TOMORROW THE COMPANY OF JESUS ​​WILL BE BURIED FOREVER. È MORTO PETER GUMPEL, JESUITE OF THE OLD SCHOOL AND POSTULATOR OF THE CAUSE OF BEATIFICATION OF PIUS XII

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Father Peter Gumpel was the last of the Mohicans. When tomorrow morning at 10 her funeral services will be celebrated with him will be permanently buried, after the previous deaths of the other elders, what was once the glorious Society of Jesus, reduced today to all the most tragic squalor personified by the unhappy and above all seriously heterodox jokes of their Superior General Arturo Sosa Abascal.

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Yesterday morning Andrea Tornielli, dear old friend, he had the sensible kindness to inform me that the Jesuit Peter Kurt Gumpel had recently died, theologian and historian of dogma, already expert at the Second Vatican Council, for half a century postulator general of the Society of Jesus together with his confrere Paolo Molinari (1924-2014), with whom he took care of the cause of beatification of Pius XII. Both were trusted private advisors of the Holy Pontiff Paul VI in the delicate and turbulent historical phase of the post-council.

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Father Peter, born in Hannover on 15 November 1923, he came from a rich family of the ancient German aristocracy, soon disliked the Nazi regime. This is the reason why they first moved to France and then to Holland, where the very young Peter, he learned the language and studied. Being a connoisseur of that country and its language, when decades later the delicate problem of the publication of the Dutch Catechism arose (1966), the Supreme Pontiff Paul VI sent him as his trustee on a visit to Holland.

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Only male heir of the family, several times he told me of how much adolescent he expressed to his father that he wanted to enter the Society of Jesus:

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“We were in the car, my father stopped, he made me get off with my dachshund dog with whom I walked a few kilometers to return home. When I entered my father told me never to go back to certain fantasies. Then he added that he would allow me to enter the Society of Jesus only if the Supreme Pontiff himself had told him ".

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The young man took his father at his word. The family had known and hosted Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli several times, at the time apostolic nuncio to Berlin, elected in 1939 to the sacred throne, to which he did not hesitate to write. A month later the father received an autograph letter from the Supreme Pontiff Pius XII asking him to allow his son to enter the Society of Jesus..

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Since I was a student with his brother Paolo Molinari he made a profound one, fraternal and intense friendship that lasted for a lifetime. During his student period in England he was an indefatigable fan of Father Paolo who masterfully played football. To my question if he ever played, with humor all the Teutonic answered:

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"No, because it is intellectually more gratifying and physically less tiring to cheer from the stands for those who play ".

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Yup, he preferred to sit and smoke one cigarette after another and enjoying the game of others. Heavy smoker, several times I found him in his study enveloped in a blanket of smoke. He could also have not signed the documents he had drawn up, because the author could have been recognized by the smell of tobacco that impregnated them. I told him once while I was smoking with him:

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«Certainly smoking is seriously harmful to health, but I fear that even cancer is far from the Jesuits, taking care not to have to deal with dangerous subjects like you ".

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Father Peter and Father Paolo they have been my teachers and trainers, for years they have guided me beyond the words imprinted in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, explaining step by step from which stories and events many of those texts were born. After my specialized studies in dogmatics, Father Peter started me on the study of the history of dogma, in the absence of which one can run the risk of ending up immersed in a dogmatic that rests on the clouds. He suggested that my bishop send me to study for a period of time in Germany, where I had some Jesuits of the old guard as teachers. Later I was trained in the postulation of the causes of the Saints, where they instructed me mainly on the papers of the delicate and complex process of beatification of the Venerable Pontiff Pius XII, to which I dedicated in 2006 the main section of my work Herbs Amare, from which a single essay dedicated to the figure of Eugenio Pacelli was later born: Pius XII and the Shoah.

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The 2 May 2014, when the funeral services of Father Paolo Molinari were celebrated in the chapel of the General Curia of the Society of Jesus, I understood that Father Peter had lost half of his life and that from then on he would be prepared to lose the other half he had left.

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The year was 2013 when during an interview he told me that the current Society of Jesus had no affinity and similarity with the one in which he had entered at the beginning of the Second World War. I understood that he was not referring to a transformation due to a natural process of evolution, but to a radical deformation that had long since affected the very heart of the charism of the Companions of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

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Shortly after the friend's notice I arrived at the Residenza San Pietro Canisio together with my brother Marcello Stanzione, great expert in angelology with whom I had been traveling until the day before. We found his body composed at the least worst possible way, placed in a corner at the entrance of the San Pietro Canisio Residence, without a cross, without a light on, without a flower. Emblem of the squalor of today's East India Company. I kissed the cold forehead of my father and trainer, I laid my hands on his and together with Father Marcello we recited the From the depths and blessed is that revered body which it contained for almost 100 years his immortal priestly soul.

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Father Peter Gumpel he was the last of the Mohicans. When tomorrow morning at 10 her funeral services will be celebrated with him will be permanently buried, after the previous deaths of the other elders, what was once the glorious Society of Jesus, reduced today to all the most tragic squalor personified by the unhappy and above all seriously heterodox jokes of their Superior General Arturo Sosa Abascal.

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A beautiful memory by Father Federico Lombardi, S.J. his The Osservatore Romano [view of page. 4 from The Osservatore Romano, WHO].

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the Island of Patmos, 13 October 2022

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