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March 12, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The prodigal son has returned home, but he’s unhappy with the shepherd in charge of the family flock. 

“(Pope Francis) is personally responsible for enough wickedness in this Church that I quake for the future of the Magisterium if he if he's not replaced relatively soon,” Milo Yiannopoulos said in an interview with LifeSiteNews' John-Henry Westen first posted today. 

The famous British author and journalist, baptized and raised as a Catholic, made headlines this week when he declared to LifeSiteNews that he is consecrating himself to St. Joseph and means to practice the Catholic faith with integrity. But Yiannopoulos has not returned to the Church with his eyes wide shut. He did, after all, publish in 2018 a book entitled Diabolical: How Pope Francis Has Betrayed Clerical Abuse Victims Like Me — and Why He Has to Go

“I consider the cover-up, the systematic, purposeful, deliberate cover-up on an industrial scale, of abuses to be equal in magnitude and moral horror to the abuses themselves,” the author told LifeSite editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen.

“Pope Francis has now, as a matter of record, been responsible for some of these cover-ups.”

This is, Yiannopoulos declared, “a uniquely awful situation” in which “the heir to St. Peter lost his moral and spiritual authority.”

“By rehabilitating Theodore McCarrick,” the author continued. 

“By perpetuating the cover-up and in lies about clerical abuse. In defending priests who describe victims as ‘hysterical’ and all the rest of it. The stuff he did as an archbishop: just unspeakable.”

Yiannopoulos said that he was “very uncomfortable” with the Argentinian pontiff’s Peronist, press-pleasing style and what it has done to the reputation of the Church. But it is the alleged complicity with abuse that the author finds “unforgiveable.”

Pope John Paul II was, Yiannopolous suggested, “naive” about clerical sexual abuse and (Pope) Benedict XVI cowardly, but there is “evil of a different order when we consider Pope Francis and the things we know he has done.”   

The author is particularly incensed by Pope Francis’s friendship with the former Cardinal McCarrick, a serial sexual abuser, and the latter’s role in the private agreement between the former and China’s communist regime. 

“(Francis) sent him to China to do a deal with a regime that operates concentration camps, (a deal) in which the Catholic Church basically endorsed a schismatic church and handed over the reins of picking bishops to this evil authoritarian regime in exchange, it now seems obvious, for money,” Yiannopoulos said.

“Who knows if the details will ever fully come out, and we should place plenty of caveats on what we're saying,” he conceded. 

“But there's good reporting on this, and there's real reporting on this. And we know enough, even though we don't know everything, to know that there are such deep and horrifying problems with this pope.”

Earlier in the interview, Yiannopoulos had revealed that there is a religious movement among disaffected young conservative men in the USA, but, dissuaded by the decadence and corruption they see in the Catholic Church, they often take refuge in the Eastern Orthodox Church instead. 

In his book, Yiannopoulos had concluded that faithful Catholics are in an “impossible situation”: they cannot hope for Francis to resign, for after two retirements in a row, the papacy would become “a political appointment” with political parties springing up among the cardinals, a “catastrophic” situation. Catholics also cannot wish for misfortune or death to befall the Vicar of Christ.

“But we're in an impossible situation where the only right answer seems to be to ride out the storm,” Yiannopoulos concluded. 
“I hold this pope personally responsible for a lot of the worst things that have happened in the church politically, to do with abuse, and also China,” he continued. 

“He is personally responsible for enough wickedness in this church that I quake for the future of the Magisterium if he if he's not replaced relatively soon.”

Pressed on the idea that Francis’ actions are “unforgiveable,” Yiannopoulos modified his condemnation of the pontiff, but only slightly.

“’Unlikely to be forgiven’ is perhaps more accurate, since I don't think that the man is capable of the kind of introspection, self-awareness and contrition that would be necessary for real forgiveness,” the author said. 

“I don't think the man is prepared, or remotely willing, or motivated to admit what he's done wrong and attempt to make it right,” he added. “I think that (the pope) will continue to get away with whatever he can get away with for as long as he can get away with it until he is in a coffin.” 

What makes Pope Francis “more endurable” to Yiannopoulos is his faith that the Church to which he has returned teaches true doctrine and, for all its lamentable appearance today, is the barque of Peter, the ship that will weather any storm.  

“Things don't stop being true just because just because the Church is in a bad place is in a bad way,” he said.

“I mean, let's face it, the church has always been a bad way,” he added. 

“This is the rickety ark on which we sit. And there are beautiful, brand-new, 300-foot, gleaming white yachts everywhere around us with pretty girls and hot tubs and champagne. And it would be easy for us to dive off and and go to one of them. But after the tempest, after the storm, after the hurricane, this rickety, stinking, hideous-looking ark is the only one that will still be afloat.”

Yiannopoulos reflected that the only reason the Church will endure is because she “envelops a truth that can never really be suffocated, a light that can't be extinguished.” 

“And that's the only thing that keeps it afloat,” he concluded.  

“And it doesn't really deserve to be afloat. But it is it is afloat because of the truth that it holds in trust. And that that, I guess, makes Pope Francis a lot more endurable.”