BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Thanks to Beatrice for leading me to this item from Korazym, which she describes on her webpage 'APRES LE PONTIFICAT'
benoit-et-moi.fr/2013-II/
as "break(ing) with the ambient unanimity". In it, the reporter seeks to talk to others who are not necessarily part of the Hallelujah chorus, who have not been afflicted by a self-willed amnesia about the Pontificate of Benedict XVI that seems more and more opportunistic on the part of the media and those whose opinions they shape.

Indeed, if I were still a reporter and were covering, say, the Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square on March 31, I would not have limited myself to just quoting persons completely enraptured by the new Pope, but would have sought some balance (not numerical, but attitudinal) by quoting others - and surely there are plenty - who did not just drop all memory of Benedict XVI into a black hole of oblivion but remember him for what he was (and is) and what he did, as the reporter does in this article (although she does not quote any Francis partisans, because the point of her story is to counteract the one-sided image presented by the media.)

But when was the last time since March 13, 2013, that anyone in the media, including Catholic media, ever showed objectivity and impartiality on this subject? No, they only cite what will tend to support the narrative they choose to present to the world about any event or personality. This is not to cast doubt at all on the authenticity of Pope Francis and of the adulation and admiration he inspires, but a judgment on those who habitually misuse their power to inform by presenting only a highly biased account of events.

Thanks to Pope Benedict....
by Elisa Bertoli
Translated from


Almost two months have passed since that February 11 when Benedict XVI announced to the world that he was resigning the Papacy. Two months during which [going by media reports and commentary] Catholics have gone from stunned surprise and confusion about the Pope's decision. to the hopes pinned on the Conclave that would elect his successor, and then the enthusiasm which continues to mount for Pope Francis.

In less than two months, the eight years of Benedict XVI's
4ntificate have seemed to become nothing more than an old memory. [Worse than that - as if they had never happened at all. Except, of course, when the media choose to bring up Vatileaks or the issue of sex-offender priests or some other blacker-than-black misdeed they choose to see as a personal 'crime' committed by that unworthy scoundrel Benedict XVI! In hindsight, all the unfavorable comparisons with John Paul II now seem less objectionable compared to the present situation.]

But among the faithful, Benedict XVI continues to be a living memory. [To begin with, he has not died!]

"I keep expecting Benedict XVI on the Popemobile - I am still not accustomed to not seeing him here anymore", says Paola, just a few minutes before Pope Francis's expected entry into St. Peter's Square.

"I saw Pope Francis directly for the first time, but I felt like I was watching a film. On TV, I had become accustomed to seeing him [as Pope], but in St. Peter's Square, it is very different for me. I still cannot seem to believe that the man in white is not Benedict XVT".

To listen to many who have seen Pope Francis live, but have not promptly forgotten Benedict XVI, one realizes that human memory can be longer than that which is dictated by the media. The latter 'forget' in great haste, but the faithful do not always take their cue.

Many do not simply not forget Benedict XVI as the universal Pastor of the Church for eight years - so many will never forgot how much he transformed their lives. [Popes have the singular power to do this - not just for isolated cases but for many. Just as already the media have been recounting the transformations effected by Pope Francis.]

Liliana was a victim of domestic violence that was moral, psychological, economic and physical. After 20 years of marriage and two children (13 and 8), "I was undergoing the darkest time of my life - I thought life was futile and despair was consuming me".

But then she recalled Benedict XVI's continual admonitions to pray - "Pray with your heart. Prayer is your winning weapon. Pray and miracles will happen. Pray and you will change your life".

"It was 2010," she says, "but suddenly, I felt that the Pope was speaking directly to me. So I started to pray, with the help of a prayer book that I had kept in a drawer for a few years and had never opened. Then Benedict XVI came to Mestre [suburb of Venice, where the Pope held a Mass for 350,000 on his pastoral visit to Venice] which is near where I live. Immediately, despite many practical difficulties,I made arrangements for me and my children to go see him... And afterwards, I went home feeling a strange calm that serenity that I asked for in my prayers, and for which I invoked his prayers - 'Pope Benedict, pray for my children, for myself, and for the whole world'... Within two years, the 'miracle' happened for me, and today I live with my children far from the place where we had suffered so much. I have work and we have a home, but the most important thing is that we are all free, serene and at peace".

She continued: "When Benedict XVI decreed the Year of Faith, I was truly moved, because I realized that with sincere faith, I had warded off more evil, and my heart has been full of serenity. And I wish that every woman who has been victimized like me can find strength in prayer, because prayer can move mountains".

Elisa is a student of modern literature, and she says she came to 'know' Benedict XVI by coming to St. Peter's Square some time last spring.

"I was in Rome with a friend to attend a conference, and our schedule included the Pope's Wednesday audience in St. Peter's Square. Walking towards the Vatican, I was thinking that I would find the usual image of the Vatican as a place concerned exclusively with power, and the Pope - described as a cold German theologian - as someone rich and powerful and remote from the people.

"But what I experienced that day in St. Peter's Square was a profoundly human Pope, someone who was close, and I started to see the Church in a new light, to feel that I was indeed Catholic. I can still see the moment: Benedict XVI in the Popemobile passed in front of us, and I realized how physically exhausted he looked, as if he were literally carrying the weight of the whole Church on his shoulders. And yet, ever after, seeing him so many times on TV, following him on his travels and his various encounters with the faithful - my eyes perceived both his humanity as well as the beauty of the Catholic Church.

"He has left me with an important legacy. He made me understand that the Church is not renewed with 'progress' understood as showy 'openings' but with simple gestures. That the face of the Church improves simply by showing that it is possible to be in the world but not of the world and a society where power is everything. Benedict XVI ultimately made the humble choice of renouncing the Pontificate".


On her blog, Lella has been soliciting responses from all those who wish to share their personal memories and/or experiences about Benedict XVI - and that should eventually be a rich lode to mine, I shall choose the most interesting to translate. Meanwhile, I have searched for the existence of any Pope Francis website online other than the Vatican site, and thought I hit paydirt with the link
www.the-pope-francis.com/
But it appears to be an initiative begun by the blog server wordpress and contains nothing so far but a "Hello world!" post dated March 14, 2013 at 12:00am. I hope a true unofficial website gets started to which we can all run to as a more-or-less comprehensive reference for all-things-Pope-Francis, just for convenience, because there is obviously no lack of sites or links rife with Pope Francis material, only one has to access them one by one...

Also picked up from Beatrice's website, this commentary published in Corriere della Sera...

Too much rhetoric about Pope Francis:
Beware of those who would rashly imitate him
by Piero Ostellini
Translated from

April 3, 2012

The saccharine mélange that has flooded the media of an ill-digested do-gooding rhetorical progressivism that is also quite clerical [viewing religion as an instrument of power] and even bigoted appears to be submerging Pope Francis himself.

The Italian media have treated Italians, believers or otherwise, as if they were devoid of an autonomous capacity to judge for themselves and to whom one can sell a Pope as one does a detergent. [In fairness, the media chorus has not been so much 'selling' Pope Francis - who 'sells himself' so effectively by a series of gestures and decisions that have clearly marked him off as different from any Pope before him - as exploiting his inherent marketability as a Pope who possesses the maximum possible common denominator of populism that they did not have even with John Paul II.]

It is mortifying that an influential part of the nation should manifest an incapacity to objectively observe - with respect to religion, the Church and the secular State - an event as important as the election of the Pope.

In the media view, ecclesiastical pauperism is the sales pitch for now of the Church, and the political essence of her hierarchy, beyond her mission of charity.

It is wrong to interpret the actions of Pope Francis as the prodrome for a 'doctrine of poverty' which would apply not only to the Church but even to politics and the lifestyles of civilian coexistence.

In truth, it is perhaps more correct to say that the choices made by the Pope so far are only the manifestations of his personal fastidiousness against the external magnificence of some of the historic rituals of the Church as an institution. A fastidiousness that he uses as a form of evangelization.

The long dominion of the Church, including a political one, on the faithful is often felt concretely both in the invasiveness of her theological authority [i.e., her moral position on social issues!] as well as her own ability to exercise secular control [And when was the Church able to do this in the modern era? Not even in Italy, which is the context for the writer's reflections.]


First built as a fortress in 1267, it was completed as a church over the next 200 years and is the largest brick building in the world. It was made a UNESCO World Cultural heritage site in 2010.

The cathedral of Albi, in southern France, which with its overpowering dimensions, dominates from its fortress altitude the tiny village where it is located, is a symbol of that Church dominion in the past. It is the concrete representation of the victory of Catholicism over the 13th-century Albigensian heresy [also known as the Cathar heresy, from the Greek word for 'pure'; Albigensian is a term that came to be used when the movement gained its widest foothold near Albi, France] which theorized a good God and an evil God, salvation for everyone, and multiple salvific reincarnations.

In short, the Albigensians preached 'an interior church', vary far from that of Rome, in which Christ would be at the center, not the Church hierarchy. [but since when has Roman Catholicism every preach that anything or anyone other than Christ be the center of the Church and of the faith???? Actually, a Wiki backgrounder says that the Cathars practised and advocated the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching. No problem with that, except that they considered Jesus only as an angel in human form, and their moral doctrine was based on the belief that the material world including the flesh was intrinsically evil, since it stemmed from the evil demiurge, and so they were celibate. Likewise, the Cathars did not recognize civil authority since this was the rule of the physical world. They called themselves the 'good men' or 'good Christians'.].

And yet a church that disapproved of baptism, the Eucharist and any form of worship. That opposed monotheism and the doctrine of original sin, Augustine's symbol of evil and man's ultimate condemnation.

The Albigensians believed man owes his salvation only to divine grace and his own reformed and enlightened free will, not to sacraments, much less to the edification of churches and basilicas that concretized the magnificence of the Catholic faith nor through any charity done through the mediation of the Church hierarchy. [Of course, they eventually developed their own hierarchy in southern France and northern Italy, with bishops, priests and deacons who went out and evangelized.]

The Cathar heresy was used as a pretext by the French State, with the active connivance of Catholics, to quell the autonomism of the Duke of Toulouse through the massacre of thousands of Cathar followers. [The writer bringing up the Cathar heresy and its doctrine of perfection, poverty and preaching is hardly subtle at all but not completely apropos either!]

Pope Francis's personal militancy as a Jesuit and the dark legends of the Society of Jesus during the Counter-Reformation, could induce some disquieting hypotheses about this Pontificate which has just begun. It would be a mistake to do so.

Only what he will do during the Pontificate will tell us exactly who he is - this Pope who is Jesuit by premise and Franciscan by promise. But the fact remains that his pastoral modalities threaten to serve as a model to be imitated, which is a risk for the necessary separation of politics from ethics, even if the Church is immersed in contemporaneity - child of Macchiavellian realism, liberal skepticism and most importantly, of her own secularization.

What form it takes - this danger of the clericalization of politics by a Third World Pope - is quickly apparent. It is in the 'imitative' vocation of our weak national (Italian) culture. We have become a nation of Zeligs, quick to imitate the person who happens to be next to us, not having our own individual identity, and it is realistic to hypothesize that sooner or later, someone will emerge in politics or civilian society who will think it his duty to imitate the suggestive populist pauperism of the new Pontificate. Which, one must admit but not concede, would be compatible with what seems to be the Church of the Third Millennium, conditioned not just by the financial nonchalance of the Vatican state [What financial nonchalance? As if Benedict XVI's financial transparency law and Moneyval's controls had never happened![, but also by a bourgeois spirit, by the industrial and economic revolutions, by liberal democracy and by the mediatic society. All of which would be physiologic to the politics and lifestyle of a post-modern nation.

One already sees the first signs of a certain counter-reformatory spirit manifested in anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist tendencies that were already infiltrated into our political culture by a Marxism that would have scandalized Karl Marx himself.

Rather, we must arm ourselves against all attempts to criminalize the market, profit and wealth itself - as the very dung of the devil. A criminalization that is the symbol of the mistaken idea of 'equality and social justice', which in a time of 'pluralistic values', of consumerism and the diffusion of mass wellbeing, is anachronistic.

The imitation, on the political level, of the salvific mission of "a poor Church for the poor', according to the Latin-American version of liberation theology [Latin America is the only place where it has prospered to any degree!] that the Church has long denounced, would be mortifying for Italian civil society and Catholicism itself - with the right aspiration for a purifying change within the Church herself - which shows no signs of aspiring to, favoring, and much less sustaining, any 'counter-revolution' even in the secular world.

Pauperism, elevated to political culture, would nullify the historic separation between Church and State - which Cavour wanted at the time of Italian unification, and which was reaffirmed after World War II by the great Catholic Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi.

It would also cancel out the wise renunciation by the Church authorities themselves of exercising over Italy any secular hegemony as she did in the remote past.

Let the Pope be the Pope, according to the historical order and the doctrine of the Church herself. But whoever would be tempted to follow his example in politics needs to reflect well on it, and above all, to forget it.

Very apropos, a quotation resurrected since the death of the great Margaret Thatcher of Britain yesterday was a terse denunciation of pauperism - "The poor will not be better off if only the rich were less rich!" A companion aphorism to her more famous saying that "Socialism works until you run out of other people's money". Social justice is not wealth redistribution - it is providing equal opportunity for all after making sure that everyone knows how to fish, not just giving them fish. I wish I could express it as elegantly and tersely as Lady Thatcher expressed herself.