Os
Justi Press have released their first book for 2026, Dominic J.
Grigio’s ‘The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis’ Rupture from the
Magisterium.’ At over 870 pages, Peter Kwasniewski describes it as the
definitive, encyclopedic guide to the heresies and destructive actions
of Pope Francis and his collaborators. He explains that Dominic J.
Grigio is the pen-name of a cleric in good standing with the Church who
cannot reveal his identity for fear of reprisals against himself and his
diocese. It has been strongly endorsed by eminent Catholic philosophers
and theologians, including: Rev. Gerald E. Murray, Edward Feser,
Eduardo Echeverria, Philip F. Lawler, John Rist, Michael Sirilla,
Claudio Pierantoni, and Josef Seifert.
Dominic J. Grigio has given his first interview to Gloria.TV
Why did you publish your book under a pen-name?
My
natural preference is for my name to be out in the open, to openly
stand by my published work, particularly when I’m writing about such a
topic. However, when I informed my bishop about my intention to write
such a book five years ago, he requested that I publish it anonymously.
You discussed writing the book with your bishop?
Yes,
he had told me that if I planned to write more books, he wanted to know
about them before they were published. So, before I started researching
and writing the book I sent him an outline of what I intended to do.
So your bishop gave you permission to write it?
I’d rather put it this way — once I agreed to publish it anonymously, he didn’t object.
Why the name Dominic J. Grigio?
I
always liked Cardinal Ratzinger’s nickname when he was the Prefect for
the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘God's Rottweiler.’ I chose the name Grigio
because it was the name St. John Bosco gave his guardian angel. On the
occasions when enemies of Don Bosco sent ruffians to kill him, a large
dog appeared to fight them off. Don Bosco told friends that it was his
guardian angel taking the form of a dog, who he named Grigio, because
his hair was grey. I also chose the name Dominic because of its
association with dogs. During her pregnancy with St. Dominic, his
mother, Blessed Joan of Aza, dreamt a dog leapt from her womb carrying a
burning torch in its mouth. The dog ran throughout the world, setting
the earth ablaze with its flame—not with destructive fire, but
illuminating everything with light and truth. The initial ‘J’ stands for
Joseph, who is the Guardian of the Church.
So you see yourself as a guard dog of the Church?
Yes,
a Russian Borzoi perhaps. These dogs were good for the hunting of
wolves. Every day I pray St. Augustine’s prayer to the Holy Spirit that
includes the sentence, ‘Strengthen me, Holy Spirit, that I may protect
all that is holy.’
Why do you think it’s your job to protect the Church?
I
received the sacrament of confirmation during a time when its primary
catechetical image was that it made us soldiers for Christ. We are meant
to fight for Christ, to fight for the Church, to fight for the Faith.
We all have the vocation to fight for the Faith in our daily lives when
we’re tempted to sin, unbelief and apostasy, and to fight against heresy
in the Church that threatens the salvation of souls. This
responsibility is doubly important for clerics who make a public promise
of fidelity to the Faith when they’re ordained. Among other things, I
affirmed, ‘With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the
word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the
Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal
Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed. I also
firmly accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the
Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.’ I made this profession
before God, my bishop and the faithful. I take this promise very
seriously.
But why do you publicly defend the Faith? Isn’t that the job of the bishops?
This
is the crisis we have to confront in the Church — the majority of
bishops aren’t publicly safeguarding and expounding the Faith. In
countries like Germany, most bishops are doing the opposite — they are,
forcing a new, woke religion on the faithful. And those bishops who
aren’t actively working against the Faith are mainly silent in the face
of heresy and immorality. Only a handful of bishops around the world
have defended the Faith, and Pope Francis punished them for it —
Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop Viganò, Bishop Strickland, Bishop
Daniel Fernández Torres. The injustices committed against these bishops
were scandalous, but their fellow bishops said nothing.
Dr.
Peter Kwasniewski, the publisher of your book, said in a recent YouTube
video that you’ve also suffered reprisals for upholding the Faith, even
that some have tried to get you laicised.
I can’t go into
too much detail about this, because it would reveal my identity.
However, I can confirm that some in the Church have sought to limit my
ministry and incite the imposition of canonical penalties against me.
Thankfully, so far, these efforts at laicization have failed. But it has
been painful to be subjected to this campaign to destroy my vocation.
The title of your book — The Disastrous Pontificate: Pope Francis’ Rupture from the Magisterium — is provocative. If this is an example of your provocative style, is it a surprise that other clergy are agitating against you?
Many
of Christ’s words were designed to provoke strong reactions that can
lead to healing change. When did the clergy become so bourgeois, so
prissy that they will not speak clearly! There’s all this talk of
synodality, parrhesia, dialogue but it becomes just high-sounding words
that in reality mean worse than nothing. Instead of open, honest, robust
dialogue there is the imposition of heretical groupthink, - a pretense
of ‘consultation’ as a cover to impose a new religion on the faithful.
Such deceit and power games in the Church are not worthy of successors
of the apostles.
You’ve related elsewhere that Cardinal George Pell inspired the title. How so?
One
of the things I appreciated about Cardinal George Pell was that he was
direct and outspoken. I recall him observing to a Catholic newspaper
that Pope Francis was an unusual pope, then immediately going on to
mention that there had been between 30 or 40 anti-popes in the history
of the Church. Before the 2015 rigged Synod on the Family he hand
delivered a letter to Pope Francis signed by 13 cardinals warning him
not to attempt to manipulate synod proceeding as he had done during the
2014 synod. It was revealed after Cardinal Pell’s death that he was the
author of the Demos memorandum in which he characterized Pope Francis’s
pontificate as ‘disastrous, even a catastrophe’, mainly due to Pope
Francis’s onslaught against doctrine. I settled on the title The Disastrous Pontificate
to show that Cardinal Pell’s prophetic warning still resonates in the
Church. Cardinal Pell’s enemies did everything they could to silence and
discredit him, even imprisoning him for 13 months for totally
ludicrous, bogus allegations. He was exonerated by the highest court in
Australia, but his enemies still try to discredit him. I want my book to
show that Cardinal Pell still inspires and encourages many of us. In my
opinion, Cardinal Pell suffered white martyrdom, and is a confessor of
the Faith.
So do you consider Pope Francis an anti-pope?
The
status of Jorge Bergoglio is the third rail of ecclesial politics in
the Church at present, especially for clergy. Touch it and you’re
‘dead’. We live in a time when canon law has been weaponized and is
often not applied justly and impartially. Clergy and religious have been
ruthlessly, callously excommunicated for challenging Pope Francis.
Excommunication is being imposed not as a ‘medicinal remedy’ to help the
victims reconcile with the Church, but to cancel and punish faithful
clergy who uphold the Faith. To me, it’s like ecclesial murder. I think I
have a duty to myself, and especially to others, to avoid being
‘murdered’ as long as possible. So I’ll make a couple of observations
and leave it at that. It took the Church 43 years to condemn Pope
Honorius and declare him anathema, and that was for being negligent in
suppressing heresy, not for teaching heresy. Pope Honorius was not an
anti-pope, he was a bona fide pope. Regarding anti-popes, apart from
Novatian, the remaining anti-popes didn’t promulgate heresy but upheld
the Catholic Faith. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of the
legitimacy of Pope Francis, but leave that to the judgment of a future
pope and council.
What do you say
to those you accuse you of being disloyal, uncharitable and
insubordinate to publicly question Pope Francis’ personal teaching?
What’s the difference between you and Protestants?
The
issue of obedience in the Church was thrown into crisis during Pope
Francis’ pontificate. As Prof. Michael Sirilla observed in his
endorsement of my book, ‘how are the faithful to respond when a pope, in
non-definitive teaching, appears to impose error or even heresy upon
them?’ The super-über-hyperpapalists as caricatured with his usual wit
by the English priest Fr. John Hunwicke (RIP), argued that we should
accept everything taught by Pope Francis because he held the office of
pope, no matter what he said or did. When the faithful pointed out Pope
Francis was contradicting the Deposit of Faith the
super-über-hyperpapalists either denied it or pretended not to see or
hear. This was an abuse of the Catholic understanding of obedience. In
the crisis fomented by Pope Francis and his co-conspirators, we must
hold onto the supreme law of the Church, the law to which all obedience
in the Church is orientated — salus animarum suprema lex, the salvation of souls is the supreme law (Can.1752). As Peter Kwasniewski argues in his invaluable book, True Obedience in the Church
[2021], ‘In normal circumstances, ecclesiastical laws create a
structure within which the Church’s mission may unfold in an orderly and
peaceful way. But there can be situations of anarchy or breakdown,
corruption or apostasy, where the ordinary structures become impediments
to, not facilitators of, the Church’s mission. In these cases, the
voice of conscience dictates that one should do what needs to be done,
in prudence and charity, for the achievement of the sovereign law.’ Pope
Francis’s disastrous pontificate was such a time of anarchy breakdown,
corruption and apostasy. His promulgation of erroneous teaching, such as
his advocacy of situation ethics overriding Divine Revelation, is an
example of a scandalous obstacle to the Church fulfilling her supreme
law, the salvation of souls.
But isn’t this Protestantism — elevating your conscience above the authority of the pope?
The
pope only has authority to safeguard and expound the Deposit of Faith,
not to promote his own personal opinions that contradict, even
repudiate, Divine Revelation. Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the
Church’s most eminent canonist, proposed a way for the faithful to
respond to this crisis without rejecting the authority of Pope Francis
as such. It is imperative that we distinguish between ‘the words of the
man who is Pope and the words of the Pope as Vicar of Christ on earth’.
In the Middle Ages, the Church spoke of the two bodies of the Pope: the
body of the man and the body of the Vicar of Christ. The first body is
that of ‘the body of the man who is Pope’, and the second body is the
‘body of the Vicar of Christ.’ Cardinal Burke concludes that ‘Pope
Francis has chosen to speak often in his first body, the body of the man
who is Pope. In fact, even in documents which, in the past, have
represented more solemn teaching, he states that he is not offering
magisterial teaching but his own thinking.’ (Burke, R [2017] The
Two Bodies of the Pope: Developing Lives of Peace after the Heart of
Mary – Remedies for these troubled times of confusion, division and
error [Online] Available at: Serve Christ Through the Marian Catechist …).
When Pope Francis taught and behaved in conformity to the Deposit of
Faith we, as Catholics, had a duty to obey him, but when he gave his
personal opinions that diverged from the Church’s doctrine, we not only
had the right to ignore him, we had the duty to challenge him.
The duty to challenge a pope?
It’s what St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, exhorted us to do in Summa Theologiae
II-II.33.4, reflecting on St. Paul rebuking St. Peter (Gal 2:11-14). He
made the argument that subjects have a duty to publicly rebuke their
superiors if they endangered the Faith. In his commentary on Galatians,
St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes that subjects must not fear to publicly
correct prelates if their acts are a ‘danger to the Gospel teaching’,
and ‘if their crime is public and verges upon danger to the multitude’.
In these circumstances ‘the truth must be preached openly, and the
opposite never condoned through fear of scandalizing others.’
You’ve spent the last 5 years researching and writing this book. What what have been the most grievous shortcomings of Francis?
I
have a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary who has guided me
during key moments of my vocation. The first theological discipline I
decided to examine in 2020 was Francis’ Mariology, working on the
principle that if you get the Blessed Virgin Mary right, you’ve got a
good chance of getting everything else right, and conversely, if you get
Our Lady wrong, you may get other important aspects of the Faith wrong.
What Francis publicly taught on two occasions, including to very sick
children and their families, still upsets me to this day. In 2013 and
2015 he had the audacity to speculate that at the foot of the Cross,
witnessing the sufferings of her Son, Our Lady lost faith in God’s
promises at the Annunciation, and accused the Archangel Gabriel of being
a liar and a deceiver. Francis even made the unsupported claim that
John Paul II — the 20th century’s most Marian of popes — was the source
of this vile speculation. Though Francis didn’t reference the source of
his claim about John Paul II, he may have been misrepresenting a passage
from Redemptoris Mater, 18,
'And now, standing at the foot of the Cross, Mary is the witness,
humanly speaking, of the complete negation of these words.’ John Paul II
did not express the words or sentiment concerning Mary’s thoughts that
Francis ascribed to him, ‘Lies! I was deceived!’ In fact John Paul II
went on to express the complete opposite, writing, 'How great, how
heroic then is the obedience of faith shown by Mary in the face of God's
"unsearchable judgments"! How completely she "abandons herself to God"
without reserve, offering the full assent of the intellect and the will
to him whose "ways are inscrutable" (cf. Rom. 11:33)!’ (RM 18).
Bergoglio not only deeply offends and insults the Blessed Virgin Mary,
he also committed calumny and detraction against his predecessor.
How many similar errors taught by Francis do you examine in your book?
I
cover 17 of Francis’ grave errors in total under 11 theological
disciplines, including: Anthropology, Christology, Ecclesiology,
Eschatology, Evangelization, Hamartiology, Liturgy, Mariology, Morality,
Sacraments, and Soteriology. This is why Prof. Claudio Pierantoni was
not exaggerating what he wrote in his endorsement of my book, that we
have witnessed ‘what has certainly been the most disastrous pontificate,
from the doctrinal point of view, in the entire history of the Catholic
Church.’
Is your book not too academic for an ordinary layperson?
I’ve
written this book for clergy and laity who knew something was wrong
with Francis’ words and actions, and needed their sense of the Faith
affirmed and to be provided with the reasons why they were right to be
disturbed and alarmed. My book rigorously juxtaposes the claims of
Francis with Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the perennial
Magisterium. Its core section, The Errors of Pope Francis, delivers an easy-to-follow doctrinal analysis; elucidated by the exhaustive compendium Sources: The Errors in the Light of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. Together, they expose a profound rupture in the exercise of the papal magisterium. Further, a chronological section, The Questionable Words and Deeds of Pope Francis and His Appointees,
exposes the full scope of these aberrations in action between 2013 and
2025: their pervasive influence on the Church and the far-reaching
consequences for the faithful. This section is guided by our Lord’s
advice, ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of
sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall
know them.’ (Mt 7: 15-16).
Where can we buy your book?
It is available as hardback, paperback and e-book and can be purchased directly from the publishing house, Os Justi Press.
osjustipress.com
Also, from the various Amazon sites and major online book retailers
You can purchase Dr. Peter Kwasniewski book, True Obedience in the Church [2021] at
Amazon.com
Your book as an unusual dedication.
Yes,
I dedicated my book to ‘the future pope and ecumenical council who will
address these errors’. But for this to happen in the future the
groundwork must begin now among laity raising their children, some of
whom will become future priests, religious, bishops, popes. Not only
will this book help you and your children protect yourselves from these
grave errors that threaten the salvation of souls, it will ensure that
you hand on the authentic Catholic Faith free from the aberrations that
Francis sought to impose on us. Also, as Prof. Kwasniewski put it, we
need to get this book into the hands of scholars, theologians, pastors,
bishops and cardinals so the work can begin to address and redress these
dangerous errors. It’s only by beginning to do the groundwork now that a
future pope and ecumenical council will emerge sometime in the future.
Please consider purchasing a copy of The Disastrous Pontificate
for clergy and laity that you think will be open to face the reality of
the confusion and intentional disruption inflicted on the Church by
Francis.
For more info on my book, my explanatory essay has been published by Rorate Caeli
Dominic J. Grigio, “Why I Wrote The …
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