Benedict XVI at his desk in Castel Gandolfo (taken in 2010).
Very welcome 'news' about the Emeritus Pope - even if packaged misleadingly by the New York Times:
What do you call it when a news headline says something that the story itself does not say or even bear out?
The above is the New York Times headline today for a significant story about the Emeritus Pope - which,
taken by itself, is out-and-out FAKE NEWS, as any reading of the following story will show. (I am using
the Catholic Herald's headline in reporting the NYT story, since it reflects what the story really is.)
Leaked letters: Benedict XVI
rebukes criticism of resignation
Apparently written to Cardinal Brandmueller
who had openly criticized him for his decision
Headline from
Story by Jason Horowitz
ROME, Sept. 20, 2018 — The remarkable letter last month calling on Pope Francis to resign for allegedly shielding an abusive American cardinal also served as a public call to arms for some conservative Catholics who pine for the pontificate of the previous pope, Benedict XVI. For years now, they have carried his name like a battle standard into the ideological trenches.
Benedict apparently would like them to knock it off. [That's a completely tendentious interpretation of the letters as quoted, which are specific enough about what the pope is referring to - the anger felt by some of his fair-weather friends like Cardinal Brandmueller that he stepped down as pope... In the second place, I know of no conservative Catholic who needs to invoke Benedict XVI's name in order to be appalled over the PRESENT CRISIS in the Church.]
In private letters published on Thursday by the German newspaper
Bild, Benedict, who in retirement
has remained studiously quiet through the controversies over Francis’s fitness to lead the church, says that the “anger” expressed by some of his staunchest defenders risks tarnishing his own pontificate.
“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate,” Benedict wrote in a Nov. 23, 2017, letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany.
“In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.”
Requests to representatives of Benedict and Cardinal Brandmüller for comment and authentication were not returned early Thursday.
Bild provided the letters in their entirety to The Times.
Cardinal Brandmüller is one of the few cardinals who signed a 2016 letter of “dubia” — from the Latin for “doubts” — demanding clarification from Francis about his apparent willingness to open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, which the signatories argue is against church law.
The dubia letter received worldwide attention and served as
a de facto declaration of independence from Francis ['Independence' is the wrong word, especially since for as long as Bergoglio is pope, no cardinal or bishop can be 'independent' of him at all; the right word in this case is 'dissociation'] and its signatories, first among them the American cardinal Raymond Burke, have enthusiastically embraced the letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, which called on Francis to step down.
Archbishop Viganò claimed that Benedict had imposed sanctions on Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, for sexual misconduct, but that Francis had lifted those penalties. Francis’s defenders say there is no evidence that sanctions were placed on Cardinal McCarrick, who resigned in July, and point to ample evidence that he did not behave as if he were under such limitations. Neither the current pope nor his predecessor has commented.
Part of Archbishop Viganò’s motivation in publishing his letter was to come to the rescue of Benedict, who he felt was unfairly maligned by Italian journalists friendly to Pope Francis, according to Marco Tosatti, the Italian journalist who helped the archbishop draft the letter.
For years, the dissenting cardinals and their supporters have sought to align their cause to Benedict, who promised to remain “hidden to the world” after his 2013 resignation, which he attributed to his waning health and energy. Francis, 81, has made congenial visits to see Benedict, 91, creating white-robed photo opportunities that give the impression of a total lack of tension.
[These were all social visits, more precisely, courtesy visits. What would you do if the reigning pope paid you such a visit? Show ill will in his face? Or the grace of good manners and respect for his office?]
But Benedict, the first pope to resign in almost 600 years, refused to fully renounce the papacy, taking the title “pope emeritus” and continuing to live in the Vatican. “The ‘always’ is also a ‘forever’ — there can no longer be a return to the private sphere. My decision to resign the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this,” he said during his last general audience.
For many supporters of Francis, Benedict’s status casts an unwelcome shadow over Francis and gives license and comfort to his enemies, though the former pontiff has kept a very low profile. Defenders of Benedict say that by living away from the public eye behind Vatican walls, he is actually avoiding the creation of a rival power center.
But in private, even Benedict’s most adamant supporters express frustration with him for quitting and allowing the election of Francis, a more pastoral, less doctrinaire pontiff who they think is ruining the church. They blame Benedict for lacking fight and throwing in the towel in the face of mounting pressure inside the Vatican, especially after he received a 300-page dossier by three cardinals that many in the Vatican believe details an extensive gay lobby within the church.
In a letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany, Benedict said the frustration he and others had publicly expressed risked tarnishing his own pontificate.
In an interview in October of last year with the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Cardinal Brandmüller expressed that frustration publicly.
“The figure of ‘pope emeritus’ does not exist in the entire history of the church,” he said. “The fact that a pope comes along and topples a 2,000-year-old tradition bowled over not just us cardinals.”
He said that he had an interesting dinner party to celebrate a German carnival holiday on the day of the pope’s retirement in 2013. “We were just having our aperitif and were waiting for a missing guest when a journalist called with the question: Have you heard already? I thought the news was a carnival joke.”
Benedict, who is soft-spoken but can also be prickly, was not amused. He wrote in his letter to Cardinal Brandmüller that
“Out of this conflation a new agitation is gradually being generated,” which he said could inspire more books like “The Abdication,” by Fabrizio Grasso, which argues that having one or more popes emeriti could fragment papal authority.
(In his book, Mr. Grasso wrote, “Even for those with little imagination, it’s not hard to imagine a possible near future with more than one emeritus pope and, consequentially, an exclusive papal club, which could be no other than a proto-parliament of the Vatican State.”)
Benedict wrote,
“All this fills me with concern, and it was precisely because of this that the end of your F.A.Z. interview so unsettled me, because it would ultimately promote the same mood.”
The letter was his second in an exchange with Cardinal Brandmüller. The first, dated Nov. 9, 2017, was even sharper, coming as an immediate reaction to the German cardinal’s newspaper interview.
“Eminence!” he began. “You said that with ‘pope emeritus,’ I had created a figure that had not existed in the whole history of the church. You know very well, of course, that popes have abdicated, albeit very rarely. What were they afterward? Pope emeritus? Or what else?”
He cited the case of Pius XII, who feared capture by the Nazis and prepared a resignation in case that occurred.
“As you know, Pius XII had prepared a declaration in case the Nazis were to arrest him, that from the moment of the arrest he would no longer be pope but once again cardinal,” Benedict wrote. “In my case it would certainly not have been sensible to simply claim a return to being cardinal. I would then have been constantly as exposed to the media as a cardinal is — even more so because people would have seen in me the former pope.”
He added, “Whether on purpose or not, this could have had difficult consequences, especially in the context of the current situation.”
It is not clear what Benedict meant by “the current situation,” but some have interpreted it to mean the dismay among many of his followers about Francis. Benedict seemed to be saying that as a former pope, he was protected from such politics.
“With ‘pope emeritus,’ I tried to create a situation in which I am absolutely not accessible to the media and in which it is completely clear that there is only one pope,” he wrote. “If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I chose, please tell me.”
After Cardinal Brandmüller apparently begged Benedict’s forgiveness [Quite right he should have! What he told the FAZ amounted to a stab in the back - to the pope who had made him a cardinal. Did he even perhaps write Benedict XVI after February 11, 2013, or after February 28, 2013, to express his reservations directly to him about the renunciation and the use of the title pope emeritus?] and explained how much pain his resignation had caused him and like-minded conservatives, the pope emeritus wrote the second letter. He concluded it by saying,
“Let’s pray, as you did with the end of your letter, that the Lord comes to the aid of his church. With my apostolic blessing I am, Your Benedict XVI.”
On his blog today reporting this story (but quoting mostly from BILD - which apparently did not name Brandmueller in its story), Edward Pentin concludes with these two paragraphs:
Cardinal Brandmüller, one of the four cardinals to submit dubia to Pope Francis questioning aspects of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, has long been a supporter of Joseph Ratzinger, but also the most vocal critic of his decision to resign.
In 2016 he wrote an article calling for a law to define the status of the ex-pope and concluding that the resignation of the Pope “is possible, and it has been done, but it is to be hoped that it may never happen again.” An extended version of the article appeared in the periodical, The Jurist.
Compare the headline and the treatment of BILD with that of the NYT:
A striking exchange of letters:
Pope Benedict greatly concerned about his Church
by Nicholas Harbusch
Translated from
September 20, 2018
Pope Benedict XVI stepped down from the Papacy more than 5 years ago. The new crisis over clerical sex abuses in the Church places this surprising decision in a new light.
Two letters from the Emeritus Pope have now turned up which are shocking and will certainly merit the attention of Church historians. These letters show a Benedict XVI who is deeply concerned about the situation in the Church today.
The letters from November 2017 are to a German cardinal who had expressed criticism about Benedict XVI’s renunciation in a newspaper interview last year.
His main points:
That Benedict’s resignation brought the Church to a serious crisis, and that moreover, his resignation was unprecedented in Church history [as an event, clearly not, of course, but perhaps, for its circumstances], and has done serious damage to the Church.
The retired Pope reacted with an angry letter, in which he tells the cardinal:
“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate. In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.”
He corrected the cardinal sharply:
“With [the title] ‘pope emeritus,’ I tried to create a situation in which I am absolutely not accessible to the media and in which it is completely clear that there is only one pope. If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I chose, please tell me.”
Of course, there have been quite a few papal resignations before. But in the context of the cardinal’s criticism, Benedict XVI cites Pope Pius XII who took measures in 1944 to resign the papacy if the Nazis were to arrest him
[so they couldn’t say they arrested a pope].
It’s interesting that he implies a comparison with the Nazi-threatened pope.By whom did Benedict XVI feel himself threatened?
“Pray for me that I many not flee from the wolves,” he had said at the Mass that inaugurated his Pontificate in 2005. Who are the wolves? Vaticanista Armin Schwibach, a philosophy professor, told BILD:
"He probably means the network of high-ranking church princes who had created a system of power and abuse of power in the Vatican, with whom he had nothing in common.”
Did Benedict even come to fear being poisoned by henchmen of this network? In October 2012, as
Der Spiegel reported in May 2015, the president of the Bavarian State Office for Criminal Investigation is supposed to have traveled to Rome to investigate any security gaps in food preparation for the Pope.
[This sounds too melodramatic to be plausible. Since, as pope, all his meals were prepared by the Memores, the would-be ‘poisoners’ would have had to co-opt one of them (or Georg Gaenswein, or Paolo the valet, for that matter) to commit the crime! Or poison any of the foodstuffs brought in regularly from CastelGandolfo for the pope’s kitchen, and thereby risk killing everyone who ate at the pope’s table! Or equally unlikely, poison the pope’s food or drink at any meal he took outside the papal apartment!]
When the cardinal wrote back Benedict XVI to apologize for his public criticism, saying “May the Lord come to the aid of his Church”, the Emeritus Pope wrote in his reply:
“Let us pray, as you did at the end of your letter, that the Lord comes to the aid of his church. With my apostolic blessing I am Your Benedict XVI.”
So, does Benedict XVI believe that under his successor, the Church has fallen into a crisis for which only prayer can help?
[Obviously, not just prayer, but pro-active actions by those who wish to contain the crisis, to begin with, and begin to deal with it meaningfully.]
Benedict's successor, Pope Francis, is currently facing allegations that he listened to a powerful US cardinal for advice about the Church in the United States and for some key appointments to the cardinalate
[not to mention using him as a roving ambassador who, for example, initiated the dialog with Communist China that may soon lead to an agreement between the Vatican and Beijing about the fate of the Church in China], although he knew that Benedict had punished him for sexual offenses.
The editor-in-chief of the German Catholic news agency (KNA), Ludwig Ring Eifel, told BILD:
"The letters provide fascinating insights into the thinking of Benedict XVI. He is obviously very worried about the state of the church."
Benedict's private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, did not want to comment to BILD on the letters.
He recently said that the Church, shaken more than before by sex abuse scandals and systematic cover-ups, is now experiencing "its own 9/11".
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/09/2018 05:14]