First, we have a Red Skull thread on 4chan.

Link to that thread here.

RS being a LARP or not aside, it’s interesting that’s RS is tying this to a Jesuit civil war and Nancy Pelosi losing her power in Congress.

This got me thinking about the ongoing trial with the Vatican and its shady $400mil real estate deal in London. So I looked up if there was any recent developments in that case.

On Thursday, the head of the Vatican Bank finally testified in court on his involvement in the real estate shenanigans.

In Thursday’s 46th session of the Catholic Church’s marathon corruption trial, the president of the Vatican Bank said he had no choice but to report to prosecutors what he knew about the London real-estate deal at the heart of the inquiry, even as he faced pressure from officials at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State to approve a loan worth hundreds of millions of euro to bail out the failed investment.

“The time had come when the institute had no other choice, given the circumstances created and the uncertainty reached. The only thing that could be done was to file a complaint with the tribunal,” De Franssu told the court.

Really recommend reading that article; it’s very juicy.

We also have new bishops being appointed that apparently are raising eyebrows.

Article: Saturday was a Doozy as the Vatican Took out the Trash

Apparently Saturday afternoons are the Vatican version of the White House dumping bad PR info on Fridays so no one pays attention?

Anyway, some highlights from the article regarding this practice and how they tried to keep four new controversial clergy members getting promoted under the rug.

In the Vatican, Saturday morning is actually a work day, so its equivalent of taking out the trash comes in the noontime Saturday news bulletin. The calculation is that anything announced therein will be largely ignored, since, in Italian psychology, Saturday afternoon is the prelude to the sacrosanct calm of Sunday.

This past Saturday brought a doozy of a trash dump, with the announcement of no fewer than four bishops’ appointments, each one of which, under other circumstances, might have triggered at least a small-scale media sensation.

First bishop is in Sierra Leone:

The cavalcade began in Sierre Leone, where Pope Francis tapped Bob John Hassan Koroma as the new bishop of the Diocese of Makeni, located in the north-central part of the country about 120 miles from the capital city of Freetown.

What makes the choice noteworthy is that Makeni has been a vacant episcopal see since 2015, and it hasn’t had a residential bishop since 2012. In January of that year, Pope Benedict XVI named Henry Aruna the Bishop of Makeni, but he wasn’t ordained until a year later, and in Freetown, because the clergy and people of his new diocese refused to let him in.

More noteworthy to me is this guy:

Next, the Vatican also announced on Saturday that *Lithuanian Father Rolandas Makrickas, * who’s been acting pro tem as the special commissioner of the papal basilica of St. Mary Major since December 2021, has been confirmed in that role and elevated to the rank of Archbishop.

What make this move curious is that, like the other papal basilicas in Rome, St. Mary Major still has an Archpriest who’s theoretically in charge in the person of 77-year-old Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, former head of the Pontifical Council for the Laity who’s been at St. Mary Major since 2016.

Aside from the fact that Rylko is an old-school Catholic conservative associated with the Pope John Paul II years, and thus not really Francis’s cup of tea, there have also been persistent rumors of financial irregularities at the basilica, which were compounded by shortfalls caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, the confirmation of Makrickas as “commissioner” – an extraordinary role which, by definition, is usually designed to be temporary – raises a couple of questions to which, so far, we don’t have answers.

…

First, if the situation is so bad, why doesn’t Francis simple fire Rylko and appoint new leadership? Why keep him on the books, only to assign most of his authority to someone else? And, second, if the problem is money, is the solution really to appoint a former official of the financial administration of the Secretariat of State, several of whose erstwhile colleagues are currently facing trial for their roles in a $400 million London real estate fiasco?

Finally, this stood out to me re: Bishop O’Connell. Especially considering Francis’ own questionable background in Argentina and women and children going missing during the war. This is from the LA Times article on his death.

He was the chairman of the interdiocesan Southern California Immigration Task Force, helping coordinate the church’s response to immigrant children and families from Central America in recent years, and was key in sponsoring the enrollment of several young immigrants in Catholic schools — several of whom have advanced to college.

Human trafficking?

So my question is: can we link this guy directly to Pelosi and/or her husband?

Because having groundbreaking Vatican trial news and a hush hush Vatican press release about new bishops all within 24–72 hours of a bishop getting shot definitely feels related.