Pope Francis, in his Christmas address to the Curia.

The quote below, from Pope Francis speaking to the Curia, is taken from an article by Joshua McElwee, Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter.  In it Francis is clearly having a go at Cardinal Muller, former head of the CDF.  Muller being the man who sidelined myself, and who later, when he was let go by Francis, complained bitterly that he wasn’t given proper procedures. Which, of course, I found particularly ironic!

Francis lambasted “the betrayers of trust or the profiteers of the maternity of the church; people that are selected to give better vigor to reform but — not understanding the highness of their calling — let themselves be bribed by ambition or vainglory and when they are delicately removed erroneously declare themselves martyrs of the system, of a ‘pope who doesn’t know,’ of the ‘old-guard,’ instead of reciting ‘mea culpa.’ “

Among those who left Vatican service in the last year were the city-state’s first auditor general, a deputy in the so-called Vatican bank, and the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller.