THE POUPARD “SOLUTION” OF THE
GALILEO CASE

          As far as the main title of this paper is concerned: the essentials of the Galileo Case were resolved by the Holy Catholic Church (which means with the direct assistance and under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit) in the seventeenth century, when the wonderful gifts and a unique combination of talents of a great Saint, St. Robert Bellarmine, were at the disposal of our Holy Mother the Church. The Galileo Case has been resolved once and for all by authority, and never by the driftsand of what nowadays goes under the name culture, or rationalist insights or, what is the same, new theology, and least of all by science. All these, according to a brilliant book by the late Professor Richard Weaver of Chicago, Ideas have Consequences, were merely the witches which kept the poisonous brew boiling that had been concocted strictly according to the nominalist recipe of one William of Occam, the ‘father of atheism’. For it had been this medieval dissenter and excommunicated fugitive from papal jurisdiction, William of Occam, who, for millions of his Renaissance and subsequent followers right up into our own times, had severed irrevocably Faith from Reason, Truth from truth.

          It proved to be the same fatal cut for Cardinal Paul Poupard and his entourage of innumerable existentialists and teilhardians ...

          This brings us to the sub-title of the present paper.

          History has recorded several major betrayals by Cardinal Paul Poupard, Archbishop of Paris and president of its Institut Catholique. I will briefly describe two of them here as an introduction to his major one, his ‘resolution’ of the Galileo Case.

[Excerpts taken from the book The Jesuits by Malachi Martin]

          The setting is the papal meeting of Pope John Paul II with 6 of his most powerful cardinals: ‘Dottrina’, ‘Propaganda’, ‘Clero’, ‘Vescovi’ ‘Religiosi’ and ‘Stato’, in the middle of the Northern Spring, 1981.

          “In sum, Propaganda agreed both with the 1962 condemnation of the Jesuit de Chardin, and with the Holy Father’s indictment of the society as a whole in 1981.”

          “It seemed at first as if Clero would confine his contribution to an amplification of Propaganda’s link between Teilhard de Chardin’s work and present-day Jesuit activity. Why was it, he seemed merely to muse about the problem a bit further, that the Jesuit faculties of philosophy and theology at the Sèvres Centre in Paris were organising a celebration for the coming June 13 to honour the centenary of de Chardin’s birth. According to Clero’s information, they were doing so with the blessing of Pontifical Institutes in Rome and the approval of the Secretariat of State and of the Jesuit General. His Holiness’s suggestion was more pointed. The Pontiff was sure that Stato would communicate to Father Arrupe the Holy See’s disapproval of the planned celebration.”
[P. 89].

          “When the Holy Father was shot, Stato, on a formal visit to the United States at the time, hurried back home to take control of the Holy See as Vatican Secretary of State. In those hectic, suspicion-laden days of May and June of 1981, there was no medical certainty that the Pontiff would pull through. It would, as it turned out, take the Holy Father the best part of six months to get back to anything like a full schedule. In hindsight, many are forced to the conclusion that there were those, including both Stato and Arrupe, who considered that John Paul’s grip on papal affairs had been loosened once and for all. They did not expect him to recover, to get back into harness. That is the most obvious reading of Stato’s and Arrupe’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of the May 13 shooting.

          One of Stato’s first public acts on his return was a direct violation of John Paul’s will expressed at the papal meeting: He sent a highly congratulatory message to Archbishop Paul Poupard, President of the Secretariat for Non-Believers, lauding the work and thought of Father Teilhard de Chardin, whose centenary the ‘Institut Catholique’ of Paris was celebrating. Stato’s message praised ‘the amazing echo of his [de Chardin’s] research, joined with the radiance of his thought’, all of which ‘has left a durable mark on his age’.

          It was an enormous gaffe of disproportionate arrogance. And although Stato dated the message May 12 - one day before John Paul was shot - clearly it was written and sent after the event.”

          “Arrupe followed suit almost immediately with what seemed a calculated and feckless disregard for John Paul’s opinions and bidding. He sent a message dated May 30, and went even farther than Stato in his praise of de Chardin” ... [P. 94-95].

          “By the time John Paul II had recovered sufficient energy and his doctors allowed him some activity, toward the latter half of July 1981, the decision to remove Arrupe by hook or by crook had been made by the Jesuit’s accumulated enemies in the Vatican Curia and in the Latin American Church. Almost certainly Vescovi, Dottrina, Propaganda, Clero, powerful Latin American churchmen such as Archbishop Alonzo Lopez Trujillo of Medellin, Colombia, and some older Jesuits of a conservative, anti-Arrupe bent were in on that decision. Arrupe had to go.

          John Paul II acquiesced readily. In fact, when he learned how Stato and Arrupe had been behaving, the Pope’s own reaction was visceral. As an added sting to his reaction, he decided not to inform Religiosi of his papal decision to remove Arrupe. This was tantamount to insult: Religiosi was the cardinal directly responsible for the behaviour of all Religious priests and of Arrupe in particular. Since the shooting, John Paul had wanted nothing of that cardinal in his life.”

          “Stato and Arrupe were the Pope’s targets, however. Quickly, he hit Stato with a typically Roman punishment for his transgressions. The Press Office of the Holy See and the official Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, both private stamping grounds of Stato’s were forced by papal order to publish an official statement correcting Stato’s praise of de Chardin and repeating the condemnation of 1962. The put-down was public.” [P. 96-97].

          Here follows the official text of this “public put-down”, issued by the Holy See press office on July 11, 1981, as it appeared in the Osservatore Romano of July 20 1981, mentioning Archbishop [by then not yet Cardinal] Paul Poupard by name:

“The letter sent by the Cardinal Secretary of State to His Excellency Mons. Poupard on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin has been interpreted in a certain section of the press as a revision of previous stands taken by the Holy See in regard to this author, and in particular of the Monitum of the Holy Office of 30 June 1962, which pointed out that the work of the author contained ‘ambiguities and grave doctrinal errors’.

The question has been asked whether such an interpretation is well founded. After having consulted the Cardinal Secretary of State and the Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, which, by order of the Holy Father, had been duly consulted beforehand about the letter in question, we are in a position to reply in the negative. Far from being a revision of the previous stands of the Holy See, Cardinal Casaroli’s letter expresses reservations in various passages - and these reservations have been passed over in silence by certain newspapers - reservations which refer precisely to the judgment given in the Monitum of June 1962, even though this document is not explicitly mentioned.”

          The second example of betrayal involving the Institut Catholique of Paris and its president, Archbishop Paul Poupard, centres on interference with the dissemination of truth by means of the direct and wilful suppression of Catholic scholarship in favour of a free and unencumbered promotion of doctrinal errors. The scandal appeared in the March 19, 1992 edition of the American Catholic paper The Wanderer, quoting two other major European Catholic periodicals, 30 Days and Il Sabato.

Reporting a scandal: An editorial in the current issue of 30 Days magazine (issue no. 2), titled “Scandal at the Institut Catholique” raises some tough questions about the openness of modern biblical scholars to research which offers evidence that the Gospels were written by A.D. 50.

Reporting on investigative work conducted by the Italian Catholic weekly Il Sabato the editorial asks why the Institut Catholique in Paris will not allow to be printed, or even acknowledge the existence of, the biblical scholarship of Fr. Jean Carmignac.

Fr. Carmignac, until his death in 1986, was one of the world’s leading experts in Hebrew and Aramaic, and his extensive research in language and the Fathers of the Church led him to believe Matthew, Mark, and Luke had written their Gospels by A.D. 50. In addition, Carmignac noted the scholarship of 49 other recognised experts who agreed with him, but whose works also had either been ignored or censored or else they did not dare wage a battle in the name of their scientific conviction.

“For the consequences”, stated the 30 Days editorial, “would have revolutionised the dominant exegetical trends today. Many ideas, whose certainty is taken for granted today, would have crumbled ... If the Synoptic Gospels were written in a Semitic language it means they were written soon after Jesus’ years on earth, when the protagonists were still alive. It means that the Synoptic Gospels are the testimonies of people who saw and heard, of witnesses to the facts. It means they are not late elaborations by anonymous transcribers of popular traditions”.

In 1983. Fr. Carmignac published a small book containing his findings and conclusions, and promised a later book which he described as “more convincing than ever and, I hope, irrefutable”.

But at that time an effort began to bury his work, the editorial said, under hefty shovelfuls of earth ... Six years after his death, none of these texts has ever been published. An impenetrable curtain of silence has fallen on Fr. Carmignac and his work. The Catholic weekly Il Sabato has been hunting down his manuscripts. It discovered that Fr. Carmignac’s entire archive is to be found at the Institut Catholique in Paris where he had taught. In all these years, the Institut Catholique has taken care not to tend to the publication of those pre-announced works, and, above all, it has prohibited people from seeing the material when they ask to see it ...

          One of the 49 scholars mentioned here by the late Fr. Jean Carmignac is, no doubt, Claude Tresmontant whose magnificent book on that very same topic, The Hebrew Christ, carries a lengthy foreword by the Most Reverend Jean Charles Thomas, Bishop of Ajaccio, dated May 1, 1983: three years before the death of Fr. Jean Camignac. In his Foreword bishop Thomas refers specifically to the same general state of affairs as was reported by the three Catholic papers mentioned above. There is no change of heart in either the ‘Institut Catholique’ or its president, Paul Poupard ...

          After this short introduction of the main historical characters in this critical dossier, and the indelible marks their lives have left on the pages of recorded history: a Renaissance mathematician, Galileo Galilei; his most famous contemporary, a Renaissance Saint and God’s chosen gladiator in the uneven contest, St. Robert Bellarmine; and the present-day teilhardian president of the corrupted ‘institut catholique’, Paul Poupard, Archbishop of Paris, we finally mention the one reality that is in no need of any introduction: the Papacy of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, Its roots go back more than 1600 years before Galileo, nearly 2000 years before Archbishop Poupard, and its infallible truths are still with us today, and will still be the most important part of recorded history when nothing else that human history could throw at it will matter anymore, being just as futile as it always has been.

          According to an address by the Holy Father Pope John Paul II, presented to the papal Academy of Sciences on October 31, 1992, this is how the various names found their way into this present record.

          “I was moved by similar concerns on 10 November 1979 ... when I expressed the hope before this same Academy that ‘theologians, scholars and historians, animated by a spirit of sincere collaboration, will study the Galileo case more deeply and, in frank recognition of wrongs from whatever side they come, dispel the mistrust that still opposes, in many minds, a fruitful concord between science and faith’. (1).

          A Study Commission was constituted for this purpose on 3 July 1981. The Commission is presenting today, at the conclusion of its work, a number of publications which I value highly. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Cardinal Poupard, who was entrusted (my stress, because of the word trust used here) with coordinating the Commission’s research in its concluding phase. To all the experts who in any way took part in the proceedings of the four groups that guided this multidisciplinary study, I express my profound satisfaction and my deep gratitude. In the future, it will be impossible to ignore the cornmission’s conclusions”. (My stress of these truly prophetic words).

          If we realise that the convening of this ‘study commission’ and the press release of the Holy Father’s rebuff of Cardinal Casaroli’s congratulatory letter to Archbishop Poupard were within a week of each other, showing that, at the time of the convening of the study commission, the Holy Father was fully aware of Archbishop Paul Poupard’s duplicity, why then, we may well ask, did Pope John Paul II eventually appoint Paul Poupard as the coordinating spirit at the head of such a sensitive commission?

          The answer, we think, has a lot to do with the reason why we read in the Gospel that the Apostle Judas was appointed by Our Blessed Lord to carry the common purse. If both had a genuine conversion, they would make a brilliant job of it. And if not? Then Paul Poupard would use the Pope’s commission as Judas used the common purse: for his own private use and advancement. From which it would follow inevitably, that the Holy Father would be presented with a mongrel of a report. In both cases not much damage could be done. In Judas’ case it would only be money, “that tainted thing”, and in Poupard’s case it would merely amount to easily corrected corruptions of Papal teachings, of historical facts and of scientific data, proposed for the pursuit of his own ends. And just as Our Lord openly declared: “One of you will betray Me”, so the papal speech of October 31, 1992, would, if there was no real conversion on the part of Cardinal Poupard, convey the same message to the whole Church.

          If now we couple the Fr. Jean Carmignac episode of the early ’80s with their recording in the Press in 1992, then it becomes obvious not only that things did not start to look too good for a genuine conversion of Paul Poupard in the early and middle ’80s, but that, in 1992, there still was no sign of it.

          For, while Paul Poupard addressed the Holy Father in Rome as late as October 31, 1992, he was still actively suppressing the truth in the ‘Institut Catholique’ in Paris. So, as things turned out, the Holy Father was indeed presented in 1992 with a mongrel of a report from an unrepentant Cardinal Poupard and his equally unrepentant ‘Galileo commission’.

          Since, going by his subsequent behaviour, Pope John Paul II had apparently made up his mind to read out to the Church whatever report he would be given by Card. Poupard, it is of the utmost importance that this report is read with the greatest of care. With that in mind I made a verbatim copy of it line by line, making sure that each sentence received its appropriate line number. To facilitate the discussion so that the unfolding of Cardinal Paul Poupard’s duplicity can be followed more easily, and so can be clearly established, here follows first and foremost a reprint of the numbered line version of Pope John Paul’s address of October 31, 1992.

          This papal address appeared in the weekly English edition of the Osservatore Romano of November 4, 1992. The paper divided the entire speech into a kind of introduction (lines 1-5) and three main sections, indicated by the use of the Roman numerals I-III, (which are preserved in our accompanying line-by-line reprint), as well as into 14 subsections, numbered 1-14, which in our reprint are represented by the capital letters A-N because of our use of Arabic numerals for line numbering.

          This address by the Holy Father was preceded by an address to the Pope by Cardinal Poupard. In it the Cardinal states:

“ ... and you had entrusted to Cardinal Garrone responsibility for coordinating the research ...”

          But in line 25 of his address, the Holy Father contradicted this by stating:

“I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Cardinal Poupard, who was entrusted with coordinating the Commission’s research in its concluding phase.”

          We all know it is the end result and the end report that count ... and these the Holy Father had not entrusted to Card. Garrone, but to no other than to Card. Poupard, although the latter did not wish to be publicly identified with it for obvious reasons of trust as will come to light in this analysis.