I've added this introduction to this post since I am now able to post a graphic that needs to be seen.
The subhead reads: A decline in the faithful, scandals, issues on ethics, gays, immigration and anti-Islam.
So many errors. Now the purges. Francis's popularity is collapsing.
The introductory teaser:
THE SOLITUDE OF POPE FRANCIS
Once the media campaign ends that has transformed the Argentine pope into an ‘idol’, one realizes that fundamentally, the work of Joseph Ratzinger has been completely under-estimated.
In a Vatican divided by factions seeking to settle accounts with each other, the German Pope brought the Vatican and its bank IOR into the international White List of banks fully compliant with regulations to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism. He imposed ‘zero tolerance’ towards sexual misbehavior by priests especially towards minors, and was constantly vigilant in analyzing the critical situation of the Church today and the challenges she faces in the foreseeable future.
Francis, on the other hand, became pope thanks to unprecedented maneuvering of which even he perhaps was not fully aware. [Not so! Austin Ivereigh, one of his instant biographers and now the pope’s primary paladin in the English speaking world, candidly discusses the maneuvering that took place among Bergoglio’s Grand Electors, who did call him in Argentina to alert him what they intended to do and to ask if he was prepared to go along. He is said to have answered with the Italian word, “Capisco”. (I understand)]
He is surrounded by a small ‘magic circle’ which robs him of his sight and fails to warn him of dangers that threaten to take increasingly greater importance, which also emphasize how distant and different he is from his predecessors.
From Argentina to the United States, Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s popularity is falling, amid the scandals, errors, purges and vendettas which are dividing the Roman Curia.
Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica may be far from throwing in the towel on their considerable investment in manufacturing and seeking to perpetrate the myth that Jorge Bergoglio is the best pope that ever was or ever could be, but one Italian newspaper did launch its case against Bergoglio in a front-page article and apread on Sunday, July 2 – thanks as usual to the ‘search engine’-like efficiency of Beatrice and her friends in these matters.
Il Tempo, a small newspaper based in Rome with five regional editions throughout Italy, front-paged a picture of a glum Bergoglio seated in one of the papal chairs, with the glaring headline IL PAPOCCHIO. Considered conservative from its beginnings as an anti-Communist newspaper in 1944, it is the paper for which Prof .Roberto Di Mattei runs his weekly column that is found online in Corrispondenza Romana.
I admit I had to look up the term which I had not heard before, and its more common synonym in Italian is pasticcio, which translates best as imbroglio in English – which I find serendipitous, because the imbroglio referred to is what I would call the ‘Bergoglio imbroglio’. Who would have thought his family name and the noun would end up in a ‘felicitous’ coupling! The best dictionary meaning I can find for imbroglio is “an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation”, although I would probably replace the ‘or’ with ‘and/or’. One would think the word was invented to describe the state of the Church today under this travesty of a pope.
Unfortunately, the rest of the IL PAPOCCHIO spread is infelicitous. And after starting to translate each of the three articles that make up the spread. I decided not to use the material at all. Suffice it to say the main article was written by one Luigi Bisignani, who turns out to be a notorious professional power broker and known Freemason, who also spent two years and six months in prison after the highest court in Italy confirmed his 1994 sentence for violation of the law on contributions to political parties that was part of a major scandal involving a company called Enimont, at the height of the widespread Italian political crisis over bribery of government officials. Later in 2011 and in 2014, he was twice placed under precautionary house arrest during the investigation of the so-called P4, successor to the infamous Masonic lodge P2 which had infiltrated high government and Church circles since the 1950s, and which through people like Bisignani colluded with high Italian officials to obtain contracts, financing, appointments and secret information that could be used to blackmail other people. An account in English of Mr. Bisignani's activities may be seen on
italychronicles.com/italys-latest-corrupt-clique-p4/
Although identified as an ex-journalist - and also the author of four spy novels since his prison sentence - I do not understand why Il Tempo would have entrusted Bisignani (unless there is another Italian journalist with the same name who is not involved in Bisgnani's bizarre affairs) with the lead article for their spread. He is not at all up to tackling his subject - I found his analyses erratic, unsystematic and prone to facile generalizations where specific arguments should be adduced, and distinctions that are more than simply nuances should be addressed. It certainly barely skims the imbroglio into which Bergoglio has brought the Church.
The other two articles consist of 1) a rehash of old reports about the declining attendance at Bergoglio's public appearances in St. Peter's Square without adding anything new - not even providing the attendance figures for 2016; and 2) a random, most unsystematic, necessarily scant and skimming-the-surface recital of 'shocking' statements that Bergoglio has made about secular and religious matters.
So, we still await a serious major analysis of this pope's litany of un-papal and anti-Catholic offenses. Meanwhile...
********************************************************************************************************************************************
Andrea Tornielli has not joined in yet – and perhaps, never will – but two of the most ardent Bergoglians in the Italian media - Marco Politi and Massimo Franco -
have now acknowledged that things are not going well in the Bergoglio Vatican, and go as far as to use previously unthinkable words for them to use about Bergoglio
like - gasp! - ‘crisis’ and ‘scandals’ to describe what has been happening.
Scandals in the Vatican:
What the crisis in Pope Francis’s
governance teaches us
by Marco Politi
Translated from his blog on
IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO
July 5, 2017
The hundred days between March to July 2017 represent
the first crisis [The first???] in the governance of Pope Francis. Too many things have piled up in rapid succession:
- The resignation of Marie Collins from the Commission for the Protection of Minors
- The unexpected departure of a first-class professional like Libero Milone from his position as [the first ever] auditor-general of the Holy See
- The question of Bishop Jean Zerbo of Mali, recently made cardinal by this pope, even as he has been unable to explain the 12-million euros deposited in his name in Swiss banks
- The brusque send-off
(which nobody thinks is provisional) for Cardinal George Pell – a member of the pope’s advisory Council of Cardinals and head of the Secretariat for the Economy, which was supposed to embody this pope’s drive for financial transparency – who has been forced to return to Australia to defend himself from potential criminal charges for alleged cases of sexual abuse.
- The
unexpected [C’mon, Politi, do not feign naivete!] dismissal of Cardinal Gerehard Ludwig Mueller as Prefect of the CDF, and
- His replacement with the Jesuit Luis Ladaria Ferrer, now said to have signed a letter to the Bishop of Lucera (Italy) asking him not to scandalize the faithful by revealing the laicization of ‘pedophile’ priest Gianni Trotta (who, availing of that
omerta, became the coach of a juvenile football team where he reportedly committed new crimes.
[Oh, so it seems worse than originally reported: namely, that Ladaria had been instrumental in defrocking the priest but failed to notify Italian authorities about his offenses. About which, BTW, Lella who is a lawyer or works in a law office says, on her blog that in Italy, only government officials are obliged to report crimes to the police, and bishops and priests are obviously not government officials.]
It is an accumulation of events each of which is so sensitive that they cannot be treated as single episodes requiring only routine ‘maintenance’. It is striking that from this muddle two crucial issues emerge, precisely those that had caught the attention of public opinion, Catholic or otherwise, at the start of this pontificate, when Pope Francis appeared to emphasize that there ought to be
zero tolerance on questions of sexual abuse and total transparency on financial questions.
The events involving Collins, Pell and Ladaria call into question the existence
[and efficacy] of a rigorous strategy to combat sexual abuses by priests and episcopal connivances to cover them up, as well as the defeciencies that have been manifested in this area.
The events involving Milone and Zerbo revive the necessity of a policy for total transparency in the financial affairs not just of the Vatican but also of the local Churches.
The Miller dismissal touches another important question: the need for team play in the Roman Curia to support the
aggiornamento that the Argentine pope preaches.
The point is that
all these cases have revealed dysfunctions in management that can change the direction intended by papal decisions.
There is no doubt that the Pell episode was badly conducted. For quite some time, there have been warnings
[by whom? from whom?] that
any personage seen to be a close associate of the pope should not be vulnerable to any possible accusations regarding sexual abuses committed or covered up.
[Please, Politi! Did anyone in the media raise any objections when Pell was first named to be in the papal advisory council early in the pontificate, nor several months later, when he was named Secretary of the Economy and hailed by anyone as the #2 man in the Vatican? No one did, not even recalling that Benedict XVI had decided against naming him Prefect of Bishops back in 2010 precisely because the accusations that had hounded Pell for decades would definitely be destructive to the Church and to both of them.
No, the narrative was that nothing Bergoglio did could be wrong because he only has the best intentions. Of course, it was not wrong to name Pell - because he was pre-eminently qualified for both positions given him by Bergoglio – but no one at the Vatican, nor among the Bergoglio fanatics in the media cheering squad, imagined that the animus in Australia against Pell would come back, sooner or later, to sting the pope like the proverbial scorpion’s tail…
How emblematic that in the Pell case, the media has been responsible for publicizing and inflaming anti-Pell accusations indiscriminately in Australia; and in Italy and the rest of the Western world, for having been so blinded by Bergoglio adulation that they failed to see that sooner or later, Pell would fall victim in some way to his accusers in Australia.]
By mid-June, Pell’s situation was already considered dangerous by many in the highest circles of the Vatican.
“Pell has skeletons in his closet which are by no means minor,” a Vatican functionary confided to me.
[Well, that’s a new one! As clear a declaration of war as there ever was! Would Politi’s confidant ever have expressed himself in that way if he did not believe that it expressed what the pope himself thought about the case?]
To announce to the media at 4 o’clock in the morning that Pell was going to have a press conference first thing in the day showed a ‘dilettantish’ way of dealing with the issue, wrote Isabelle de Gaulmyn in the French newspapee
La Croix.
[Hey, the news from the Australian police arrived in Europe in the late evening – Australia being 18 hours ahead of Rome time. How much sooner could Pell arrange with the Vatican Press Office to hold the news conference – especially if, unofficially, he was already considered persona non grata at the Vatican?]
“The Church made a move because government justice [in Australia] had moved,” she said, when it ought to have been the other way around, pointing out that
this was not a question of presumption of innocence till proven guilty but about ignoring the principle that it is important to take precautions. [First, whenever anyone is accused of anything, it is always a question of presuming innocence until otherwise proven. Second, what ‘precautions’ could the Vatican have taken - given Pell had been the #2 man to Bergoglio since February 2014 - other than asking him to go on leave when the accusations first resurfaced, and not when filing of charges against him was said to be imminent?
Most importantly, does De Gaulmyn forget that in February 2016, Pell had already sat through four evenings of questioning in Rome by an Australian Royal Commission about these accusations? He did his part. Is it his fault that it took the Australian police all of 16 months to put their ducks in a row and announce they were ready to file charges – on accusations they had been investigating for decades???
In checking back on the date of that inquiry, I came across a Guardian article quoting the infamous Robert Mickens saying that “Pell was purposely playing the kind of almost sorry old man who was beaten up a little bit”. (Mickens being mean and nasty as ever - this is the guy who wrote on Facebook that he could not wait for Benedict XVI to be buried.) Anyway, I had not read the article at the time, and it turns out that Pell was asked in Rome in four sessions attended by the international media about most of the icky details recounted in the Milligan book, although the article chose their takehome message to be that
Pell admitted under oath for the first time that he had heard that an Australian Catholic schoolteacher may have engaged in “paedophilia activity”, but never followed up on the “one or two fleeting references” he heard about the “misbehaviour”.
But the main question, even in the light of Mueller’s dismissal, now concerns the immediate future.
- Will that long-announced special tribunal come into being which will take up the case of abuse victims whose local bishops are negligent and fail to go after predator priests?
- And will the Commission for the Protection of Minors be given an effective role instead of remaining a confraternity for reflections, whereas its only true objective ought to be to elaborate obligatory guidelines for Episcopal conferences who continue to deal with clerical sex abuse with an apparent calm that approaches indifference?
[Politi should directly challenge Cardinal O'Malley about this, because the latter has been so sanctimonious about this Commission which he heads, even as it has done nothing but exist so far!]
The second point; money. It would seem that Pell, in his role as supervisor of the finances of the different Vatican agencies, was considered ‘a bad man’. He was clear about clearing out the jungle of arbitrary and at times illegal ways of financial management practiced by various sectors of the Vatican. Now that even his handpicked Auditor-General has resigned, how does the Secretariat of the Economy intend to follow a line of rigor and transparency?
[That’s a silly question. The Secretariat has its statutes as well as various implementing instructions – it simply has to stick to them, making improvements where necessary. And what stops the Vatican from immediately hiring a replacement for Milone - while also taking measures that his replacement will not be hobbled in doing his job as Milone was because he went after one of the papal pets, Mons. Vigano of the new Secretariat for Communications, for proposing too big a budget?]
Let us not forget that two years ago, it was discovered that the APSA (Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See] had encrypted accounts available for carrying out ‘irregular’ operations.
[But the APSA, which is officially the central bank of the Holy See, not the IOR, has since regained many of the powers it had earlier apparently lost to the Secretariat for the Economy, and that surely could not have happened without the knowledge – and tacit approval – of the pope.]
Nor must we forget that
it is useless for the Authority for Financial Information (AIF) to [religiously] report ‘serious irregularities’ it has uncovered when almost not a single one of those responsible has been brought to face a Vatican court.
These are knots that the pope must undo quickly. They require clear and effective solutions if he wants to provide a fresh impulse for carrying out reforms on extremely sensitive matters.
There is a last question. The dismissal of Mueller,
who systematically played against the pope’s pastoral line [What planet do you live on, Politi? Mueller systematically spoke out of both sides of his mouth, which was an eerie version of Bergoglio’s calculated ambiguities; and even after he was dismissed, his first line was to say, “I really have no differences with Pope Francis”. You, Politi, are just as much in a state of denial as Mueller], brings to the foreground the exigency that the pope creates a homogeneous team of reformers at all levels of the Curia.
Up to now, in the name of inclusion and respect for Curial appointments made by Benedict XVI [Again, Politi is reporting from Mars. What respect was given to Cardinals Burke and Piacenza, and to Mueller long before he was dismissed, nor to Amato whose appointment the pope deliberately did not renew donec aliter promoveatur?], this pope has essentially left the Curial leadership as it was from the era of Wojtyla and Ratzinger. [If he truly found serious fault with any of those who are still in place, enough to dismiss them for cause, he would have done so, but he has not!]
But a Church on the move, as Bergoglio wishes, needs a lead patrol inspired by the same objectives. Even these choices rest with Bergoglio now. Otherwise the machinery will stall. And we have seen with what results…
Between poisons and the snares of power:
Pope Francis’s obstacle course
In recent dismissals and new appointments, one can see the problems behind Bergoglio’s reforms.
But criticisms are growing in the Curia for a method and an agenda that are considered unbalanced.
By Massimo Franco
Translated from
CORRIERE DELLA SERA
July 5, 2017
The rosary of the heads that have fallen in recent weeks tell of a Vatican that has yet to stabilize, more than four years into the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
It conveys the image of a pope who is formidable on the level of popularity and influence on geopolitics [We have yet to see that! Even if he is already seen by some as the new post-Obama 'leader of the global left', what did Obama really manage to do in that capacity?] but who continues to work uphill in deciding how to govern ‘his’ Rome and in Italy, whether it concerns Vatican finances, his closest collaborators or the ‘ministers’ of the Holy See.
Merely to say that one or the other promotion was rash or mistaken does not suffice. What emerges is a method of government which shows obvious limitations and which transforms the best intentions of reform into potential boomerangs. [Who ever judgedsanybody on intentions, anyway, when the road to hell is proverbially paved with good intentions? Only the demented Nobel Prize committee which gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama when he had done nothing yet in office.]
But everything is taking place in a veil of mystery, sometimes of deliberate opacity, that only Francis’s great charisma has allowed to be received with indulgence. [Franco omits to mention the corollary: Whereas the media’s great hostility to Benedict XVI, in whom they could see not a single virtue, never allowed them to be indulgent about him in any way!]
The Vatican Auditor-General Libero Milone was dismissed only two years into his five-year appointment. And his mentor, Cardinal George Pell, was forced to leave the Secretariat for the Economy in order to go to Australia and defend himself from accusations of sexual abuse some of which date to forty years ago. While the ‘guardian of orthodoxy’ Cardinal Gerhard Mueller did not get re-appointed after his five-year tenure begun under Benedict XVI ended. All three gone in the space of two weeks.
Singularly interesting is that the pope named Spanish Jesuit Luis Ladaria Ferrer to replace Mueller, one considered a ‘fedelissimo’ [‘most faithful’ to the faith is fine, but not ‘most faithful’ to this pope]. But we quickly learned that the man who now leads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith labors under the shadow of failing to denounce to the authorities a priest found guilty of sex abuses and laicized by the CDF. Apparently this information was either never brought up or considered of secondary significance when the pope decided to appoint him to succeed the conservative Mueller, who had been a tenacious critic of Bergoglio on the theological level [Like Politi, Franco and other Bergoglio paladins choose to evoke Mueller as one-sidedly hostile to Bergoglio, when his ‘conservative’ critics found him inconsistent at best, and a practitioner of doublespeak at worst.
In fact, his most unambiguous statements were pro-Bergoglio, from “Amoris laetitia presents no dangers to the faith” despite the DUBIA presented by four cardinals with whom he co-authored a preemptive defense of marriage book before the first Bergoglian family synod, and the fact that he submitted ‘hundreds of corrections’ to the draft given to him to review, all of which were ignored; to his “I have absolutely no differences with Pope Francis” on the day his dismissal was announced.
Any ‘unambiguous’ statements he made in relation to faith and the doctrine targeted by AL were generic statements 1) that the document must be interpreted according to preceding Magisterium, Church Tradition and doctrine; 2) that it changes nothing about the sacramental discipline that the Church has always taught; and that, yest, it presents no danger to the faith! - none of them directed at Bergoglio, 'understandably'. How could he have said all that with a straight face?]
The German cardinal, who denied he dissented from Pope Francis [There he goes again!], says he will not accept any appointments [as if any would be offered!] and will stay in Rome.
“But now Mueller can be the standard bearer for the pope’s opponents” [How can he be if he denies that he dissents from the pope at all???], says a cardinal at the Vatican [Coccopalmerio or Maradiaga. Take your pick!] “He already is the reference point for bishops of Eastern Europe, of Africa and part of North America who are prevalently conservative”. [That’s news to most of us! News reports over the past four years would make that ‘reference point’ Cardinal Burke, or lately, Cardinal Sarah, not Mueller.]
These are snapshots of a papacy immersed in a convulsive phase, in which merely changing the head of a dicastery after five years is not seen as physiologic (i.e., normal) but traumatic. [Since Mueller’s dismissal was widely predicted and expected, there was nothing traumatic about it, not even to Mueller himself.]
The enemies of Bergoglio, who remain many, claim that they actually see a progressivist consistency in all this. Indeed, they accuse him of following an unbalanced social agenda in favor of ‘the poor’, of indiscriminate immigration and of dialog with modernity.
[Please, Mr. Franco, name me one world leader or politician who does not say he is for ‘the poor’, exactly as a beauty contestant would! By now, expressions of concern for ‘the poor’ by anyone should be considered ‘white noise’ to be ignored.
Let the Vatican do things that will help the poor to help themselves from being poor, instead of concentrating on token cosmetic stunts like providing showers for the homeless at the Vatican, or inviting them to breakfast with the pope, or bring them to the beach for a swim and buying them pizza! Then we can talk about ‘the poor’!
Nor are 'the poor' helped one iota by subscribing as this pope does to the UN’s never-going-to-happen goal of eliminating poverty and hunger from the world by 2030! It is hubristic unreality – as if any human agencies could do what Jesus did not do when he was on earth and did not intend to do, because ‘the poor you will always have with you’. Poverty, like death and disease, is simply one of the great ills unleashed on mankind by Original Sin, and no one will ever eliminate it completely because to do so would violate the very sense of divine justice.]
Their accusation would sound like a badge of honor, if it was not also accompanied by criticisms that he names to positions of authority those who express a ‘non-antagonistic’ culture like him and that therefore, he has a circle of collaborators who are not always able to advice him adequately and appropriately.
Among other things, for months it has been insinuated that there are anonymous dossiers against persons close to him. On some ‘conservative’ sites, one reads fictional accounts of persons linked to the aid given by the Italian bishops’ conference to some dioceses in the Third World, who were reportedly in contact with Bergoglio when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. [So? Were the contacts questionable, were these persons questionable, and are the CEI projects overseas questionable? The CEI finances this aid from the annual payment to them by the Italian government of a sum equivalent to 0.008% of all the taxes paid by Italian Catholics, and amounts to tens of millions of euros annually. This is in reparation for all the Church properties occupied and confiscated by the Italian state at the time of the unification of Italy in the mid-19th century and the dissolution of the Papal states all over Italy except the Vatican.]
These are poisons which illustrate well a situation of constant tension and of internecine power struggles which may seem to recall too much those that have taken place in the Vatican in recent years and in recent pontificates. [Get off it, Franco! Internal power struggles are a permanent feature of all bureaucracies, and you cannot get away with claiming that they only took place ‘in recent years and recent pontificates’.]
There is a muffled tam-tam reflecting a repressed but widespread discontent in the Vatican, and the frustration of those who know they cannot directly attack a very popular pope who is respected internationally [as if the popes before him had not been respected internationally, or had not been popular in their own better ways!]And yet, it is a commonplace that the economic reforms undertaken have produced results that are controversial, to say the least.
Pell’s ‘leavetaking’ and before that, Milone’s resignation, cannot be dismissed merely as the outcome of a struggle within the Curia. “About Milone, just ask the Vatican police,” some say in a sybilline [i.e., ominous] way at the Vatican. [Are they implying Milone committed acts deemed worthy of inquiry or investigation by the Vatican police? This is the first such negative insinuation I have read about him.] The idea that he resigned only because he was asked to take a salary cut was never plausible.
In fact, there is a crisis in the model of governance and impulse for reforms that this pope had strongly wanted. And one guesses there is some sort of settling accounts by the ‘Old Guard’ in the Curia. [Please! What ‘Old Guard’? Go through all the names of the dicastery heads and their secretaries in the Bergoglio Curia, and identify who would be the ‘Old Guard’! Bergoglio has co-opted all of the Curial heads he did not appoint, placed his favorites in key positions, made sure the secretaries in every dicastery are persons loyal to him and who can serve as his ‘eyes and ears’, demoted Piacenza and Burke to sinecures, and is giving Cardinal Sarah the same treatment he gave Mueller for years (“You really are of no importance to me, so watch out as I can throw you out any time”).]
And not because they have any autonomous power – in the Bergoglio era, they [WHO ARE THESE ‘THEY????] have been marginalized or placed on the defensive. [I don’t think ‘they’ include any Curial head or secretary. By process of elimination, we are left with the middle-level management who continue in the Curia regardless of who is pope, the permanent officeholders who are the bane of every bureaucracy.]
But some levers remain in the hands of persons who have not been minimally touched by the ‘new course’. And now, almost by inertia, they are re-emerging with the disappearance from the scene of ‘new people’. [So far, Franco has only mentioned one of the ‘new people’ – Milone – or two, if one includes Cardinal Pell. The Pope has said, however, that in the interim, the two secretaries of the Secretariat for the Economy will be running the dicastery, namely, Mons. Alfred Xuereb, whom he named Secretary-General at the time the dicastery was created in February 2014 (and who served for ten months as Bergoglio’s private secretary at the recommendation of Benedict XVI, to whom Xuereb was the second private secretary besides Mons. Gaenswein) and Monsignor Brian Ferme, an Australian-born jurist as Prelate Secretary. Xuereb cannot by any means be considered ‘Old Guard’ unless anyone who served Benedict XVI is considered ‘Old Guard’ – and that would include many current Curial prefects and presidents, who can no longer be Old Guard because they have been so evidently been co-opted by Bergoglio.]
Moreover, Francis himself admitted in an interview with Corriere della Sera last February that the situation in the Church, compared to that considered by the Conclave of 2013, has changed. [DUH!] “At the General Congregations,” he said, “they spoke about the problems at the Vatican, of reforms, which everybody wanted. There is corruption in the Vatican. [‘C’e corruzione in Vaticano’ – literally, “There is corruption in the Vatican”, using the present tense. Bergoglio’s language is so imprecise I do not know if he meant that literally, or if he meant ‘There was corruption in the Vatican’ then, in which case, he ought to have said ‘C’era corruzione in Vaticano, using the past tense.] But I am at peace. If there’s a problem, I write a note to St. Joseph and place it under his statue that I have at my bedside. It’s the statue of a sleeping St. Joseph. By now, he has been sleeping on a mattress of notes!”
Well, that symbolic ‘mattress’ must have thickened considerably in the last few weeks.
And in the restaurant of the Hotel Santa Marta, where the pope lives in the Vatican, a small but significant novelty has been noted. The pope’s dining table is no longer the one at the center as it used to be. Now, it is located in a corner, Bergoglio eats with only a few selected people, and has his back to the rest of the room. [Why does he not stop with the rigmarole and simply have room service?]
P.S. I thought I would re-post here a Vatican Radio interview with Marco Politi shortly after Benedict XVI announced his resignation. Politi had been such an unrelenting critic of Benedict XVI that he even published a book in 2012 entitled Joseph Ratzinger: Crisis of a Papacy. Which is ironical now that Bergogliophile Politi writes about 'the first crisis' in Bergoglio's Pontificate.
A Vaticanista looks back to
the Papacy of Benedict XVI
VATICAN RADIO
March 5, 2013
Explaining how the Papacy of Benedict XVI has written new chapters in the history of the Catholic Church, veteran journalist, author of a number of books dedicated to the Popes, and Vatican observer Marco Politi looks back to an intense eight-year period which has further defined the role of the Roman Pontiff in a contemporary world.
Speaking to Vatican Radio’s Linda Bordoni, Politi expresses his opinion that Benedict’s Pontificate has been in perennial tension, moving “from the past to the present, from the past to the future”. By being the first Pope to resign in modern times - he says - he has set the stage for a new scenario…
Politi says that by stepping down, Pope Benedict “has moved the human aspect of the Pontiff to the forefront, underlining that the Church is led by Christ – not by a person – and that the Popes are servants”. So, he says “when it is the time for a servant that has much vigour spiritually and physically, then it is good that the former servant gives way to a successor”.
This – he says – is very human, and at the same time it is theologically very deep, because it puts Christ and God at the center of the community. [P.S. 2017 It took someone like Politi to note this, while too many so-called 'conservative' or 'traditionalist' commentators have impugned Benedict XVI - and continue to impugn - for having resigned, deriding the reason he gave for it!]
Politi agrees that Benedict’s unprecedented step in modern times to step down in a way modernizes the Papacy. He says that “he is completing the reforms of Paul VI who wanted to refresh the top hierarchy of the Church. In fact he decided that bishops over 75 had to retire, and then he decided that Cardinals over 80 could not be electors in the Conclave”. Now Benedict is giving his successors the possibility to step down at a certain moment of their life.
Since Benedict is a rational man, Politi points out, “he knows very well that in the modern world changes are very quick so you need somebody who can follow all those changes”. And also in the modern world, where the media and public opinion are so focused on the Pope, it is not possible like in past centuries to have an old and ill Pontiff who delegates administration to someone behind the scenes.[Even worse, every sign and symptom of papal infirmity would be blown up as a symbol of everything wrong in the Church - a most obvious consequence completely ignored by those who insist Benedict XVI should have carried on till he died. What they overlooked about Papa Wojtyla's final years, they would never have done with Benedict XVI!]
Politi adds that this gesture, which was revolutionary, and at the same time humble and noble, also was a way to recognize his personal limits. Many people – he says - have appreciated this gesture, “even those who maybe were not in agreement with him got a new wave of sympathy for him”.
Because of his very high intellectual and theological stature, Politi continues, Benedict has always been beyond stereotypes. [But Politi was in the forefront of those who stereotyped Joseph Ratzinger first as the Panzerkardinal and then as 'the isolated Pope who lives in an ivory tower'.] And because it is not in his temperament to “rule” the machinery of the Curia, he showed a certain lack of leadership. But thanks to his “intellectual dimension he was often moving “from past to present, from past to future.
For instance, in the last years he often underlined the fact that Christians must be an active minority in modern society - recognizing that society has changed. He reiterated this concept during his journey to Britain, and also when he returned from Prague when he said ‘it is time to open a dialogue with non-believers who are in search of the truth’. And he decided to invite non-believers for the first time to the great religious meeting in Assisi”.
This, Politi says, is also very modern because it means “to understand that modern society is a society of crossroads where many philosophies, religions and ways of thinking meet with Christianity. And Christianity must be able to be in dialogue with these dimensions”.
Politi speaks of his recently published book, “Joseph Ratzinger: Crisis of a Papacy”, written because he realized that there had been too many crises in the Papacy. He says that although they were all unwanted crises, they showed there was a problem. [Are there any 'wanted crises'???]
Politi mentions the crises with Islam and with Jews because of the Lefevrian groups, and he says there were other flashpoints culminating of course with the “Vatileaks” crisis and the questions regarding the Vatican Bank.
As regards his handling of the sexual abuse crisis, Politi points out that "it must be said Pope Benedict turned a new page in the history of the Catholic Church” with his zero tolerance line, by putting the victims at the center of the attention, and by recognizing the failures of some bishops who failed to apply the rules. And he has put new, more rigorous rules in place and asked bishops all over the world to elaborate guidelines to confront this phenomenon.
Politi says that he thinks when Benedict spoke of the burden of the Papacy, saying that sometimes it was very heavy to bear this burden, the Pope was also referring to these situations.
As regards the problems he ran into with Jews, Politi says in reality Pope Benedict had a “super great esteem for the Jewish traditions. He found a better a better word to describe the Church’s relationship with the Jews than did Blessed John Paul II, because John Paul II, coming from the Romantic Polish tradition said that they were ‘our elder brethren’, but the Jews don’t like this example because the elder brethren always fail, and the younger brethren win – like Jacob or Joseph – and Pope Benedict found a better word when he said ‘our fathers in faith’, showing he is a very subtle theologian”.
Finally, thinking back to his own reaction when the news broke that Pope Benedict had stepped down, Politi says he actually wasn’t surprised. After having ascertained the veracity of the news, he recalled that for a number of years he had been saying that because of his mentality, Benedict could become the first Pope to step down in modern times. He had always predicted a 50 percent possibility that he would do so.
Why? Because - Politi says – “I always took Ratzinger’s speeches very seriously. Also when I interviewed him in the past, I noticed he has a way of choosing his words: ‘when he speaks it is as if he is writing what he thinks’. So when two years ago he told his biographer, Peter Seewald, that in certain circumstances of physical, psychological and mental stress a Pope, not only has the right but also the duty to step down, this for me was like an alarm signal because he was speaking about “duty”, and for Germans, the word duty is very strong. And already when Pope John Paul II was very ill, there were only two Cardinals who were speaking about the possibility of him stepping down: one was Cardinal Ratzinger and the other was Cardinal Maradiaga. So this idea regarding the possibility and the necessity to step down was in his mind a rational option. So when it happened I said: voilà – he did it”.
Politi speaks of the great esteem he has for Benedict’s spiritual and intellectual qualities. He says he always liked the way he preached the Gospel in some little parishes he visited as the Bishop of Rome. “He has a way of explaining the Gospel in such a clear way that it comes straight to the heart and the minds of both very intellectual people and of very simple people. I always felt in his words a Living Faith”. [Hmmm, I must check back to read what Politi has written about Bergoglio's preaching!]
"If at times" ['At times'! It was all the time with Politi], Politi says, “I have been critical towards some aspects of his lack of leadership, it is because it is the duty of a journalist to observe what happens (...). Even if you see a personality and recognize that he is an exceptional or extraordinary personality, whether he is a politician, a leader or a religious leader, you must observe what really happens in his mandate and you must be a witness of things, even if they don’t all go well”.
[But nothing at all here about Politi's most frequent criticism of Benedict XVI as "an ivory-tower Pope, isolated from reality"... In short, as I noted at the time, Politi seems to have summed up his criticism of Benedict XVI into 'his crisis with Islam', 'his crisis with the Jews', Vatileaks, and the IOR. And that's what he wrote a book about?]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/07/2017 00:57]