For want of new material from anybody to mark the second anniversary since the end of Benedict XVI's blesed Pontificate - - maybe I just have not searched enough but there cannot be too many out there - here are some re-posts from 2014 and 2013.
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In 2014, I counted only five posts in a two-day peripd (Feb. 28-March 1) in the Anglophone media and blogosphere who remembered that February 28 was the first anniversary of the end of Benedict XVI's Pontificate.
Rocco Palmo recalled it with some videoclips and the text of Benedict XVI's last address as Pope (in Castel Gandolfo). Father Z reposted his real-time blogging as the final events of that day unfolded, with great videocaps from CTV's coverage of Benedict XVI's final public words as Pope, delivered in Castel Gandolfo.
And Fr. Dwight Longenecker, whose blogs this year one might describe as consistently along the lines of "What a miracle of God we have in Pope Francis!", suddenly remembers Benedict XVI long enough to tell us why he misses him. And Peter Kranieswski in the New Liturgical Movement website offers a rather offbeat but beautiful tribute to Benedict XVI that fills up some of the resounding silence from everyone else.
(We know, of course, that 'everyone else' is really counting down impatiently to the March 13th anniversary of Pope Francis's election and the explosion of panegyrics and pyrotechnics that it will occasion such as has never been seen before in recorded history for anyone's first anniversary of anything...)
Vatican Radio's English service decided to take note of the February 28t anniversary by interviewing an official at the CDF to ask him what he was doing on February 28, 2013.
CDF official recalls 'that historic day'
when Pope Benedict stepped down
February 28, 2014
One year ago (on February 28th 2013) Pope Benedict left the Vatican for the last time as Pope and was flown by helicopter to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
Benedict was the first Pope to step down in more than 600 years and for many people within the Vatican those final moments of his papacy are indelible images stamped in their memories.
One of those who was an eyewitness on that historic day was Monsignor John Kennedy, a senior official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Monsignor Kennedy worked with Pope Benedict for several years when as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger he was the Prefect of that Congregation. He shared with Susy Hodges his memories and emotions of that day that was like no other.
Mons. Kennedy recalls that February 28th last year when Pope Benedict formally stepped down was “a typically bright early spring day but it was so surreal.”
As a result, he said, it was really hard for him and his colleagues to concentrate on their work. “Our minds were on our desks but our hearts were with Pope Benedict.”
He describes how the people working at the Congregation that day “all felt magnetically drawn” to go up onto the roof terrace of their office building to witness with their own eyes the final scenes of Benedict’s departure from the Vatican.
Asked about his own emotions on that historic day, Monsignor Kennedy said: “I felt lost, I felt sad and I felt kind of empty.” He took pictures of Pope Benedict’s helicopter which after taking off turned back and came and circled right over the roof of their office building. and described how they “all waved” in a cheerful yet “heart-sinking” sort of way as it flew over their heads.
Later on that day, Monsignor Kennedy went down to St. Peter’s Square just before 8pm, the exact time when Benedict’s papacy formally came to an end and described what he saw and his own feelings.
“At eight o’clock the bells chimed … and then everybody in the square began to clap and I thought this was a nice way of saying (to Benedict) ‘Well done, thank you for everything you’ve done for us and we wish you well in the future.” [Thank you, Mons. Kennedy - that is one detail I had not read about before.]
Missing Papa Benedict
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker
February 28, 2014
Today is the anniversary with incredible memories of a frail Pope Benedict waving farewell, climbing into the helicopter and flying across the rooftops of Rome into retirement.
I miss him, and here’s why.
First of all, I think Pope Benedict shared my love of England and Anglicanism. He made a historic trip to England, giving an amazing speech in Parliament the very place where St Thomas More was tried.
During the visit he went out of his way to beatify a saintly man so close to his own heart and character: the gentle scholar John Henry Newman. Newman is the mentor and guide to countless Anglicans on their way to Rome, and Pope Benedict understood him not only with the head, but with the heart.
Benedict also took the amazingly historic step of establis'hing the Anglican Ordinariate
[which CardinalBergoglio thought was a mistake' and 'totally unnecessary'].
Instead of simply continuing endless detente-style ecumenical discussions with the Anglicans he actually DID something. He took a great risk in establishing the ordinariate, and showed tremendous faith and leadership–trusting the Anglicans who were knocking at Rome’s door and offering them a way to full communion.
This step of his, so momentous for us former Anglicans, and so overlooked by the rest of the world, may be one of those seeds that Archbishop Ganswein in a recent interview, believes Benedict has planted.
What do I love about Pope Benedict? His scholar’s mind and artist’s heart.
Here is a world class theologian and Bible scholar who is able to write with clarity, humility and grace.
Here is a musician–a quiet man who likes cats and wanted no more than to retire to his study and be with his musician brother, and yet at the point of possible retirement took up the mantle of the papacy declaring to the world in his first appearance just exactly who he was – a simple laborer in the Lord’s vineyard.
His eventual resignation from the papacy was another mark of his remarkable courage, complete humility and amazing faith. He did it, he said, out of obedience to the Lord–just as he took up the white cassock as an act of obedience to the Lord.
I love Pope Benedict because I am a Benedictine oblate. I have spent many happy hours and days visiting Benedictine monasteries on retreat, writing books about Benedict and his rule and sharing the Benedictine way with others.
That Joseph Ratzinger took the name of Benedict was music to my ears because St Benedict is one of the greatest, and yet quietest and most stable and seemingly unremarkable of saints. It was a perfect papal name for a man who has a monastic, scholarly mind and a cultured prayerful heart.
As St Benedict and his monks are cut off from the world and not understood by the world and even mocked and persecuted by the world, so this introvert was willing to take up the most terrible of tasks in the papacy and open his tender heart to the mockery and scorn of the world.
Do people think he was not hurt by comparisons to the Dark Sith Lord Palpatine? Do they think he was not hurt by being referred to as a Nazi and God’s Rottweiler?
Do they think he was not hurt at being mocked for wearing red shoes and fine vestments when he wore all those things not because he liked dressing up but because he really believed in a principle called “the hermeneutic of continuity”–in which the traditions of the past are treasured because they keep us linked and rooted in the past so we can live positively in the present and move confidently into the future.
Do they think this gentle scholar and shy musician was not hurt by the mockery of the world, the infighting in the Vatican, the scandals and the conflict? And yet he bore it all with a grace, a dignity and a gentle forbearance.
Finally, I love Pope Benedict for the personal reason that in 2006 he was the one who approved the paperwork for a dispensation from the vow of celibacy which opened the door for my ordination to the Catholic priesthood.
He’s the one I have to thank for the speedy delivery of the decision and the agreement that I might go forward to serve the church despite having a wife and children.
History will show Pope Benedict XVI to have been one of the great popes of this modern age. A gentleman, a scholar, a true man of faith and the Holy Spirit–a man full of grace and blessing:
Long Live Pope Emeritus Benedict.
Homage to Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI, one year later
by PETER KWASNIEWSKI
February 28,, 2014
On Thursday, February 28, 2013, at eight o’clock in the evening, Rome time, the See of Peter became vacant. Through his own unappealable decision and at a time appointed by himself, Pope Benedict XVI had ceased to be the Vicar of Christ on earth.
The past year has been, to say the least, a dramatic and tempestuous one, in which I have often wondered exactly what providential role the nearly eight-year pontificate of Benedict XVI was meant to have in the life of the Church—and what role it is meant to continue to have, through the rich teaching and inspiring example this pontificate left us, and through the enormous energies for reform it has unleashed throughout the Church.
(After all, we can truthfully say that the pontificates of St. Gregory the Great, Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and other popes of massive spiritual stature have continued and will continue to send out ripples, as it were, across the ocean of time, until the return of the Lord.)
In company with Pope Benedict, we observed the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council—a Council in which he vigorously took part, a Council whose legacy he later witnessed being manipulated or forgotten as the “virtual” or “media” Council and its antinomian “spirit” took the upper hand, and finally, a Council that he rightly demanded must be read in a “hermeneutic of continuity” with everything that had come before or had been clarified since.
All of this suggests that Pope Benedict was passionately concerned with rectifying something, or many things, that had gone desperately wrong in the past five decades. [A passion and rational motivations he explained so well in THE RATZINGER REPORT twenty years after Vatican-II had closed, arousing so much hostility among the rovressivist 'sppiritists' especially in the Catholic hierarchy that he was accused of being a 'restoratonist' seeking to return theChurch to the Dark Ages.]
One way of understanding what has happened over this half-century is to think about the delicate balance between ad intra and ad extra concerns, which are two sides of the same coin.
The Church has her own life, one could say—a liturgical, sacramental, spiritual, intellectual life, defined by the confluence of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium—and this life must be tended, nurtured, guarded, deepened.
But simultaneously the Church always has a calling to go outwards into the world of unbelief, to preach to it, convert it, sanctify it, confront its errors and wrestle with its problems.
It seems to me that the noble intention of Blessed John XXIII, a very traditional Pope in many ways, was to bring the treasures of the Church’s inner life to bear on modernity and the modern world. To this end he convened the Roman Synod and, more fatefully, the Second Vatican Council. He wanted the Catholic Church to send forth God’s light and truth, to intensify an apostolic activity that, under Pius XII, was already flourishing.
What actually transpired in the years of the Council and immediately afterwards is well known, tragic, even apocalyptic. The Church went through a period of
ad intra amnesia and lost herself in an
ad extra intoxication.
It was forgotten that if one’s own house, one’s own soul, is not in order, one has nothing worthwhile to share with the world; that preaching the Good News to unbelievers is effective only to the extent that there is something profoundly and transcendently good awaiting them when they arrive at church.
Instead of recalling the People of God to a sane repentance and inaugurating massive repair work ad intra, however, Paul VI and countless churchmen pushed the ad extra agenda further and further, with greater and greater incoherence as the result. The promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae sealed this trajectory and stifled, for a time, the cultivation of institutional memory and identity.
In short, the history of the Church from the Council to the present is a history of unremitting ad extra efforts without the requisite interior resources.
As many have pointed out, it has often seemed
in the past half-century or so as if the institutional Church cared more for atheists, modernists, and every type of non-Catholic than for her own faithful children who are simply striving to believe what has always been believed and to live as Catholics have always striven to live, “in the world but not of it.”
[Sounds familiar and quite recent! But certainly not under Benedict XVI, for whom 'charity begins at home' was always a self-evident guideline. How can we think of evangelizing others who are not already Christian or have lapsed away from the Church, if our own faithful are almost illiterate om the essentials of the faith? Because Catholic parents are no longer capable of being their childrne's first teachers and exemplars of the faith, and priests are not formed properly in order to be ministers of Christ, in persona Christi, who serve the faithful as they should, inculcating the catechism and encouraging the pursuit of sacramental grace.
One thinks of the words of Saint Paul: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith”
(Gal 6:10); and again, “If any one does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his own family, he has disowned the faith and is worse than an unbeliever”
(1 Tim 5:8).
The Church is the family of God, and the pastors serve in loco parentis.—so why are they absent? Are they truly taking care of their children, and of their children’s primary needs?
Ecumenism, inter-religious dialogue, efforts for social justice, even evangelization efforts are worthless if the faithful themselves are not first being well clothed, nourished, and taught—clothed by sacraments frequently and worthily received, nourished by a sacred liturgy offered with beauty and reverence, taught sound doctrine in catechesis, preaching, and schools.
Hence,
after forty years of wandering in the desert [OK, that rectifies the 'error' I protested above],
the pontificate of Benedict XVI seemed, and truly was, a watershed moment, a breath of fresh air — a realization that it was time to attend to the state of our soul, to put our own house in order, to renew our liturgy from its deepest sources, and to learn once again what exactly is the Good News we are supposed to be sharing in the New Evangelization.
This pontificate began to undo, in a systematic way, the amnesia and the intoxication. In addition to its burgeoning fruits in the daily life of the Church,
Summorum Pontificum stands forever as a symbol of the effort to bring about meaningful change by recalling the faithful to a tradition, spirituality, and way of life that are not in flux, as, indeed, its symbolic date—the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millennium—plainly announced.
In God’s Providence, it was a short pontificate, but the teaching and legislation of those eight years will, as the new century moves on, prove to be either the mustard-seed of an authentic renewal or the prophetic condemnation of a failed one.
In any case, it is our privilege, through no merits of our own, to embrace with gratitude, humility, and zeal the traditional Catholic identity, the fragrant living memory of God's gifts, that Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has done so much to protect and promote, and to let these seeds bear fruit in our own lives.
There is no more any one of us can do, and yet this is enough. For God can take the few loaves and fishes we have, and multiply them endlessly.
When one thinks of the greatness of the task Pope Benedict entrusted to us — the task of authentic renewal from the very sources of faith and in continuity with tradition — and when we contemplate how much work and suffering faces us as we strive to put into practice the profound teaching on the sacred liturgy Our Lord has given us through this great Pope, we might be tempted to grow weary of the fight and fall away from it, especially in a time when so many in the Church seem to be running away from the dawning light back into the stygian darkness of the seventies.
Let us take heart from the many noble men and women, clergy, religious, and laity, who have fought the good fight, from the time of the Council even to our day; but let us also take heart from the unchanging spirituality that sustains the Benedictine monastic ideal that so inspired His Holiness.
As expressed by the Right Reverend Dom Paul Delatte, O.S.B.:
Patience hath a perfect work, and its work is to maintain in us, despite all, the order of reason and faith. Let us take our courage in both hands; let us grasp this blessed patience so tightly and so strongly that nothing in the world shall be able to separate us from it: patientiam amplectatur.
This is not the time for groaning, for self-justification, for dispute. We should not have been saved if Our Lord had declined to suffer. It is the time for bending our shoulders and carrying the cross, for carrying all that God wills and so long as He wishes, without growing weary or lagging on the road. …
There is no spiritual future for any but those who can thus hold their ground. When we promise ourselves to stand firm and to wait till the storm is past, then we develop great powers of resistance.
From 2013, thanks to Beatrice who has shared this letter sent to her by one of the followers of her website... This reflection by a priest says a lot of what we may have wanted to say ourselves....
This is simply 'au revoir'
Translated from
March 2, 2013
He left as he wanted to, in simplicity and in beauty, having decided, after long reflection, a long interior meditation ['after having examined my conscience again and again before God, coram Deo'] of which he has deemed us worthy to confide. He had chosen to respond to the will of God as it was revealed to his conscience.
How beautiful it was, the light of a peaceful Roman spring day, as if suspended between heaven and earth, as a pure white helicopter flew over the roofs of the Eternal City. How breathtakingly splendid were the gilded domes of the Roman churches, of the hilltowns called the 'castelli romani', and Lake Albano in its frame of greenery.
How beautiful it was, the goodwill of Romans watching from their roofs or windows, the joy of the parish priest of Castel Gandolfo welcoming a familiar 'parishioner', the faces of numerous religious in tears, images of the Church's universality. The wide-eyed little girl in her father's arms unsure if she should laugh or cry.
Even the amplitude of the material means placed at the disposition of an old man heading to retirement, the ballet of the troops, of vehicles and TV crews, was itself a homage from the world to the ministry of Peter.
There was more than just the emotion we heard from the TV commentators who themselves were seeking to understand what was happening.
A departure which reflected the retiring Pontiff in every way. Familial and intimate, recollected and spiritual.
Some world leaders leave in shame, amid general indifference, or in the violence of hatred that had accumulated against them. He left in God's time. In peace and serenity.
Perhaps we will see him again. Perhaps one day, we shall pass near him, in the Vatican Gardens, knowing he is there - praying, working, dedicating his remaining strength to the service of Christ and his Church.
His silence will comfort us. He will continue to be a living predication and an appeal for us to always turn with confidence to Christ.
Au revoir, most holy Father, and good night...
Abbé Hervé BENOÎT
Catholic Priest
Fr. Lombardi offered a more abstract look at Benedict XVI's departure from public life..
A hopeful farewell
March 2, 2013
The final days of the pontificate of Benedict XVI will certainly remain ingrained in the memory of innumerable people and will mark an important stage, new and unprecedented, in the history of a pilgrim Church.
For many it was almost a discovery of the Pope’s humanity and spirituality; for others, a confirmation of his humility, along with his deep life in faith.
If Pope Wojtyla had given, with admirable courage before the eyes of the world, his courageous witness of faith in the suffering of sickness, Pope Ratzinger, without lesser courage, gave us the witness of acceptance before God of the limits of old age and of the discernment on the exercise of responsibility that God had entrusted to him.
Both taught us, not only with their Magisterium, but also and perhaps even more effectively with their lives, what it means to seek and to find everyday the will of God for us and for our service, even in the most crucial situations of human existence.
As Benedict XVI told us effectively himself, the resignation of a Pope is not in any way abandonment, neither of the mission received or much less of the faithful.
It is the continuation of entrusting to God his Church, in the secure hope that he continues to guide it.
With humility and serenity, Benedict XVI says he “tried to do” everything possible to serve the good of the Church, a Church that is not his, but God’s, and which, by the continued working of the Spirit, “lives, grows and awakens souls”.
In this sense, the legacy of Pope Benedict is today an invitation to all to prayer and responsibility. First, naturally, for the cardinals to whom falls the task of the election of a successor, but also and no less for the entire Church, who needs to accompany in prayer the discernment of the electors and the new Pope in the task of effectively proclaiming the Gospel “for the good of the Church and of humanity” and to guide the community to an always greater faithfulness to the same Gospel of Christ.
Because no Pope can do this alone. We will do it therefore also with him, and the Pope Emeritus will continue to accompany us, “working” for this – these were his final words spoken publicly –“with his heart, with his love, with his prayer, with his reflection”.
Thank you, Pope Benedict.
Benedict XVI has shown the world by an example that, for those who have no blinders, is dazzling in its luminosity, a simple obvious fact of human existence that is often ignored: No one is indispensable. No human being.
The Italian saying so often cited these days - 'Morto un Papa, se ne fa un'altro'(If a Pope dies, another becomes Pope) is true for any position however exalted. Earthly existence means that humans come and go. Men die or leave office, but life goes on in the world, in society, and living people take their place.
Everyone must come to terms with human mortality and the inexorable stages of life that come with it. Benedict XVI has had the wisdom and the humility to accept that, and to courage to say, "No, I will not inflict my own afflictions and limitations on the Church, because she deserves someone to lead her who is in the fullness of his powers. I have done my part, and beyond this, I can no longer effectively continue the Petrine ministry".
He did this with great certainty and total confidence, because, as he often says, the Church is God's not ours, and he will take care it does not sink, despite all the evil elements caught up in its net along with the truly good and saintly.
]St. Ambrose said, 'Ibi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia' - where Peter is, there the Church is - but if Peter is afflicted and ineffective in any way, then so is the Church afflicted and ineffective.
As someone who loves Benedict XVI and has followed him as closely as I could these past eight years, I did not want to publicly acknowledge my deep concerns about his well-being and the rapid signs of aging which seemed to have overtaken him in the past year and a half, at least. I refused to believe that the 'eternally youthful' Joseph Ratzinger was now succumbing to the ravages of age - though we had the example of his brother to remind us of that eventuality.
It was not so much any impaired ability to move that first caught my attention but his manner of speaking on some occasions. Times when he seemed to hurry through reading a message or a homily, without his usual enunciation of meaning by careful phrasing and pacing of the text, and with a voice that was distinctly flat as with exhaustion. The occasional bouts of coughing that he had, which made me wonder if he had any throat condition at all that should worry us. The contrast was obvious because much of the time, he spoke in fine form.
My first thought was that if he lost the faculty of speech or his speech became impaired in any way, then it would be a serious setback for him, not just as a person who all his life was called Goldmund (Chrysostomos, golden mouth)) but as the universal Pastor whose Magisterium must be authoritative not just in content but in delivery.
And then, his eyesight. His older brother has been virtually blind for five years now. What if the same gene worked in him! Sure, he would be able to say the prayers by memory, but how would a blind Pope say Mass on Mondovision and fumble around - because he can be helped to move around the altar, but celebrating the Mass involves gestures done by the celebrant alone that cannot be done for him.
Because of impaired speech and impaired mobility, John Paul II delegated papal Masses to his cardinals in the final months of his life, and had his homilies and speeches read by someone else.
Joseph Ratzinger had time enough during the final years of John Paul II's increasing physical disability to think about the implications of physical affliction on a Pope in this very public age and its inhuman demands on the time and resources of a Pope.
John Paul II was exceptional in that he chose to live his private suffering in public. And his public Calvary was accepted by all in the spirit that he offered it. But as an ordinary human being, I believe very deeply that suffering must be done in private, not made into a public spectacle (which it became, inevitably, with someone as prominent on the world stage as John Paul II was).
I would have preferred to be spared John Paul II's public agony - I did not need to see it to be convinced he was a holy man, or to appreciate that suffering is part of existence which we must live with Christian fortitude. Christ set the example on the Cross. One cannot possibly forget that!
A Pope cannot delegate his Petrine powers and authority - that is why there is no deputy Pope or anything equivalent. But he can renounce those powers and authority completely if he is no longer able to carry them out as they should be carried out. (Even at the Conclave that elected him, Benedict XVI said he had urged his supporters, "Choose someone younger and more able", to no avail.)
Complete renunciation of the Papacy is the simple and humble choice Benedict XVI made. In the full knowledge that he would be faulted yet again, as he has been so clamorously, for failing to 'follow the example of his predecessor'.
To the very end of his public life - and perhaps for some time to come in the transient chronicles of our time - he continues to be compared unfavorably to John Paul II. Who would never have been so uncharitable to Joseph Ratzinger as many Catholics are proving to be.
May God continue to clothe his faithful servant Joseph Ratzinger in his protection and grace, even now that he is no longer formally his Vicar on earth. But he will be in persona Christi for as long as he lives. (And a piano=playing one at that!)
What has most motivated me to set down my thoughts today about the 'gran rifiuto' by our beloved Benedict were Cardinal George Pell's strong words clearly and deliberately made to Australian TV [on the day Benedict XVI stepped down] openly criticizing Benedict XVI's decision as "wrong and destabilizing for the Church".
My first reaction was shock that he chose to say these things so openly at this time when it can serve no positive purpose at all but can only be counter-productive, especially since he was always considered one of Benedict XVI's staunchest allies - I thought that meant he was also a friend. Absolutely nothing and no one is served by the statements he made.
And the second was how can it be destabilizing to the Church when the purpose is precisely to place her on more secure footing under new leadership, with someone in the fullness of his powers who can meet the harrowing demands on a Pope in our time... I cannot even try to rationalize Cardinal Pell's appalling judgment lapse, let alone forgive him what I can only call disloyalty to Benedict XVI - because surely, the cardinal does not lack sensibility or common sense. He has every right to think what he does, but what was the urgency of saying it now? [P.S. 2014 Of course, as it turned out, and oh-so-quickly, Pell's 'treachery' - more charitably, let me call it 'lack of Christian charity' towards Benedict XVI - just happened to be the first of such 
insults to Benedict XVI from those in the Church hierarchy who chose to speak to the media (and everyone did, it seemed) from Feb. 28 onwards. It was a crescendo of indirect but never-subtle Benedict-bashing that reached peak fortissimo after his successor had been elected - a fortissimo sostenuto that has become the incessant. clamorous and inevitable accompaniment to every report and commentary made about the Church today.]
P.S. 2015 - Little has changed in the situation today, as we saw from the AFP Vaticanista's report 'report' on the two-year anniversary of the renunciation. Even as media contihnues to make Benedict XVI a covnenient scapegoat for anythign wrong with the Church today, media and 'the world' continue to be enthralled with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his papal veneer, despite increasing indications that 1) the imagined positive 'Francis effects' on the Church herself are mostly anecdotal and do not stand up to any factual analysis, and, 2) judging from the activity on the blogosphere and the comboxes of 'conservative' bloggers and commentators, as more and more orthodox Catholics are increasinly vocal about their 'doubts and perplexities' regarding this Pope and his intentions for the Church.
I always thought I should give him the benefit of teh doubt and jot 'judge' him prematurely, but I have thrown in the towel, after the overt manipulation of the so-called 'family synods by his men, apparent misdeeds by the likes of Rosica, Volpi and Baldisseri, and most importantly, that carefully crafted homily to the new cardinals on February 15 in which JMB articulated his principal heterodoxies.
It was easy to be 'indulgent' with the almost-daily outrage of his off-the-cuff morning pontifications from Casa Santa Marta, otherwise known as Padre Jorge's bully pulpit against all the 'categories' of Catholics he dislikes.
But to have him compare, in a prepared homily delivered in St. Peter's Basilica to his new cardinals (most of whom have happily echoed his heterodoxies to the media since they were named) his favored categories of Catholics living in a chronic state of sin {whom he would virtually exonerate of sin) to lepers who are despised and cast off by society (the Church, in this case) because they have a terrible illness they cannot help (even if their problem is a consequnce of a choice they consciously made, and therefore, self-inflicted), and say that it is Catholself-inclictedics who insist on the purity of doctrine and sacramental discipline who are wicked for doing this - it is all beyond belief from a Pope.
That few have taken issue with that dreadful and frightening homily is a measure of how a-critical most observers, swamped by the insant golden legend of the pluperfect Pope and his phenomenal celebrity, have tended to be about Jorge Bergoglio. Truly, one can say of him as John Lennon once said of the Beatles, he is far more popular than Jesus himself, because his celebrity has spread far beyond the Christian world. With every new interview he gives, and every attention-calling gesture he makes, it is not Christ he calls attention to but himself. Yet everyone calls him the humblest Pope there ever was.
Of course, he 'preaches Jesus'. He is the Pope, after all. But it is a false Jesus he preaches about - a Jesus who came to earth only for the poor, whose Gospel is only abotu the poor and for the poor (and he clearly means the materially poor). But in his syllogism, being poor is equivalent to being virtuous, so if the poor are already virtuous just by being poor, therefore it is not them whom Jesus came to save, right? It is all the non-poor whose sinfulness, this Pope says in so many ways, are causing all the material miseries of the poor.
In the same way, in his false ecclesiology, he only preaches about going to the peripheries, without saying anything about what happens to those who are already within the enclosure of the shepherd - who
presumably abandons them to go tend to those 'outside the flock'.
Pastors must go to the peripheries, he says, to take on 'the odor of their sheep', he says, as if that 'odor' only came from stray sheep and not from the regular flock.
Yet these pet theories have been widely acclaimed and disseminated, without even being given a superficial analysis that suffices to immediately demonstrate their fallacy. JMB's words are literal pablum (baby food), comfort food meant to provide an immediate sense of virtuousness that is perceived as virtue - without need of all the hard work one must put into being virtuous and remaining virtuous.
So, 'communion for everyone', even those living in chronic state of sin, or who may never have bothered to go to confession regularly - because 'communion is a medicine that heals' (as if it were a panacea that would cure anything and everything, no matter how habitually unhygienic you are).
Oh, yes, you should go to confession, if you can - it is good for your soul, you will say three Hail Marys and that's penance enough, not bothering to recall Christ's injunction to the adulterous woman, "Go and sin no more". (If he doesn't say that to his favored 'chronic sinners', he has less reason to nag the regular faithful about it.)
Is it improper for me to carry on about the dissatisfactions I have with JMB/PF in a post that is meant to be an unadutlerated tribute to Benedict XVI? I excuse myself in that the faults I criticize in his successor are faults that he certainly could never be accused of, nor for that matter, the previous Popes in the past 150 years.
