Weekly News Roundup: Amazon Synod Update, Church Fires, Hagia Sophia, Open Letter to Viganò and Schneider

In this episode, CFN’s editors discuss the following news items:

Amazon Synod Update: Another Confirmation of Nefarious Motives
- Bishop David Martinez de Aguirre Guinea of Puerto Maldonado, Vice-President of the newly established Amazon Ecclesial Conference (as reported by Maike Hickson for LifeSiteNews): “He [Francis] thinks that the Amazon region, this Amazon Ecclesial Conference, is a testing ground … a practical application of the Second Vatican Council in this form of Church life.”
Churches Burned on Both Coasts
- San Gabriel Mission (Archdiocese of Los Angeles), founded by Fr. Junípero Serra in 1771.
- Queen of Peace Parish in the Diocese of Orlando, Florida, where the Traditional Latin Mass is offered weekly by FSSP priests.
Hagia Sophia Resubjugated to Islam
- On July 10, the Republic of Turkey announced that Hagia Sophia — the magnificent 6th-century cathedral built during the reign of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565) in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and later stolen by the invading Ottoman Turks in 1453 — will be reconverted back into a mosque after serving as a museum since 1935.
- Lebanese journalist Jenan Moussa noted a telling difference in the English vs. Arabic versions of Turkish President
  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s press release concerning the decision.
- In 1998, when he was mayor of Istanbul, Erdoğan famously recited the following words from an Islamic poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers….”
Pro-Life, Pro-Family Polish President Narrowly Wins Re-Election
- President Andrzej Duda narrowly defeated Rafał Trzaskowski, the current mayor of Warsaw, in Poland’s recent presidential election held on July 12.
- As Dorothy Cummings McLean explained for LifeSiteNews, “The Polish choice was not only between two candidates but between two philosophies: traditional Polish family values [Duda] versus a globalist pro-LGBT ethos [Trzaskowski].”
- The day after his re-election, on July 13, President Duda visited the Jasna Gora Monastery, where the famous icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa (Black Madonna) is housed, to thank Our Lady.
Open Letter to Archbishop Viganò and Bishop Schneider
- Published online on July 15 and signed by an original group of 51 scholars, clerics, dignitaries, and journalists (many more have since added their names — the total number of signatories is now over 90).
- The purpose of the letter is to convey “sincere gratitude” to their Excellencies for their “fortitude and care of souls during the ongoing crisis of Faith in the Catholic Church.”
- The signatories are “grateful for [their Excellencies’] calls for an open and honest debate about the truth of what happened at Vatican II and whether the Council and its implementation contain errors or aspects that favor errors or harm the Faith,” noting further, “Whether or not Vatican II can be reconciled with Tradition is the question to be debated, not a posited premise blindly to be followed even if it turns out to be contrary to reason.”
- The letter includes a reference to a private petition submitted by Msgr. Brunero Gherardini (1925-2017) to Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 calling for a re-examination of Vatican II in light of Tradition, which was later incorporated into a public petition to Benedict in 2011 signed by 50 Italian theologians and scholars, including Msgr. Gherardini and Professor Roberto de Mattei.