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ANALYSIS

July 22, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has named Bishop Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva of the Diocese of Rio Gallegos in the extreme southern region of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina a member of the Congregation for Bishops. Commonly known as “the most Bergoglian bishop in Argentina,” García Cuerva will be expected to travel regularly to Rome and to participate in the work of this crucially important dicastery, whose role is to name and monitor bishops, create new ecclesiastic territories, and organize ad limina visits of bishops to the Pope.

The nomination is highly symbolic, not least because García Cuerva has shown his openness to transsexuals in different ways, baptizing the twins of a couple composed by two men, one of them a transsexual, and failing adequately to sanction a priest of his diocese who, earlier this year, organized the “marriage” of a similar couple in his parish church.

When still a priest in Saint Clare of Assisi parish in El Talar, Tigre, in the province of Buenos Aires, then-Father García Cuerva agreed to baptize one-year-old twins obtained by hiring a surrogate mother, at the request of a well-known society and media couple formed by “Florencia” Trinidad or “Flor de la V” (born Roberto Carlos Trinidad) and Pablo Goycochea, whom Roberto married in 2010 after having a full surgical “transition.”

The event was widely covered by the Argentinian popular press; a photograph of the pair posing together with García Cuerva and the two toddlers in front of the main altar of the Basilica of the Most Holy Sacrament, where the baptism took place, was used for the cover of the society magazine Gente in August 2012. The Basilica is especially sought after by high society in Buenos Aires; perpetual adoration is organized there.

The godmothers and godfathers of the children included the biological son and daughter of Goycochea.

García Cuerva agreed to baptize Paul Alexander and Isabella after several parish priests refused to do so, among other things because Roberto was baptized as a male. During the ceremony, García Cuerva gave Holy Communion to “Florencia” and Pablo, thereby condoning attempted sex-changes and homosexual activity.

García Cuerva argued that children have a right to be baptized, but canon law requires that there be good hope that the baptized infant will be raised in the Catholic faith, as its consent will be expressed by its parents or godparents and not by the child itself.

It was only a few days later that Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, violently criticized priests who refuse to baptize babies born out of wedlock. According to GloriaTV, the then-archbishop at the time phoned two priests who refused to carry out the baptisms and accused them of “filling the Church of the Lord with precepts.”

“They are todays hypocrites, those who clericalize the Church, those who are keeping the people of God away from salvation,” said the then-archbishop, speaking specifically of unmarried mothers and their babies, but close enough to the “Flor de la V” event for this to be identified as one of the reasons for his outburst.

In February 2021, then as bishop of Rios Gallegos, Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva challenged a local priest in Ushuaia who celebrated the “marriage” of a man with a transsexual who appeared as a woman, dressed in black in homage to other gender-confused people who are not allowed to marry in the Church. Father Fabián Colman, a Salesian priest, had welcomed the two men to his parish church and the ceremony was in all ways similar to that of the sacrament of Matrimony.

Shortly afterward, Colman was moved to another parish, but sources quoted by the local press said the priest had been notified about the move already in December and it was in no way linked to the trans “marriage” he had “blessed,” also giving Communion to the pair and to their 60 or so guests.

As to Bishop García Cuerva, he merely published a statement after the event denying that he had given consent for the ceremony to take place. But there was no public condemnation of the objective scandal and sacrilege that had taken place.

The diocese’s official and remarkably weak communiqué instead noted, “We accompany all persons without exception in their legitimate desire to receive God’s blessing. We state for the record that this case is not about the sacrament of marriage as the Church believes and holds it to be. The priest in question has already been duly warned.”

In the statement, Bishop García Cuerva added, “As the own pastor of this diocesan Church, I want to convey to all the people of God who are pilgrims in Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego my closeness, asking that we all pray that we may always maintain Christian charity towards our neighbor, accompanying his pains and sufferings, his joys and hopes, and at the same time preserving the deposit of the teaching of Jesus, the Lord.”

In fact, the bishop’s mention of “all persons’ legitimate desire to receive God’s blessing” reads as a partial approval of Colman’s move, and Colman is now functioning a s a priest in good standing in the parish of Maria Auxiliadora in Chos Malal, Neuquén, in central Argentina. There Mass is concelebrated by Colman and two other priests on what looks like a kitchen table with the help of an accordion, as a recent video shows.

Back to Bishop García Cuerva and the Congregation for Bishops. He has told the Argentine media Tiempo Sur that he wants “to contribute to the model of bishop that Francis wants from us: a poor bishop for the poor.” In other words, a bishop who is in line with Francis’s “people theology,” an offshoot of Liberation Theology.

Giving such a man as García Cuerva a say in the choosing and promoting of bishops, successors of the Apostles, is the sign of a profound contempt of the Church’s teachings and of the delusional form of “charity” that minimizes truth and justice.

The Congregation for Bishops, which is still under the authority of its prefect Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who tendered his resignation at age 75 in June but who has yet to be replaced, is surely a key element of Pope Francis’s plan to modify the Church. It can put pressure on existing bishops, not all of whom are impervious to the sirens of ambitions, honors and advancement. It can also profoundly remodel a diocese by replacing a traditionally-minded pastor with a modernist one, or by failing to accept the resignation of “progressive” prelates.

Cardinal Ouellet, for instance, was one of the four cardinals who, according to highly trustworthy sources, lobbied Pope Francis for the replacement of Summorum Pontificum by a new motu proprio: Traditionis Custodes. It is a clear attempt to outlaw the Traditional Latin Mass in the Church; bishops who refuse to implement it are not going to look good to the Congregation for the Bishops.

García Cuerva will find another protégé of Pope Francis at the Congregation for the Bishops: its secretary, Monsignor Ilson de Jesús Montanari, a Brazilian prelate, is an intimate friend of another Rome-based prelate, the Pope’s Argentinian private secretary Fabián Pedacchio.

In her “Who’s who of the Viganò” testimony published three years ago by LifeSite, Dorothy Cummings McLean had this to say of the Congregation’s present secretary: “Ilson de Jesús Montanari, b.1959, Secretary of the Congregation for Bishops since 2013; Viganò says that his promotion in the department was unprecedented and that he is a great friend of Francis’ secretary; Viganò also says he must have known about McCarrick, given his position.”

García Cuerva called himself “enormously surprised” by his nomination as a member of the Congregation for Bishops. He told the Argentinian Catholic News Agency, AICA: “Pope Francis invited me, last Friday, to carry out this service in the Church, and I hope to fulfill it with great humility and commitment.” He also said that in his new office, he would be “looking for bishops after the Pope’s heart:” “Bishops who take to the street, not princes of the Church.”

He often speaks of bishops who should be “close to the people” and, in the words of Pope Francis, of a “Church” that must welcome all in the way of a “battlefield hospital.”

The Swiss Catholic Internet portal, cath.ch, which has the support of the Swiss episcopate, offered a portrait of García Cuerva in March 2020, one year after his nomination as bishop of Rio Gallegos: “truly a bishop of the peripheries,” the article gushed.

“I am a fan of Pope Francis, perhaps the most bergoglioanist of the Argentinian bishops,” the story quoted García Cuerva as saying. Aged 52 at the time, the young bishop told of his devotion for Msgr. Oscar Romero, at the same time accusing “justice” of “biting” the “bare feet of the poor” like a “serpent”: “Prisons are full of bare-foot people, the poor and the vulnerable,” he said, invoking his experience as prison chaplain.

“I’ve worked for years with prisoners, prostitutes, gays, transsexuals… I say that we are all sinners loved by God, whoever we are.” This is true, of course – provided that one does not confuse love of the sinners and love of the sin. His motto is: “Turn not away thy face from any poor person” (Tob. 4, 7).

In his diocese, he is committed to fighting drugs and to the prevention of prostitution and human trafficking and wants to change the cultural norms of immigrant groups in which sexual abuse is widely tolerated. The only way, says García Cuerva, is to live in the presence of these groups, to be close to them and to foster links with them, leading him to “join their feasts and dance with them.”

Unsurprisingly, Bishop García Cuerva has promoted the COVID experimental “vaccine” as the “only way out” of the coronavirus crisis.