The Eponymous Flower

Friday, October 16, 2026

Now We Know Why Bergoglio Never Returned to Argentina

Alicia Barrios, a close confidante of Bergoglio, confirmed that as Pope Francis he did not want to return to Argentina

“Francis did not come to Argentina because he did not want to – he was treated very badly.” With this pointed statement, the journalist Alicia Barrios, a longtime friend of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, yesterday offered a personal interpretation of one of the most striking omissions of Francis’s pontificate: The first pope from Latin America never returned to his homeland after his election in March 2013.

Barrios knew Bergoglio from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Her assessment points to a strained relationship between the later pope and his homeland that went far beyond the question of a missed trip.

Barrios thereby contradicts key points of the official narrative that was spread by the Bergoglian circle inside and outside the Vatican. According to this, a visit to Argentina had been made difficult for years by the country’s political polarization. Francis had therefore been advised against a trip from the Vatican because his visit would inevitably have been co-opted by political camps both positively, but above all also negatively. At the same time, the Pope had repeatedly indicated that he himself was considering a return.

Observers expressed the view early on that Francis in reality never had the intention of returning to his homeland again.

The dilemma was obvious: His earlier conflicts with political decision-makers made it difficult to detach him from the domestic political disputes of his country. This was all the more true since he, not only as Archbishop of Buenos Aires but also during his time as Pope, repeatedly and directly tried to exert influence on the political development of his country of origin. His efforts were directed at a certain radical left, but also at left-wing Peronism. Although Bergoglio had considerable conflicts to settle with individual representatives of this direction, these apparently weighed little when it came to preventing the electoral victory of a president from the non-left camp.

The political polarization that Francis apparently feared, he had to a good extent provoked himself. It was apparently even worth the renunciation of a visit to Argentina to him.

The statement by Barrios, a close confidante of Bergoglio, now confirms that it was Francis himself who did not want to visit Argentina. Francis had even said it openly in 2021: “I do not miss Argentina.”

Barrios suggests that behind the failure to return home were not only diplomatic considerations and tactical deliberations, but also personal experiences and injuries. Of the injuries he had inflicted on others, there is no mention.

Just one example among many may be mentioned: On the abortion question, Francis refused to really throw his authority as head of the Church into the balance, both first as Primate of Argentina and then as Pope. The disappointment among the pro-life supporters was enormous. The alliance, even in this question, with non-left forces was an abomination to him. Even more, he did not want to jeopardize his alliance with the political left, to which he adhered unwaveringly throughout his entire pontificate, without being able to draw any recognizable success in evangelization or any other benefit for the Church from it.

Francis died on April 21, 2025, without having seen Argentina again as Pope. Thus the non-return to the homeland remains a telling example of how much personal history and political conflicts can overshadow and darken the Church’s mission.

Text: Giuseppe Nardi

Image: X (Screenshot)

Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com

AMDG

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Film Star Refused Communion by Imperious Presbyter

Edit: wouldn’t have expected this man to do something like this. I wonder who the “priest” was. Some pretender, no doubt. Only a huge 9ha660zt would refuse a communicant like this.

AMDG

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Happy Lepanto Day!

AMDG

Friday, October 2, 2026

Eucharistic Damage Control!

Edit: this Hopkins Parish in Minnesota looks like it has your conservative NO. The priests are wearing fiddlebacks and the tabernacle is covered with a veil. There are so many perils to the spiritual life, like apparently conservative and spiritual, but mentally unstable clergy that might flip out and murder the staff of a funeral home. Did Father Haverstock just diss his associate?

“The real miracle is the fellowship we share.”

The last time we know that something like this happened was at Saint Augustine’s when the pastor found what looked like a piece of bloody flesh after putting a consecrated Host in a chalice of water to disintegrate. We said it was serratia mascerens possibly, a bacterium which leaves a red residue.

The worthless Archdiocese sent it to some bonehead mycologist who said it was a fungus known as Fusarium, which grows on wheat that’s growing and kills it, leaving a white substance. The Archdiocese wouldn’t say what it was and didn’t give any details, because they’re evil.

According to the worthless Communications Director Dennis McGrath, it was a fungus. They apparently didn’t send the sample to be tested for human tissue and probably didn’t send it to anyone at all, and I repeat, we never received a response from those people, except they wanted us to take a Father Echert photo down on the blog, since it was their IP. The Marxist local news took this picture with a fisheye lense which made Echert look odd, like a Lovecraftian demi-human. I found a better picture of him from when he was in Iraq and replaced the one they asked me to take down. You know, I’ve grown to really despise the general parsimony and manifest evil of the chancery, but their indifference to the divine is at a whole new level!

Anyway, it was a low effort takedown of the possible miracle by the Archdiocese. I’m sure the last thing the now deceased Origenist Archbishop, +Scary Flynn, wanted to deal with. So there is evidence, as if any were needed, that if God appeared miraculously to the clergy in this Archdiocese, that the authorities would do everything in their power to pretend they didn’t see Him.

AMDG

Marxist Archbishop Hebda Censures Father Conklin for “Connection” to SSPX

Do heretics have jurisdiction?

Archbishop Bernard Hebda will stand in the sanctuary of the Basilica of Saint Mary while a rabbi addresses the Catholic congregation and an imam quotes the Quran from the same floor. He will not let one of his own priests remain in public ministry for affiliating with the Society of Saint Pius X.

That is the pattern. The non-Catholic thing is hosted. The Catholic thing, if it is the old Mass and the old objections, is processed.

On the evening of 28 August 2025, the day after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School, Hebda led an interfaith service at the Basilica. The Basilica’s own page lists the company: Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of Temple Israel, Imam Matthew Ramadan of Masjid An-Nur, Episcopal Bishop Craig Loya, Metropolitan Nathanael of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, and, on the Catholic side, Hebda with Bishops Michael Izen and Kevin Kenney. The Catholic Spirit reported the imam greeting the congregation and citing the Quran: “Whoever kills a soul, unless for justice or for corruption in the land, it is as if they had killed all of humanity.” Father Daniel Griffith, the rector, told reporters the doors were open to “people of faith, people of no faith, agnostic.” Two children, Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, had been killed at Mass the morning before. The archdiocese’s answer was a shared service.

The Eponymous Flower wrote it up on 30 August 2025 under the headline “Minnesota McCarrick, Archbishop Hebda Advocating for Gun Control at Interfaith Mess in Fancy Gay Basilica.”

The post quotes the line, attributed there to Christopher Hale, that describes the arrangement exactly: a Jewish rabbi who does not believe in the divinity of Christ, a Protestant minister who doubts it, and a Catholic priest who agrees to forget it for an evening. Hebda’s contribution, as that piece records it, was that prayer “doesn’t absolve us” from steps against gun violence, and that prayer is not “a hall pass for political inaction.” The same post sets the old law next to the new courtesy. Canon 33 of the Council of Laodicea: “No one shall join in prayers with heretics or schismatics.” Apostolic Canon 45: a bishop or priest who merely joins in prayer with heretics is to be suspended, and if he has permitted them to perform any service as clergymen, deposed. The 1917 Code forbade Catholics to take part in non-Catholic worship. None of that was cited from the ambo.

The companion piece, posted 28 August, “Minnesota Archbishop’s Mealymouthed Response to Trannycide,” takes the statement Hebda actually issued. “My heart is broken as I think about students, teachers, clergy and parishioners and the horror they witnessed in a church, a place where we should feel safe.” The blog’s complaint is not that he grieved. It is that grief was asked to do the work of a judgment he would not make, and that the public act which followed was the interfaith service rather than a procession or a day of reparation.

The Basilica evening was not the first counter-example. The Eponymous Flower’s Hebda file records the 2 June 2020 walk. Hebda and other Minnesota clergy, Christian and otherwise, went in silence to the place where George Floyd died and prayed at the memorial. His own summary, quoted there from a tweet: “While many faiths were represented, there was great unity as we prayed for justice and peace.” The same file notes him on a platform with Jewish and Muslim leaders calling for refugee admissions, speaking from Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. Canon 1210 is quoted against the habit: in a sacred place only what serves worship, piety, and religion is to be permitted.

Set the other column beside it. This week Hebda wrote to the people of Saint Michael and Saint Mary in Stillwater that Father Philip Conklin, ordained for the archdiocese in 2024 and parochial vicar there until March, had affiliated with the Society of Saint Pius X and would not end the affiliation. Hebda has opened a canonical process “to clarify the situation and his status,” and has told Conklin he is not to exercise any public priestly ministry. In July he had already said the Society had rejected Pope Leo XIV’s pleas and gone ahead with episcopal consecrations. The Eponymous Flower noted the canon-law scramble at the time: “Canon 844 & Archbishop Hebda Reaches Out to SSPX Friends.”

So the permission and the prohibition are both public. An imam may quote the Quran in the Basilica, and a rabbi may speak from its sanctuary, and the archbishop will stand with them and call it prayer. A priest of the archdiocese may not remain in public ministry if he goes to the Society that still says the Mass Pius X knew. The non-Catholic thing is allowed. The older Catholic thing is not.

AMDG