May God grant eternal rest, peace, and light to Josef Ratzinger. I loved him and still do. He was my Pope.
Yet, as with many, I am conflicted. I've said many times. all he had to do was to go to the window at the Angelus on a Sunday and tell the City and the World of those wolves who were persecuting him and out to take over the papacy and destroy the Church. Romans loved Josef Ratzinger. We did. There would have been a bloodletting and we would have risen up in an open war with the enemies. He had the power, but he failed to use it. He was forced out? How, what could they have threatened him with? Martyrdom? Instant heaven. His brother's murder? Same thing. What could he have possibly been threatened with to leave? Yesterday, I used the word "coward" in the combox to the post below. It has offended some. Correct, I should not speak ill of the dead but it doesn't change the truth. When that helicopter carried him away that day, I thought he would be dead in months, that he has some kind of terminal disease and he was going off to die. Instead, he lived three months short of ten years. He was there watching his successor attempt to destroy and did nothing. He let it happen. He was my "Papa" and he walked out on his "Bride" my mother. He let the family house be taken over by an abusive bully who has beaten my mother and continues the spiritual abuse of his children. How do we square this with those who say that he retained the "munus" and only renounced the "ministerium?" No, he left, he abandoned his post, if the election of Pope Francis was defective and he was not a true Pope, he is now. This is the bottom line. The priests of the Diocese of Rome accept Jorge Bergoglio as their bishop and the Bishop of Rome is the Vicar of Christ on Earth and Pope. So, let's get off of this "interregnum" merry-go-round. Sometimes Occam's Razor is simply true. The simplest option is what it is. What I keep my eye on is that God wins in the end and so do those of us who remain steadfast with Him. We keep on going. We don't abandon the job as I see so many past "experts" doing on social media. "Look at what they have done to us." No, look at what you have done to yourself! Stop whining (you know who you are); you who were so prominent and "in the know." Your responses now are pathetic. You've abandoned the job too. On my part, I have not stopped doing what I have done from 2005 and before. I will continue as long as God gives me the will to do it.
God wins. Get back to work.
Courtesy of Rorate Caeli blog.
My spiritual testament
When, at this late hour of my life, I look back on the decades I have wandered through, I see first of all how much reason I have to give thanks. Above all, I thank God Himself, the giver of all good gifts, who has given me life and guided me through all kinds of confusion; who has always picked me up when I began to slip, who has always given me anew the light of his countenance. In retrospect, I see and understand that even the dark and arduous stretches of this path were for my salvation and that He guided me well in those very stretches.
I thank my parents, who gave me life in difficult times and prepared a wonderful home for me with their love, which shines through all my days as a bright light until today. My father's clear-sighted faith taught us brothers and sisters to believe and stood firm as a guide in the midst of all my scientific knowledge; my mother's heartfelt piety and great kindness remain a legacy for which I cannot thank her enough. My sister has served me selflessly and full of kind concern for decades; my brother has always paved the way for me with the clear-sightedness of his judgements, with his powerful determination, and with the cheerfulness of his heart; without this ever-new going ahead and going along, I would not have been able to find the right path.
I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the many friends, men and women, whom He has always placed at my side; for the co-workers at all stages of my path; for the teachers and students He has given me. I gratefully entrust them all to His goodness. And I would like to thank the Lord for my beautiful home in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, in which I was able to see the splendour of the Creator Himself shining through time and again. I thank the people of my homeland for allowing me to experience the beauty of faith time and again. I pray that our country will remain a country of faith and I ask you, dear compatriots, not to let your faith be distracted. Finally, I thank God for all the beauty I was able to experience during the various stages of my journey, but especially in Rome and in Italy, which has become my second home.
I ask for forgiveness from the bottom of my heart from all those whom I have wronged in some way.
What I said earlier of my compatriots, I now say to all who were entrusted to my service in the Church: Stand firm in the faith! Do not be confused! Often it seems as if science - on the one hand, the natural sciences; on the other, historical research (especially the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures) - has irrefutable insights to offer that are contrary to the Catholic faith. I have witnessed from times long past the changes in natural science and have seen how apparent certainties against the faith vanished, proving themselves not to be science but philosophical interpretations only apparently belonging to science - just as, moreover, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith has learned to understand the limits of the scope of its affirmations and thus its own specificity.For 60 years now, I have accompanied the path of theology, especially biblical studies, and have seen seemingly unshakeable theses collapse with the changing generations, which turned out to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher, etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann, etc.), the Marxist generation. I have seen, and see, how, out of the tangle of hypotheses, the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging anew. Jesus Christ is truly the Way, the Truth, and the Life - and the Church, in all her shortcomings, is truly His Body.
Finally, I humbly ask: pray for me, so that the Lord may admit me to the eternal dwellings, despite all my sins and shortcomings. For all those entrusted to me, my heartfelt prayer goes out day after day.
Benedictus PP XVI
9 comments:
No, my friend. Benedict was not a coward for the same reason that Jesus was not a coward and St. Peter was not a coward. They knew intimately the power of the Cross. You are thinking like the enemy: power must be exercised, order must be restored, "No, this won't happen to you" etc.
A Pope cannot call for a revolution when the flock is so weak that they believe only what the head in television says. John Paul II was surrounded but he had some friends that he positioned in such a way to cause the fall of the USSR. He was the one that designed with Ratzinger the munus/ministerium thing and you better believe it because it is the law of the Church.
Didn't the prophets and seers told us that the Pope was going to be a prisoner in the Vatican? that he was going to suffer much? that the devil was going to sit in Rome AND ALSO that Rome is going to be destroyed, that "a bishop dressed in white that we believed to be the Holy Father" was going to be attacked by archers and soldiers with arrows and bullets? that Russia was going to be the hammer of God to punish the West? that a pope was going to leave Rome walking over the corpses of his cardinals?
You are gravely mistaken if you think Benedict acted cowardly. On the contrary, he boldly assessed the weakness of his enemies: he knew that they were a cretinous bunch that did not even bother to learn the language and laws of the Church. Benedict defeated them with that. He is not a simple man like you or me: he dared to play chess with the devil and he prevailed.
Coward!??? He and John Paul imagined the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin knows that and he is going to take revenge soon but he will take revenge on the usurpers until there is not one left. The infiltrators have been infiltrated. They will go up in a cloud of radioactive dust.
Everything will be uncovered and Benedict will be seen at last as he is The Glory of the Olive, the glory of the Church.
Peter conquered Rome by allowing the Romans to crucify him. This last Peter conquered his enemies in the same manner. See what follows. In a few months you will agree with every letter of this comment.
God bless you.
Carlos, I read your post. You may be right. I hope you are.
I do not know the time and the seasons but I know all that God predicted will come to pass.
God bless you always.
Vox
I share some of your conflictions. As a high school Department Head of Religious Studies, I had, in 1984, purchased a copy, for every department member, of the Ratzinger Report. Really, I was on a fool's errand. So deeply entrenched was the Modernist playbook that the Report, not read, was thrown on the shelves. Even though Ratzinger had sold his soul to the conciliar genie, I always believed that he maintained some sense of doctrinal intergrity and that the Report was a lonely light, in the Modernist darkness, that had become default in "Catholic" education. Summorum Pontificum will continue to bear fruit, despite Bergoglio, the Traditionis Deletor. When it was announced that Benedict would visit the USA in 08, I wrote him a letter(snail mail), pleading with him to offer a High Mass while in the United States. This would have been a very effective follow up to Summorum Pontificum. I reminded him of Pius VII, in Paris, for the coronation of Napoleon. Pius faithfully celebrated Holy Mass. The faithful, rustic and erudite alike, came out and sang the Credo with him. This papal witness brought to a halt much of the liturgical lunacies of the Jansenists, liturgical lunacies eerily similar to what flourishes in the Novus Ordo theme park. In closing, I certainly wish he had scattered more of the wolves. May he rest in peace.
Really, Vox? If you hold that since "the priests of the Diocese of Rome accept Jorge Bergoglio as their bishop and the Bishop of Rome is the Vicar of Christ on Earth and Pope", he is the pope, then why would your position have changed with the death of Benedict XVI? You should have accepted Jorge Bergoglio as pope all along. But despite this, where do you get that because "the priests of the Diocese of Rome accept Jorge Bergoglio as their bishop and the Bishop of Rome is the Vicar of Christ on Earth and Pope", he is the pope? Can you back this up with some theology or canon law?
Tony,
You've been twisting yourself into a pretzel ever since I met you. Not even the SSPX is good enough for you. No priest can be a vagabond, he must be under the authority of a bishop. You follow priests who have left or been thrown out of the SSPX. You don't go to Mass, and you can't access the Sacraments. You are now a sedevacantist. It's twisted logic on your part. If Bergoglio, as bad as he is, is not Pope then his Cardinals are not legitimate and they cannot elect his successor. Therefore, there can be no more Pope, no more visible head of the Church which becomes defective. Rather, just believe, as, in the past, we can have a really bad Pope.
As for the law, the Pope is elected by the clergy of Rome represented in the Cardinals who are clergy of Rome; the priests there accept Francis as their Bishop. The Bishop of Rome is Pope. At this stage, there is no bifurcated papacy, if there ever was one, Francis is Pope. Deal with it.
Ciao bello.
At this point it does not take a Canon Law genius to figure out the basics.
Forgive me if this sounds a bit strong. That is not my intention at all.
This was a coup d’état. Pope Benedict was pressured. He had enough time to see that if he was assassinated the rebels would elect a successor of their own and the munus would have passed to a bad man. He devised a way to keep the munus while letting his enemies think they have captured the Papacy. But they were merely in Sede Impedita with someone playing kabuki dressed as a pope. I bet there are a bunch of good loyal bishops who will elect a pope “in the catacombs” so to speak. It may have happened already. Soon everything will be exposed (Luke 8:17) and this miserable episode will pile eternal shame on the conspirators. We are in Sede Vacante and Pope Benedict won. His enemies will have to face the Terrible Judge. Poor fools! They have conquered the world only to lose their souls.
Francis is NOT a pope, he is an imposter chosen illegally by the group called "Gallen Mafia". He and about 20 cardinals are in the click together to change Catholic Church from within; just wait for the synod of synodality to see their evil intentions, and the schism which will follow. Pope Benedict XVI has died, because new chapter of this evil sect in the Vatican will be written now. Pope Benedict was a katechon, who was stopping the worst from happening. Now the Keys of Peter went back to Heaven for the time being. False pope does not have power from above - you will see this soon. His decisions will be full of evil attacking the meaning of the Holy Mass (especially transubstantiation) to make IT invalid. All these were prophesied and all are playing exactly in front our eyes. Many people will be mislead following this imposter straight into the door of the FALSE CHURCH. Many will not even understand what is happening - like the biblical silly maids, who forgot to put oil into their lamps... BEWARE OF BERGOGLIO and his false humility!
Tereze, This must be your first time here. Clearly, you do not understand my position on Bergoglio.
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