Benedict XVI unequivocal: "I resigned, but I did not abdicate"

HH,

There were times when there were different claimants to the chair of Peter. There were not two bishops with split papal powers.

 

Well, there aren't two bishops with split Papal powers. There is one Pope, Francis, and a retired Pope, who dresses like a pope and refuses to go back to being a bishop, it seems.
I believe that is true, and I am like Dolours, who says that it will take Church action to prove otherwise. And it might not be in our lifetimes. As for the story having legs, it only has legs if the moderator doesn't cut off the legs. No disrespect intended to the moderator.

 

Sorry for the confusion. I was just referring to the article (resigned but did not abdicate) which makes that claim. I think it is a false claim.

I feel for Benedict, who must have endured great pain in making his decision to leave office. He likely is pained when he sees the confusion Francis caused among the faithful. Yes, Francis is the one and only Pope. What a mess.

 

I guess we never think spiritually about situation?

Could God have asked him to resign?

Maybe Benedict had a dream or vision?

Maybe he is here to suffer in the slow destruction of church?

Maybe the gates of hell won’t prevail because he is in the background praying?

How must he feel watching the liberal/worldly Bishops slowly taking over the church?

Interesting times!

We will never know...but if evil is growing. So is God’s saints.

 

Yes! All of this has been the thoughts of me and my husband for a few years now. I have been wondering with a bit of apprehension what will break loose spiritually when Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI dies...

It has been my secret theory that Pope Francis was originally going to wreak far more havoc than he has, and that as a great mercy and answer to the prayers of the faithful, God told Benedict to resign, let Pope Francis in early, and be the restrainer within the Vatican, preventing far worse damage, and being an additional spiritual "father" to us. That's just my theory, but isn't it a comforting thought?

 

This has been my thought too. The Church is in God's hands and Christ is leading it, we have to trust this.

I feel like quoting Mirjana on the pope: "I believe, with all my heart, that holy spirit always gives us a pope we need. When we needed a pope like John Paul II, it was him. When we needed a pope like Benedict XVI, it was him. Now we need Pope Francis, and that’s him. We must pray to help him. We are used to commenting everything, because we think we know everything. But we don’t know anything!”

The two popes must be linked to the end times events and I wish that priests would consider this in a supernatural light.

 

No it wouldn’t. Aside from emotional reactions it would separate the wheat from the weeds, those who really love God from those scared to go against the grain.

What do you make of the Book of Destiny, Saint Francis’s destroyer pope, Bishops Sheen’s prophecy on the false prophet and counterfeit church and deception of the Antichrist, the book of the apocalypse and what the catechism says about Antichrist’s religious deception?

 

It’s easy to lose heart if one sticks to a rigid interpretation of papal indefectability and tries to square that with Pope Francis.

What has kept me from losing heart these many years since his elevation is that eventually, possibly in hindsight, the Church may rule him as having been an antipope. That is only possible when there are two claimants to the Chair of Peter. In this case, BXVI doesn’t exactly fit that definition, but there are certainly “two popes” as Blessed ACE foresaw and the Fatima vision seemed to indicate.

But we cannot declare this pope an antipope, only the Church can.

Yet we CAN and we MUST recognize his material heresies and that which competent Church authority may well judge his formal heresies, and we may well discuss whether the conditions exist, now or in the future, based on an invalid resignation by his predecessor, an invalid conclave, or his personal heresy, for the Church to eventually declare him an antipope.

These latter things are the only things bringing me sanity and peace during this horrifying pontificate, and no, I do NOT think it appropriate or prudent to censor this line of thinking at this late point.

 

Unless there's some terrible catastrophe in the Church along the lines of a clearly apostate Bishop being elected to succeed him, I can't see Pope Francis ever being declared an Anti-Pope. It would cause too much of the kind of mess lukewarm Bishops wouldn't want to deal with. For example, declaring him an Anti-Pope would mean half or more of the current College of Cardinals were never Cardinals. Only the Cardinals appointed before he took office would be eligible to elect a Pope while all the clergy he promoted to the Episcopate are valid Bishops. Given that some if not most of the best Cardinals who voted in the 2013 conclave are either dead or too old to vote, that means there would be a minority of Cardinals and Bishops trying to choose a valid Pope in opposition to a substantial majority of Cardinals and Bishops.

Whatever happens with the papacy, Francis being a valid Pope doesn't give anyone an excuse to break the Commandments just because the Pope sends out mixed messages letting people think that abortion, contraception, divorce and sodomy aren't really sinful. The natural law is written on everybody's heart. Every one of us will stand alone before God on our personal judgement day. I reckon that a lot of graduates of expensive Jesuit universities will be shocked to discover that judgement day isn't a debating session and the Judge isn't afraid of the NYT or CNN.

 

Nor Washington or Huffington Post .

 

It might not happen on the near horizon but I firmly believe some day it might, probably would or should, happen.

 

Good gravy...

 

In the 1970's there arose a school of thought called Nouvelle Theologie . Father (bishop?) Ratzinger was a key participant. One of the questions that was discussed was whether the pope had to be just one person. Ann Barnhardt and Professor Mazza have done an excellent job of analyzing Benedict's partial resignation in light of this thinking. In my opinion their hours of podcasts on the subject of Benedict's resignation are well worth listening to. Here is just a teeny bit of her commentary on this topic:

THERMONUCLEAR SUBSTANTIAL ERROR: In 1978 Joseph Ratzinger considered hypothesis that a monarchical Papacy was intrinsically “Arian” in nature, and the Papacy should reflect the Trinity, a “Pope-Troika” consisting of One Catholic, One Protestant and One Orthodox, “through which the papacy, the chief annoyance of non-Catholic Christendom, must become the definitive vehicle for the unity of all Christians.”

 

A theologian and teacher might well entertain a hypothesis as a new way of examining an issue. A science teacher might ask,"What if the sky were green? What would that mean for photosynthesis?"

What would matter is if there is evidence he proposed this as a real-life working model for the papacy. Evidence that he argued the Church should adopt this troika or tried to persuade his brother bishops, even his good friend Pope John Paul II.

I wonder if Benedict XVI was even the originator of the hypothesis.

 

Consider the source (author)of the article

 

I’m glad I’m not being held accountable for whAt I thought and how I behaved in the 1970’s.

 

I think that he would have to formally teach and bind the faithful to error before he could be declared an anti-Pope unless some evidence came to light proving that Benedict's resignation was invalid, which won't happen. Perhaps his failure to defend the faith will lead to his condemnation as happened with Honorius 1 but I don't believe that any of us will live to see it.

The bifurcated papacy claim seems to me to be clutching at straws. Before he was Pope, Benedict explored all sorts of theories. He co-wrote a book favourable to Liberation Theology. I recall reading a note on the Vatican's website to the effect that he later came to realise the error of Liberation Theology. I think, but could be mistaken, that Pope John Paul set him straight on that topic. For all his brilliance, Benedict was a product of the rarified atmosphere and mutual admiration cliques prevalent in academia. There are no heresies named after plumbers, bricklayers or waiters.

 

I think that if Francis taught some heretical teaching accompanied by an anathema against those who opposed him, he obviously would not be a legitimate pope (this has not happened so far).

 

Yes, that's exactly what they were doing: hypothetically rethinking the papacy. I'll qualify all this because it's been at least 9 months since I listened to the 3 hour discussion of Benedict, Francis, and the papacy. This particular point simply demonstrates that Pope Benedict as part of this group had considered the possibility of the office being split. It's not so far-fetched to think that Pope Benedict intended to separate the office of Bishop of Rome from that of Vicar of Christ.

Honestly, Professor Mazza, Ann Barnhardt, and Mark Docherty have done incredible research into what might have happened. The rest of the traditional CAtholic world is slowly catching up to them.

 

In a stealth maneuver, without signaling or explaining his intention? That simply doesn't correspond to what we know of Benedict's character.
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