archbishop until he was 81, long after the mandatory retirement age of 75... But (immediately) after granting an interview to Louis H. Remy...Siri was forced into retirement. One year & nine months later he was dead."
"There is (also) evidence he covertly ordained priests for the Church in eclipse."
8. "What sort of man does 'our last true Pope' turn out to be? Why would he in any way submit to this destructive Council if he knew it to be the work of papal impostors?"
For reasons given above. Once again, I'm not proposing the man for sainthood. I'll grant that on the surface his actions look weak, but if it were written down somewhere that only a strong man can be pope then we'd have to disqualify half of them.
1st, he probably accepted the opinion of the camerlengo that he could withdraw canonically. So it may be useful to ask, "Would the camerlengo really have done that?"
I refer now to :
http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3304 "The camerlengo (Benedetto Cardinal Masella) was chosen by the 12 or so cardinals, now here... under the guidance of Eugene Cardinal Tisserant... Meanwhile, most of the other of the world's 55 cardinals hastened toward Rome..."
I've been able to find nothing on the theology of Cardinal Masella specifically, but clearly he was a Curial candidate. And since the Roman Curia has been one of the major forces within the Church pushing for greater liberalism-- especially since his election was rushed thru rather than waiting for the other Cardinals to arrive-- I conclude that Masella & a majority of the cardinals who elected him were probably part of the conspiracy. Possibly I do an injustice to their memories, but clearly something very wrong happened to the Church between 1958 & 1962. I believe these men were at the root of it, because
it could not have happened without their collusion. 2d, it may have been years-- during or after V2-- before Siri fully realized what had been done, & that he was in fact the true pope. And 3d, what could he do then? By that time John 23 was probably already dead. Paul 6 was masquerading as pope, Siri had no evidence, & there are indications that he was being closely watched by the Vatican. Siri himself said that his life was in danger if he spoke about what happened at any of the Conclaves.
Unthinkable? Robert Calvi was murdered, possibly with Vatican collusion. Ditto Michael Sindona. I suspect this is gonna get me in trouble with some of you, but there's strong evidence that Pope John-Paul I was murdered with the assistance of Cardinal Villot. Whether Vatican complicity in any of these murders is true or not, any or all of them could have been presented to Siri as evidence of what would happen to him if he got out of line. Such a threat would have been highly credible. (Note, for those of you who aren't very good at reading nuance, I'm not saying that any of this is true-- merely that it could have been made to seem so.)
9. "Lastly, if the 'Siri Thesis' were true, then every Cardinal at the 1958 conclave is implemented in the swindle. None of them could be forced to go along with such a scandal, and none of them could be legitimately 'bound by the Secret' of the Conclave..."
...again we have the "secret". And once again, if the prelates who were responsible for planning V2 & the NO Mass were capable of such deliberate deviousness, then surely they were capable of making up a list of the Cardinals most likely to rebel & ensuring their silence thru the use of the confessional.
10. "Cardinal Siri died in 1989. If the Siri Thesis is true, the papacy came to an end 17 years ago with no successor in sight."
I have posted elsewhere on this site why I believe that is precisely in accord with various End Times prophecies, including the Book of the Apocalypse.
In conclusion, the "refutation" of the Siri Thesis repeatedly mis-states what the Siri theory actually says, essentially setting up a straw man only to knock it down. It relies for its force on supposing what various people-- mainly Cardinal Siri--
should have done, instead of looking for plausible reasons why they did what they in fact
did do. And it concludes, as the Pope in Red site points out, "...(according to John Vennari) 'The Siri Thesis'...is untenable because it is unthinkable. ...But it
is thinkable to John Vennari that the man who substituted a new modernist religion for the ancient faith, new sacraments, & extinguished the sacrament of Orders...was the true Pope."
...and that is precisely my point in a nutshell. It is unthinkable to me "that the man who substituted a new modernist religion for the ancient faith...was the true Pope." Rather than that, I would prefer to think-- as crazy as it sounds on the surface-- that maybe Siri really
was elected pope.
I'd like to conclude by quoting from an eminent 19th Century Cardinal & close associate of John Cardinal Newman, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning-- "The apostasy of the city of Rome from the vicar of Christ & its destruction by Antichrist may be thoughts so new to many Catholics, that I think it well to recite the text of theologians of greatest repute. First Malvenda, who writes expressly on the subject, states as the opinion of Ribera, Gaspar Melus, Biegas, Suarrez, Bellarmine, & Bosius that Rome shall apostatise from the faith, drive away the Vicar of Christ, & return to its ancient paganism. ...Then the Church shall be scattered, driven into the wilderness, & shall be for a time, as it was in the beginning, invisible hidden in catacombs...it shall be swept, as it were, from the face of the earth. Such is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early Church." (Cardinal Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See, 1861, London: Burns and Lambert, pp. 88-90.)