Cardinal Siri and The Dissent of Genoa
In 1938 Pope Pius XI was quoted as saying "When today the Pope dies, you'll get another one tomorrow, because the Church continues. It would be a much bigger tragedy, if Cardinal Pacelli dies, because there is only one. I pray every day, God may send another one into one of our seminaries, but as of today, there is only one in this world."
After the death of Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli would become Pope Pius XII, and in 1953, he too would endorse a man for the papacy, 46-year-old Giuseppe Siri, Archbishop of Genoa. As Pius XII made Siri a Cardinal, placing the red hat on his head, a reporter in attendance remarked “this is an historic moment, the Pope meets the next Pope.” In fact, Siri wrote in his now published personal diary, “Pius XII said I had to succeed him, and was preparing for me the same system that Pius XI had prepared for him.”
Local clergy in Genoa also testify that in the years before the 1958 Conclave, Siri was “seriously preparing himself to succeed Pius XII by keeping up with his languages and studying to remain abreast of all the necessary branches of knowledge.”
What happened then, for those who don’t know, was that on the first day of the 1958 Conclave, 5 minutes of white smoke(1) billowed from atop the Sistine Chapel signaling that a new Pope had been elected. But the new Pope never appeared, and two days later Cardinal Angelo Roncalli arrived on the balcony in St. Peter’s as Pope John XXIII, an unlikely choice for the Holy Ghost but the ideal one for the Communist~Masonic infiltrators and their backers. Roncalli, a Freemason(2), even had the all-seeing-eye engraved on his pectoral cross.
As to who was elected 2 days prior, the evidence points to Cardinal Siri, whose pontificate was suppressed to clear the way for Vatican II and the new mass. And the changes started almost immediately after the Conclave while Siri, the lawful Pope, was more or less confined to his diocese of Genoa. Recently, this idea has been ridiculed buy some who produced pictures of Cardinal Siri and John Paul II together as well as Siri saying the new mass. It’s hard to imagine how one could take these arguments seriously as a standard photo op is rarely a place where people show their true cards, but nonetheless it prompted a more thorough investigation of Cardinal Siri’s legacy in Genoa to gauge just how much Siri accepted these things.
Before looking at Siri’s record in Genoa, let me point out that the two biggest objections to Cardinal Siri having been elected pope is that he celebrated the new mass and that he acknowledged the other Popes. I’d answer that his acknowledgment of the other Popes was superficial, and that he really had no use for the new mass even though he did celebrate it on at least one occasion. Instead of debating pictures though, let’s hear what the Genoese have to say, after all, he was their archbishop for over 40 years. And why not start with a bit of testimony from a disgruntled Genoese priest who entered the seminary in 1964 and served for 40 years until his recent banishment. Father Paolo Farinello, who has no love for Cardinal Siri or for tradition writes in his 2007 book,
“Cardinal Siri, in fact, has never hidden his denigration of the Council and the liturgical reform in particular. In any way he obstructs its implementation in the diocese … We (the seminarians) were trembling with the spirit of the council and each time he (Siri) castrated our passionate enthusiasm by ensuring us that it would take fifty years to remedy the Vatican … He inoculated us unsuspecting with the suspicion that Pope Paul VI was not an orthodox Pope.”
Farinello writes in another article more recently,
“Siri told us ‘do not say the new mass in my diocese, I did not vote for these changes.’”
Notice in the first excerpt that he says we were “inoculated unsuspecting that Paul VI was not an orthodox Pope” From this we can infer that Siri was actively resisting the changes in the Church but was doing so covertly, as opposed to his contemporary Archbishop Lefebvre, founder of the SSPX, who did so in the open. There are several reasons why Siri would take this approach, one would be his proximity to the seat of power in Rome and his chance to become Pope at a future conclave. Secondly, he saw the struggle for the Catholic Church as a long term affair that was not going to be settled in his lifetime.
But let’s look at some other records in order to put the idea that Siri accepted Vatican II and the new popes to rest for good. An exchange between Cardinal Siri and Cardinal Sebastiano Baccio (who appears on many lists of Freemasons in the Vatican ) was published recently in the Italian daily, Il Stampa,
"They say that once the old curial Cardinal, Sebastiano Baggio, prefect of the powerful Congregation for Bishops in the last phase of the pontificate of Paul VI and the beginning of that of John Paul II, accused Cardinal Siri of growing his seminarians and priests as an island separate from the body of the Italian Church, and that this was not taken into account when they were made bishops. ‘Yes, it's true’ - Siri would respond – ‘we are an island, but my own I taught to swim.’"
And yet another quote from the Italian publication, Vatican Insider,
"Under Siri, the most faithful and authoritative interpreter of the pontificate of Pius XII, Genoa became the stronghold of the defense of Christianity and the cardinal point of reference for a church closer to tradition than innovation, leading it to its isolation from the rest of the country, particularly after the Council."
And there is no shortage of quotes from Siri himself, in his interviews with Benny Lai, for example he said that Vatican II “was the worst mistake in history.” He said it would “take the Church 50 years to recover from the pontificate of John XXIII” and many other statements that reveal his true feelings regarding the new “popes” and there innovations.
So my advice to those trying to grapple with the apparent inconsistency with the photographs of Siri above and the thesis that Siri was the lawful pope, is to ponder Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s response when Henry Kissinger’s asked his thoughts about the French revolution, “it’s too early to tell.” It’s now been forty odd years since Vatican II and the promulgation of Pope Paul VI’s new mass, and the trend towards novelties is long behind us. The traditional seminaries of the SSPX are full to the brim with new vocations and many mainstream Catholics are abandoning their scandal ridden churches for independent traditional parishes, meanwhile, in Italy, a former Siri disciple was just promoted to the See of Venice, a See that produced 3 popes in the last hundred years. And there are the other Siri disciples recently appointed to key positions in the Vatican, Cardinal Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), Mauro Piacenza, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and Domenico Calcagno, President of the Apostolic Administration of Assets. Did Cardinal Siri teach his men to swim in the flood of infiltration and modernism with the long range view that they would be positioned to take back the reigns of power when the tide turned against the usurpers? Word from Italy certainly suggests so. And perhaps it will be Cardinal Siri of Genoa, unknown to the outside world throughout his pontificate, who gets the last laugh when the best laid plans of the Anti-Church crumble like the Tower of Babel.
(1) Footage of the 1958 white smoke
(2) November 12, 2002 Portugal Daily reports that “Virgilio Guito, former head of the Italian Grande Oriente Masonic Lodges, in a statement published by the French newspaper “30 Days”, said: It seems that Pope John XXIII has been initiated in Paris, and participated in the works of the Lodges in Istanbul.”
Topic: The election of Cardinal Siri in 1958 (Read 8567 times)