BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Because of the page change, I am re-posting here the last post on the previous page, for easier browsing continuity with the posts that follow which relate to the 7/23/16 post.




I wonder if the Vatican will commemorate this 65th anniversary on stamps as they did the 60th anniversary with the set of 4 above, marking his priestly ordination, consecration as Archbishop, elevation to cardinal, and election as Pope.

The pope says 'Benedict XVI renounced
the active exercise of the Petrine ministry'
Will he provoke new rounds of protest?

L'Osservatore Romano today dedicated a full-page spread to the coming 65th anniversary of Benedict XVI's ordination to the priesthood.



The page features the Preface Pope Francis wrote for a book published by Cantagalli to mark the 65th anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger's ordination to the priesthood, entitled Imparare e Insegnare L'amore di Dio) (To learn and to teach the love of God). The page provides all the information missing in the Catholic Herald's report yesterday on the Pope's Preface yesterday. The book on the right is the Italian edition of Joseph Ratzinger's writings on the priesthood (766 pp in the German edition) - Vol. 12 of his Opera Omnia, reissued this year for the anniversary.

But something jumps to the eye early in the Pope's Preface, as Antonio Socci quickly observed on his Facebook page, reproducing the passage of interest as it was printed in La Repubblica today.


The entire paragraph reads:

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Renouncing the active exercise of the Petrine ministry, Benedict XVI decided to dedicate himself totally to the service of prayer: "The Lord calls me to 'climb the mountain', to dedicate myself even more to prayer and meditation, But this does not mean abandoning the Church. Rather, if God is asking this of me, it is so that I may continue to serve the Church with the same dedication and the same love as I have always sought to do, to this day", he said after the last moving Angelus that he led.

From this point of view, as rightly expressed by the Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, I would like to add that perhaps it is today, as emeritus Pope, that he is imparting in the most obvious way one of his greatest lessons in doing 'theology on one's knees'.

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Antonio Socci's reaction, of course, reflects his own pet theory that something/someone/some group had pushed Benedict XVI into resigning, though Socci himself cannot name any names, much less, the reason these unknown elements wanted Benedict out and what leverage they could possibly have used to force him out! He sees Francis's words as supporting his theory:

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Fantastic! Even Papa Bergoglio acknowledges that Benedict XVI renounced 'active exercise of the Petrine ministry' only... The mystery continues and is becoming even more sensational.

The question that arises - especially after Mons. Gaenswein's address - is what really happened, and if Benedict XVI ever did, truly renounce the Pontificate validly.

The photo shows a passage from the Preface to a book by Benedict XVI published today by La Repubblica and signed 'Francesco'. But the sentence is so embarrassing for the Bergoglians that the newspaper does not make a headline of it, and the newspaper's Vaticanista in his commentary published alongside does not even mention it! My compliments...

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As for me, I can hear the howls of protest and the gnashing of teeth now by George Weigel and those who think like him: "NO, NO, Pope Francis, you cannot mean what you wrote. By all the rules and traditions of the Church, there can only be one pope at a time. As St. John Paul II said in his time, 'A pope emeritus is impossible'. Why are you now echoing Gaenswein's absurd theory?" [Though it turns out the Preface was written in March, and GG gave his address on May 22 - unless, of course, as I speculate below, JMB asked GG to draft the preface for him, and the latter sort of gave his theory a dry run, which seems to have passed untouched by the man who should be most concerned!]

In fact, Weigel et al think Benedict XVI has no right to call himself 'emeritus Pope' and to continue to wear a white cassock and the zucchetto - and that is why they have been angrily derisive of Georg Gaenswein's expressed view of an 'expanded Petrine ministry'. As if GG were advocating for B16 any special prerogatives - there are absolutely none for an ex-Pope - and as if for him to say that Benedict XVI is now exercising a contemplative ministry meant he was muscling into the reigning pope's territory, usurping some of his powers and prerogatives somehow [which one(s), exactly?].

Weigel et al have perhaps never stopped to consider that as an ex-Pope, Benedict XVI has a duty to uphold the dignity of the papacy, especially as he freely chose to step down with his reputation and personal integrity intact.

Someone who has been pope is not just like any other bishop who retires, as B16's critics would have it. He is one of only 266 men in the past two centuries who have held office as Successor of Peter with all the powers and authority vested in the Successor of Peter.

Yes, he loses all that power and authority the minute he steps down, but the aura and spiritual consequences of the office he held linger in him, especially since, in the case of B16, the only reproaches to his Pontificate were administrative and relatively trivial. He has not lost the charisms endowed by the Holy Spirit at the moment he was chosen pope and which he cultivated to the best of his ability for the good of his flock and the greater glory of God.

I have a practical conjecture about how and why the paragraph in question is in the Preface. Generally, when a pope needs to write a message of special circumstance, as this preface is, he asks someone very familiar with the subject and the circumstance in question to prepare a draft for him, which he can then adapt, in full or with some revisions, and publish under his own signature.

At the Vatican, there were two people well qualified to write such a draft for him - Cardinal Mueller and Mons. Gaenswein. But since Cardinal Mueller had already written the Introduction to the book, he turned to Mons. Gaenswein. That would explain not just the content of the paragraph in question, but also the premise it lays that B16 had abandoned active exercise of the Petrine ministry but not its service of prayer.

Of course, the paragraph does not go as far as GG's further extrapolation to an 'expanded' and 'collegial' Petrine ministry - terms which, IMHO, were unnecessary and bound to provoke angry protests from theologians and canonists alike, as they have, already. He was expressing his opinion and that of the professor who wrote the book that was presented, and, we may assume, he cleared the contents of his address with Benedict XVI himself.

He did not propose that Church law be amended to reflect this 'expanded ministry' - because the situation today is unique to Benedict XVI. Subsequent popes who decide to retire instead of dying in office will have different situations and different conceptions of what their post-papal life should be. And I don't think any of them would impinge on the reigning pope's prerogatives in any way.

One must assume the pope himself reviewed the draft of the preface - as he would have, whoever had prepared it - and did not find the aforesaid paragraph offensive or wrong, especially since it ties in very well with his theme that Joseph Ratzinger is the master example of doing theology on one's knees. [If JMB, for example, had not reviewed the Preface personally, and any of his close associates, say, Fr. Spadaro, did so on his behalf, they would never have allowed that clause "Renouncing the active exercise of the Petrine ministry" to stay.]

Given his personality, no one could doubt that JMB is supremely confident that Joseph Ratzinger resigned validly, and can possibly have no designs at all to claim a 'co-papacy' or 'diarchy', or whatever term 'strict' canonists use to underscore their exaggeration of GG's hypothesis. And that JMB is just as supremely confident he was legitimately elected, and accusations of electioneering by the Sankt Gallen Mafia, even if true, are not actionable at all. He can well afford to be magnanimous to his predecessor, even if George Weigel and company are not.

Here is how the OR introduced the Preface by the Pope, which was entitled 'Prayer is a decisive factor', for the newspaper:

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We present here the integral text of a Preface signed by Pope Francis on March 7 for an anthology of texts about the priesthood by his predecessor.

Entitled Insegnare e imparare l’amore di Dio (Siena, Cantagalli, 2016, pagine 304, euro 19), the book contaisn 43 homilies by Joseph Ratzinger. From the oldest of the published homilies, delivered in 1954 in Berchtesgaden and dedicated to Franz Niegel on the occasion of the latter's first Mass, we also publish the first part here.

The anthology, which is introduced by Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, closes with Benedict XVI's Apostolic Letter on June 16, 2009, in which he decreed a Year for Priests.

The book will be released on June 30, the day after the 65th anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger's ordination to the priesthood on June 29, 1951, in the Cathedral of Freising.

The commemorative book is the first in a book series on selected texts by Joseph Ratzinger, to be published initially in six languages, on the following other subjects: science and faith, Europe, creative minorities, politics and faith, the university, and the Eucharist.

The anniversary will be commemorated at a ceremony presided by Pope Francis in the Apostolic Palace on June 28.

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I shall, of course, translate the papal preface to the new book by Benedict XVI, but meanwhile, I have one other supplemental task.
I could not quite make out what the OR illustration was for the Pope's Preface, but it was captioned 'Angels contemplating the Last Supper', by Jean Guitton.

Guitton is the French theologian who was the first lay person invited to be an observer of an ecumenical council (Vatican II) and who became a good friend of Paul VI.



I found this color image of the painting in an online article about the Paul VI Art Collection on exhibit at the Opera per l'Educazione Cristiana di Brescia in Concesio, the suburb where Paul VI was born and lived.

Papa Montini was a knowledgeable collector of modern art, and the exhibit, inaugurated in 2009, contains 270 paintings and sculptures from his personal collection that had been enriched over the years by donations and legacies from institutions and private individuals who are aware of Paul VI's interest in modern art.

Among these works are two paintings by Guitton, the other one being a panorama of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean desert entitled "What Christ saw from the Cross". The illustration used by OR is signed by Guitton in 1974, and he writes the programmatic title, "Les anges contemplent La Cene'.

Here is a translation of the excerpt from the 1954 homily by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger that opens the collection of 47 homilies on the priesthood anthologized in a book to commemorate the 65th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood. He delivered it for the first Mass of a friend and former student of his, Franz Niegel.

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The fisherman of the lake
Excerpt from a homily
by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger
Berchtesgaden, 1954

The Gospel today, which the deacon has just proclaimed for us, contains something of the fascination we have for the Holy Land. It is almost as if for one moment, we feel the gentle breaking of the waves on the lake that the Lord travelled so often with his disciples. As if we perceived the luminous splendor of the southern sky arching clear above us and a greeting from the fields around the lake whose flowers the Lord has praised in his parables.*

In announcing the eternal Kingdom, the Lord has placed us somehow within that breaking of the waves and the perfume of the flowers in his land, and we are happy because we recognize with joy the affinity with the beauty of our own land.

But everything that is said here is only the external framework for the greatest and most important thing: the morning of existence for a man who receives the call and the responsibility of his life.

Simon, who as a fisherman, had been travelling this lake, once again goes out towards the deep for fish. But when the nets are drawn to shore, so heavy and full of fish - though this time, the catch owed nothing to him - something new begins: "From now on, you will be a fisher of men," the Lord tells him.

The nets and the boat shall therefore remain by the lake - others will make it their business. Now you must cast the nets of God in the ocean of the world. Now you must bring to safety, towards the shore of eternity, even those reluctant men who prefer to immerse themselves in the ocean of the world with the illusion of a presumed happiness.

But you must do this through the desolate nights of so many failures. You must do it without losing your spirit and without moaning, even in the bitter hours when all may seem futile to you and the work of your life seems to have gone to waste.

This happened then, almost 2000 years ago, on the morning of a man's existence. But not only then. It is happening here, today.

Indeed, what happens in priestly ordination and the first Mass we say if not this? That Christ has presented himself anew to some young men and takes away their boats and nets, the things to which they may have attached this or that youthful dream, and he tells them: "Now you must be fishers of men. In the ocean of the world, you must go out into the deep to cast the net of God with courage and magnanimity, at a time when everyone seems to want to flee from God, the holy 'predator'".

And that is why like an echo from the lake of Gennesaret, when, at the beginning of the sacrament of ordination, the bishop enunciates to the young deacons the tasks that they now face, he does so objectively, clearly, simply and in summary, exactly in the way that the language of the Romans, then masters of the world, had formulated those tasks.

The priest must offer the sacrifice of the Mass, he must bless, he must preside, he must preach and he must baptize. Short words that are pregnant with content, about which the candidates for priesthood would have reflected long and well in the exercises before ordination - because these words contain the whole meaning of their future life...

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*A personal reflection, which has nothing to do with the theme of the homily but yes with the setting where it happens:
This is the second occasion I read Joseph Ratzinger describing the ineffably transcendent moments one feels - and I assume most people who have the opportunity to visit the lake of Galilee and the hills and fields that surround it do experience it - standing and walking where Jesus stood and walked when he was on earth.

After visiting Greece the first time, I immediately appreciated the 'stereotype' that the light of Greece is somehow different from anywhere else - with a diaphanous clarity and radiance that lend a distinct imprint to the objects one sees and and how one sees them.

But the light in Galilee transcends that experience. Perhaps not objectively, but because standing there on the Mount of the Beatitudes and looking down on the Lake of Galilee and the shores, fields, villages and hills surrounding it - substantially unchanged since the Lord walked this land - one is easily transported to his day, and one is filled in every sense with the blissful and indestructible certainty of one's faith in God and all his manifestations. One feels directly touched by God - and it is a memory that I seek to evoke every time I say the third luminous mystery, when I receive the Eucharist, and at concrete moments when I truly need God's 'immediate presence' to see me through.

P.S. Beatrice on her site www.benoit-et-moi.fr/2016 has happily recalled that Fr. Niegel is one of the persons Peter Seewald interviewed around the time he had been first asked to write about Joseph Ratzinger back in 1992 - and he sought to speak to as many persons who had known him and were well-disposed towards him, as well as persons hostile to him. He recounts the interview he had with Niegel in his book BENEDICT XVI: AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT, the informal biography he published shortly after Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope. It deserves to be re-read. I will post the English excerpt as soon as I can because I do not have my copy of the book available right now.

Here is my translation of Pope Francis's Preface to a book of homilies on the priesthood by Joseph Ratzinger...

In the life of every priest:
Prayer is the decisive factor
by POPE FRANCIS
Preface to the book
'Insegnare e imparare l'amore di Dio'
Homilies on the priesthood by Joseph Ratzinger
Translated from the 6/23/16 issue of


Every time I read the works of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, it becomes clearer to me that he did and continues to do 'theology on one's knees'.

On one's knees because, before being a very great theologian and teacher of the faith, it is obvious that he is a man who truly believes, who truly prays. It is obvious he is a man who embodies holiness, a man of peace, a man of God.

And therefore he incarnates exemplarily the heart of all priestly action - that profound rootedness in God without which all possible organizational qualities and all presumed intellectual superiority, all the money and all the power, are useless.

He incarnates that constantly relationship with the Lord Jesus without which nothing is true, everything becomes routine, priests are mere employees, bishops are just bureaucrats and the Church is not the Church of Christ, but our own product, an NGO which is ultimately superfluous.

The priest is he who "incarnates the presence of Christ, hearing witness to his salvific presence", he wrote in the letter whereby he decreed a Year for Priests.

Reading this book, we see clearly how he himself, in 65 years of priesthood that we celebrate this year, exemplarily lived and lives, bore witness and bears witness to the essence of priestly action.

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has authoritatively stated that the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger and later of Benedict XVI places him among the greatest theologians who sat on Peter's Chair, like, for example, Pope Leo the Great, saint and Doctor of the Church.

Renouncing the active exercise of the Petrine ministry, Benedict XVI decided to dedicate himself totally to the service of prayer: "The Lord calls me to 'climb the mountain', to dedicate myself even more to prayer and meditation, But this does not mean abandoning the Church. Rather, if God is asking this of me, it is so that I may continue to serve the Church with the same dedication and the same love as I have always sought to do, to this day", he said after the last moving Angelus that he led.

From this point of view, as rightly expressed by the Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, I would like to add that perhaps it is today, as emeritus Pope, that he is imparting in the most obvious way one of his greatest lessons in doing 'theology on one's knees'.

Because it is perhaps, above all, from the Mater Ecclesiae monastery to which he has retired, that Benedict XVI continues to bear witness, in an even more luminous way, that 'decisive factor', the intimate nucleus of the priestly ministry that deacons, priests and bishops must never forget.

That is, that the first and most important service is not the management of 'current affairs', but to pray for others, continuously, body and soul, as the emeritus Pope does today. Constantly immersed in God, with his heart always turned to him, like a lover who can think only of his beloved, whatever else he may be doing.

Thus, His Holiness Benedict XVI, with his witness, shows us what true prayer is: It is not the occupation of some persons who are considered particularly devout but perhaps not able to resolve practical problems - that 'doing' which the most active [activist] priests believe to be the decisive element of our priestly service, thereby relegating prayer to their 'free time'.

Nor is prayer simply a good practice that helps us lay our conscience to rest, nor a devout way of obtaining from God that which we believe we need at a certain moment.

No, prayer - we are told in this book and as Benedict XVI shows us - is the decisive factor: an intercession which the Church and the world - especially at a time of true and proper epochal change - need more than ever, like bread, and more than bread.

Because to pray is to entrust the Church to God, knowing that the Church is not ours, but his, and precisely because of this, he will never abandon her.

Because prayer means entrusting the world and mankind to God - prayer is the key that opens the heart of God, the only means that can bring back God ever anew to this world, as it is the only means to bring men ever anew to God, like the prodigal son returning to his father who, full of love for him, wants nothing more than to be able to embrace him again.

Benedict XVI does not forget that prayer is the first task of a bishop (Acts 6,4).

And thus prayer truly goes hand in hand with the knowledge that, without prayer, the world will not only lose its orientation but also the authentic source of life.

"Because without the bond with God, we are like satellites who have lost our orbit to hurl ourselves precipitously into the void, not just shattering ourselves but also threatening others", writes Joseph Ratzinger, offering us one of so many stupendous images found throughout this book.

Dear brother priests! Allow me to say that is any of you should ever have any doubt about the center of your own ministry, about its meaning, its usefulness, if you should ever have any doubt about what men truly expects from us, then meditate profoundly on the pages that are offered here to us.

Men expect from us above all what you will find described and borne witness to in this book: that we bring Jesus Christ to them, and that we lead them to him, to the living waters for which they thirst more than any other thing, that only He can give and no surrogate could ever replace; that we lead them to full and true happiness when nothing satisfies them any more, that we lead them to realize their most intimate dream that nobody else could promise and fulfill.

It is not by chance that the initiative for this book - together with starting a series of thematic books on the thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - came from a layman, Prof. Pierluca Azzaro [also the translator from the original German to Italian of the GESAMMELTE SCHRIFTEN (Opera Omnia)] and a priest, Rev. Fr. Carlos Granados.

To them, I send my sincere thanks, best wishes and support for their important project, along with Fr. Giuseppe Costa, director of the Vatican publishing house which is publishing the Italian edition of the Opera Omnia of Joseph Ratzinger.

I say it is not by chance because the book that I am presenting is addressed in equal measure to priests as well as the lay faithful, as we see most magisterially in this page from the book that offers an invitation to religious and laymen to read it:

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Lately, I read an account by the great French writer Julien Green about his conversion. He writes that in the period between the two world wars, he lived as most men live today - he did whatever he pleased, he was so chained to pleasures contrary to God that on the one hand, he needed them just to make his life bearable, but on the other hand, he did find his own life unbearable.

He was seeking a way out, to make new relationships. He sought out the great theologian Henri Bremond, but their conversation remained on the academic plane, dealing with theoretical subtleties that did not help him at all.

He then began a relationship with two great philosophers, Jacques and Raissa Maritain. Raissa referred hin to a Polish Dominican, whom he met and to whom he described his lacerated life. The priest told him: "And do you agree to continue living that way?" He said, "Of course not!"

"So you wish to live differently. Have you repented?", he asked. "Yes," said Green. Then something unexpected happened. The priest said to him: "Kneel down!... Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis (I absolve you of your sins)."

Green writes: "It was then I realized that at bottom, I had always been awaiting this moment, I had always waited for someone to tell me, 'Fall on your knees... I absolve you'. I went home: I was not another person, no. I had finally become myself". (Joseph Ratzinger, Opera omnia, Vol. 12, p. 781)

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While I do thank Pope Francis for writing this Preface - and for all the words that he rightly says about Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - that acknowledgement is conditioned by major mental reservations about the claims that the pope reiterates from his reading of his predecessor's words on the priesthood.

I did not want to precede the presentation of my translation with any of these reservations, firstly because I already had, in the previous post, speculated that perhaps this Preface had been drafted for JMB, at his request, by someone like Mons. Gaenswein who not only knows Benedict XVI intimately but is also familiar with his work and thoughts. And that, regardless of who wrote it, the Pope had substantially approved the draft and sent if off under his signature.(Since JMB also entrusts the drafting of his most important documents to others, it is unlikely he would have sat down to write this Preface himself.)

In any case, I had pointed out it was unlikely that anyone who could have reviewed the draft text for the pope would have kept the line that says 'Renouncing the active exercise of the Petrine ministry...', which is anathema to those who think Benedict XVI, through Georg Gaenswein, is somehow trying to usurp some part of a ministry that no longer belongs to him - as if praying were a function one could usurp from anyone.

Now, it appears that in the full text, the reigning pope also refers to Benedict XVI as 'His Holiness', an appelation he could have withheld without affecting the sentence that contains it. Yet another Bergoglian 'slip' bound to provoke clenched fists waving and cries of outrage from George Weigel et al, who have in the past praised Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI fulsomely for his genuine humility but now make him out to be an egoistic person seeking somehow to hang on desperately by his fingernails to some vestige of his past office.

Worse than all that, however, insofar as Bergoglians are concerned, is the title and central thesis of the Preface that prayer is the decisive and pre-eminent factor for the life of the Church and of the world.

In sentence after sentence in this Preface, while they are gratifyingly true, JMB seems to contradict everything he has been preaching about the primary task of priests, bishops and himself as pope - namely, concrete service that will relieve the material and physical afflictions of the faithful. Which seems to me the most convincing 'proof' that the essay could not have been drafted by anyone close to JMB and who knows the unabashedly pragmatic priorities that he assigns to the work of the Church and the ministers who serve her.

Of course, it can always be argued that every good deed is in itself a prayer, but that's not always so, especially if it is all part of a generic 'Look at me, how good I am at serving others" activism, of philanthropy, big or small, focused principally on the effort and its effects rather than primarily for the greater glory of God.

One consequence, is that, improbably, some journalists may read the Preface and then, on that basis, proclaim rather intemperately and quite naively (or perhaps more properly, faux-naively):


Maybe it is the agenda of John Allen and San Martin, his only associate so far in the new Crux, to depict this Pontificate as the best there ever was or could be, while augmenting the particular virtues they attribute to JMB with virtues of his predecessor that could also be attributed to him. Not so much to underscore a 'continuity' that is falsely presumed, but to say that JMB's perfection also encompasses virtues of his predecessor that no one could question as virtues.

In what one might loosely call an objective correlative to what Pope Francis really feels about most priests who fail his single litmus test - that of Bergoglio-style pastoral mercy - he made two remarks about priests last June 16 that some commentators did highlight, alongside his remarks on invalid sacramental marriages and 'real marriages' in cohabitating couples. Mons. Pope, of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, reacts to the priest remarks...

One priest's concern about
the pope's recent remarks on priests

June 24, 2016

As a parish priest in the trenches, I would like to make a few remarks concerning the Pope’s recent statements in Rome at a gathering of priests and seminarians. Others have admirably remarked on his troubling remarks on marriage and cohabitation. I will not add to those.

But I would like to focus on two other reported remarks the Pope made about priests to the effect that some of us are cruel, are putting our noses into people’s moral life and possibly that he even called some of us animals.

And while most of these remarks, recorded and widely reported, were not included, or were “adjusted” in the Vatican transcript, they cannot simply be unsaid. And even the clarifications remain troubling.

I write these remarks simply as a parish priest. I am not a canonist and certainly not a reporter. I react simply as a priest to what has been reported all week, and write here the reaction of one man and priest — me.

First, it is reported that the Pope said pastors should not be “putting our noses into the moral life of other people.” [As I said earlier, this is an explicit but most offensive restatement of his 'Who am I to judge?' throwaway line, which was certainly most startling for any pope to say - who, like priest confessors and spiritual advisers, constantly has to judge actions, thoughts and decisions shared with them by sinners!]

Permit me to state my utter bewilderment at such a notion. As a priest, and especially as a confessor and spiritual director, this is my duty! It is true that I am not to unnecessarily pry into the private lives of parishioners. But surely there is a requirement that as a confessor and a pastor, I have some sense of the moral life of those to whom I minister.

Consider a medical analogy. Suppose a patient comes to a doctor with breathing difficulties and chest pains. Surely the doctor will inquire as to the person’s lifestyle. Does he smoke? Did he ever smoke? What sort of food is being consumed? Does he exercise? What is his weight and what are his vital signs? Is a doctor putting his nose into the private life of the patient, or is he seeking necessary information? Of course the answer is clear, and he must have the info both to diagnose and set forth a proper medical plan of action.

It is no less the case with a priest who is exercising spiritual care. He has the duty to know and assist the faithful in their moral life.
- Thus if a baptism form indicates cohabitation, or single motherhood, he has a duty to teach.
- If, in confession, he finds evidence of sinful drives, or moral irregularities, he must address them and set forth a pastoral plan for a soul in need.
- If a couple comes to him cohabiting, he must discuss this with them, explain why it is wrong and should stop, and set forth the truth that alone sets us free. To fail to do so is not kindness, it is malpractice!

This is not “putting our nose into the moral life of others;” it is engaging in a moral and pastoral conversation with souls in need. This is pastoral care, not snooping. Surely a priest should not seek for impertinent details, but no diagnosis or plan can be helpful without the basic facts at hand.

The “official transcript” of the Vatican wisely removed these remarks, but still, they were widely reported and have given fodder both to critics of priests who seek to faithfully preach the moral vision of the faith and also, at the opposite spectrum, of the Pope.

Secondly, as “widely reported” by Crux and others, during a question-and-answer session towards the end of the meeting, Francis spoke of “pastoral cruelty,” such as priests who refuse to baptize the children of young single mothers. “They’re animals,” he said.

Here too the Vatican sought to “clarify” these remarks and the “official transcript” says that the Pope actually meant to say that priests treat single parents as animals, not that priests were animals. (More on the spun remarks in a moment.) But the recorded and reported remarks have the Pope calling priests whose prudential judgments do not match his, “cruel” and “animals”.

First, let me say that I know of very few priests who deny baptism to infants born to single mothers. Most priests I know are very generous in extending baptism to infants, realizing that they are not responsible for the sins or shortcomings of their parents.

Those who do, at times, delay baptism do so for other reasons, such as little evidence for a well-founded hope that the child will be raised in the faith. There are some prudential judgments to be made and pastors are required to make them (see canon 868). Again, most priests are very gracious with baptism.

But it is beyond lamentable that the Pope, as initially reported, should have called priests (or any human being for that matter) “animals.” Such a word should never have come out of his mouth, and I would hope for an apology for this offensive characterization, not merely a Vatican 'clarification' [via dishonest 'corrective editing' of the transcript made from the audio recording of what the pope actually said].

I certainly have some differences with brother priests, and I would call my differences with dissenting priests significant. But this does not permit me to call them animals, and the Pope, who seems to have done so, has no business doing it either.

Admittedly the recorded comments are hard to follow, but the cleansed Vatican transcript is more in the mode of “Let’s pretend this was never said as recorded” rather than a clear denial — “The Pope wants to say he not consider priest animals, even though he thinks some are too hard-lined on this matter.”

It will be admitted that Pope Gregory (in his Pastoral Rule) once said that silent priests who failed to rebuke sinners were like “dumb dogs that cannot bark.” But he was using a metaphor, and quoting Scripture. He did not univocally call them dogs, he said they were “like” or in the mode of dumb dogs that cannot warn of danger.

But there is nothing in this recent Pope’s comments that suggests metaphor or simile. He just outright called priests whose prudential judgments he doubts “animals”. “They’re animals” he said. I pray that never again will we hear reported such a rude and unnecessary remark from this pope or any pope. No human person should be called an animal by a pope or any anyone, for that matter.

Metaphors and similes have their place in human discourse, but to univocally call a fellow human being and animal is out of line.
But let’s consider the post hoc assessment of the remark wherein some prefer to say he apparently intended to say that some priests treat children (or possibly their unwed mothers) as “animals.”

Well, count me as less than relieved by this explanation. Again let me note that delaying a baptism merely due to the parents being unwed is rare in my experience (and hence a strawman argument). [Which is what most, if not all, of the 'pastoral anecdotes' from JMB's infinite trove amount to! As I said, they are worse than hypothetical, they sound so implausible they must be unreal.]

But it remains highly disrespectful to say that priests who delay baptism (usually for a number of reasons) are treating others as animals and are cruel. Thus even the “spun” remarks are unhelpful at best and divisive at worst.

Please, Holy Father: Enough of these ad hoc, off-the-cuff, impromptu sessions, whether at thirty thousand feet or at ground level. Much harm through confusion has been caused by these latest remarks on marriage, cohabitation, baptism, confession, and pastoral practice.

Simply cleaning the record in the official transcript is not enough; this is an era of instant reportage and lots of recording devices, tweets, and Instagrams.

This may be just this priest’s perspective. But I can assure you, dear reader, that the impact hits priests hard, and I cannot deny a certain weariness and discouragement at this point. I realize that such remarks of the Pope are not doctrinal, but just try and tell that to gleeful dissenters and the morally confused or misled in this world.

Let us pray for our Holy Father and for the universal Church.


P.S. Our beloved Pope is currently in Armenia on a three-day apostolic visit.

Pope's new 'favorite theologian'
calls in Sikh for a day

VIENNA, June 24, 2016 - The newspaper Heute features pictures of Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Archbishop of Vienna 'like you've never seen him before: sitting cross-legged on the floor with an orange stole as a headscarf. Occasion: Schönborn attended the Sikh temple in Meidling (12th district) on Sunday, in which he paid tribute to the freedom of religion, in first official visit to this religious community.

[Sikhs belong to a monotheistic religion that was an offshoot of Hinduism in the 15th century. There are some 27 million Sikhs worldwide today, most of them originating from the Punjab region of India where the religion was born.]

The Archbishop of Vienna can do all the far-out things he has been doing in the past 5 years, and it would be no skin of my nose in any way. But he's president of the Munich-based Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI Foundation established by the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, and that is why I mind very much indeed that:
1) His diocesan museum exhibited the perverse anti-Christian art of an Austrian painter who infamously depicted the Last Supper as a homosexual orgy;
2) As president of the Austrian bishops' conference, he initiated and passed a resolution criticizing Benedict XVI for having named a conservative priest auxiliary bishop of Linz, one of Austria's most secularized cities and recommending that henceforth, local bishops should decide who gets to be bishop, not the pope in Rome.
3) He overturned one of his parish priests' decision not to recognize the election as parish council president of a known homosexual registered as 'married' to his partner, after having lunched with the couple and announcing that he had no objection as the couple apparently have a happy relationship.
4) He visited Medjugorje with a media entourage to record his endorsement of the pilgrimage site and, by inference, of the purported Marian apparitions there. He celebrated Mass without the courtesy of informing the local bishop - for which, apparently, Benedict XVI directed him to apologize to the bishop in writing, a handwritten note he faxed to the bishop from the Vatican where he was attending a monthly meeting of the CDF (of which, BTW, he was never secretary, even if JMB has attributed the position to him on two recent occasions).
5) He then hosted one of the purported Marian seers from Medjugorje at the Vienna Cathedral where Mary was supposed to appear on schedule for the seer. But of course, nothing of the sort happened, and strange to say, the media simply chose to ignore it as a 'non-event'.
Any other cardinal who is not the media darling that Schoenborn is would have been torn to pieces with ridicule. Yet he has blithely carried on about Medjugorje, when as a CDF member of long standing, he ought to be familiar with the Church law on purported miracles and apparitions that have not been declared to be of supernatural origin to the satisfaction of the local bishop and the Vatican.
6) At the 2015 'family synod', he apparently drafted the German-speaking bishops' so-called compromise position that toned down Cardinal Kasper's original pastoral leniency proposal for remarried divorcees. It is no accident he was chosen by Pope Francis to be the principal presentor of Amoris laetitia, which Schoenborn described as a 'linguistic event' in a strange but revealing manner, for a document whose major, most far-reaching and heterodox propositions are expressed with calculated casuistry, ambiguity and rhetorical ruses that do not at all hide their intent.

I have not included the many clown Masses he joined or officiated, and the list above only includes those incidents I can recall offhand, but it certainly is representative enough of his odd eyebrow-raising mediatic stunts, though I am sure he was very serious about each of them. This man was considered a papabile in two conclaves. It is not far-out to speculate that on the remote chance he had been chosen in 2013, he would have turned out to be far more disastrous than JMB has been so far.

Given all these antics that contradict much of what Benedict XVI stands for, I find it all the more objectionable that media continue to call him 'Benedict XVI's favorite student', which was always wrong to begin with, because he never was formally a student of Prof. Ratzinger. Already a full-fledged doctor of theology from the Sorbonne, he spent two semesters auditing (attending but not enrolled) some Ratzinger courses in Regensburg, accordinng to Mons. Vincent Twomey, who was a bona fide doctoral student of Prof. Ratzinger at the time.

It's creeping, but it will get there, Bergoglio volent...

Italian bishop bans priest 'permanently' from preaching
because he cited St. Paul on homosexuality in a homily
by Tancred
THE EPONYMOUS FLOWER
June 24, 2016

...The Archbishop of Cagliari in Sardinia, Mgr. Arrigo Miglio, has permanently banned a priest of his archdiocese from preaching and from taking a public position on anything. In addition, the priest must close his YouTube channel with his sermons.

Miglio disciplined Don Massimiliano Pusceddu for having quoted St. Paul in a homily on May 28 opposing the 'gay marriage' legislation approved by the Italian Parliament.

For this he was lynched verbally by the media. The Corriere della Sera called him an "anti-gay priest" who demands the execution of homosexuals. Numerous media outlets ran the headline: "Priest wants death of homosexuals".

In his homily, Don Pusceddu had quoted the letter of Paul to the Romans (1,18-32):

---

The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.

As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened.

While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes. Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions.

Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper.

They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

---

The focus of Don Pusceddu's homily was the importance and beauty of the family, which was being damaged by the legalization of "gay marriage." In this context, he cited St. Paul on the perversity of homosexuality. [The New American Bible does not explain who Paul was referring to but verses 18-32 are in a part of the chapter entitled 'The punishment of idolators'. One gathers from Paul's description that he may have meant the Israelites who worshipped the Golden Calf and apparently lost all moral discipline during their long wait for Moses to come down from Sinai. Anyway, he seems to imply that by turning their back on God, their punishment was to be left alone to commit all kinds of sin, some of which 'deserve death'. Indeed, after the explicit examples of unnatural sexual behavior that he cites, St. Paul goes on to all the other sins mankind typically commits.]

The journalists seem, even in a Catholic country, not to know the difference between sin and sinner. The distinction belongs to an essential element of Catholic doctrine. What the media does not know, at least should be understood by the bishop. However, he knelt before the undignified media and homosexual campaign.

'Gay' representatives held a protest vigil in front of the priest's church and demanded the removal of Don Pusceddu in a petition to Pope Francis...

After a few days, Archbishop Miglio was moved to intervene. To defend his priest? To protect the Church from spurious attacks? To demand the right of Catholics to read, ponder and proclaim the word of God? Not at all!

In a long press conference, the Archbishop attacked Don Pusceddu frontally and from the side. He accused him of having "distorted the thought of St. Paul," and "in my name and on behalf of our diocesan Church', he begged pardon of the offended aberrosexuals. pardon." At the same time he made known the list of punitive measures against the priest of his diocese.

Miglio chose to capitulate to the world and to raise the white flag without fighting. He sacrificed his priest to please the spirit of the world. The other priests of the Archdiocese are now careful not to take a position on this issue...

The bishop has the first obligation to be like a father to his priests, then his faithful. If a bishop can let a priest down in such a way, what can the faithful expect of him?

Miglio's punishment of Don Puscheddu ultimately falls upon a movement founded by this priest, "Apostles of Mary", which is now represented in all of Italy and many other countries, to promote praying the rosary by families.

It was not unnoticed that this sad statement by the Archbishop took place on the eve of the annual Sardegna Gay Pride event...

The above episode is doubly striking because the same passage from Romans was cited by a Texas congressman in the US House of Representatives shortly after the mass shooting of 49 people in an Orlando LGBT club, for which he drew execrations from the media (the New York Times infamously claimed in its story that St. Paul had ordered Christians to execute homosexuals) and in particular, from a US bishop, Mons. Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Florida, who claimed on his blog that"sadly it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally, and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people".

Mons. Lynch's blogpost is worth posting for the record as a prime example of how progrssivist ultra-liberal ideology such as that practised by President Obama and the Democratic Party has corrupted even men of the Church. His title is the type of sentimental claptrap as 'Je suis Charlie...' and similar meaningless slogans meant to 'commemorate' some contemporary tragedy caused by hate and/or freligious fanaticism.

---

ORLANDO, ORLANDO, WE LOVE YOU
by Mons. Robert Lynch

Today I write with a heavy heart arising from the tragedy which occurred in the early morning hours yesterday at a Gay, Lesbian, Transgender night club in Orlando, our neighbor to the east. Yesterday, the best I could muster was to send these words by text message to my brother, Bishop John Noonan, bishop of Orlando: “John, I am so sorry. With love to and for all.” Today with a new dawn, I once again have some thoughts which I wish to share.

Our founding parents had no knowledge of assault rifles which are intended to be weapons of mass destruction. In crafting the second amendment to the Constitution which I affirm, they thought only of the most awkward of pistols and heavy shotguns. I suspect they are turning in their graves if they can but glimpse at what their words now protect. It is long past time to ban the sale of all assault weapons whose use should be available only to the armed forces. If one is truly pro-life, then embrace this issue also and work for the elimination of sales to those who would turn them on innocents. [A carbon copy of Obama's tired and utterly fallacious talking points. The best argument against Obama and his me-too Democrats is this: In his home city of Chicago, 15 people, mostly blacks, are daily killed from being shot by other blacks. Despite having one of the toughest gun-ban laws in the USA, Chicago continues to lead the country in violent gun deaths. Yet Obama never even mentions Chicago when he rails on and on about 'guns killing people' - NO! bad people kill people, not just by guns but any other way'.]

Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally, and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people.

Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence. Those women and men who were mowed down early yesterday morning were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that.

[So what makes you say that "it is religion, including our own..." which is to blame for what you call 'contempt' for sexually disoriented persons? Name one priest or bishop that has expressed such 'contempt'. Some orthodox priests may preach against aberrant lifestyles - though it would certainly make news if anyone did in the USA - but pointing out what the Church considers wrong is not meant to 'breed contempt', it is merely telling the truth. Isn't it more likely that it is you who feels 'contempt' deep down about them, but you project your own core attitude towards others and generalize it for the entire religion, by which I take it you mean Catholicism.]

Without yet knowing who perpetrated the PULSE mass murders, when I saw the Imam come forward at a press conference yesterday morning, I knew that somewhere in the story there would be a search to find religious roots.

While deranged people do senseless things, all of us observe, judge and act from some kind of religious background. Singling out people for victimization because of their religion, their sexual orientation, their nationality must be offensive to God’s ears. It has to stop also. [So, was the assassin singled out for his crime, and therefore 'victimized' because he is Muslim, or because he killed 49 people and wounded twice as many more? He, on the other hand, apparently went on his killing spree to express his 'contempt' for persons living aberrant lifestyles, even if it now seems he too had these aberrant tendencies.]

Third, responding by barring people of Muslim only faith from entering the country solely because of their stated faith until they can be checked out is un-American, even in these most challenging of times and situations. [How can it be un-American to enforce laws - such as that of proper background checks on entering aliens -that will safeguard the security of the nation and its citizens, individually or en masse?] There are as many good, peace loving and God fearing Muslims to be found as Catholics or Methodists or Mormons or Seventh Day Adventists. The devil and devilish intent escape no religious iteration....

---

THE ANTIDOTE
A few days later, another Florida bishop articulated the Catholic position in no uncertain terms:

Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher:
Men for our season
By Mons. Thomas Wenski
Archbishop of Miami
Homily at Opening Mass for
the Fortnight of Freedom
Church of the Little Flower
Coral Gables, Florda
June 19, 2016

The Church of the Little Flower is blessed today to receive relics of two great English saints: one, St. Thomas More, was a statesman, an intellectual, a Catholic layman who took his baptism seriously; the other was a bishop who also took his office as bishop seriously.

Both were martyred by King Henry VIII because they would not consent to his making himself the head of the Church in England, which he did because the Pope would not allow him to divorce his wife. In order to have his way, he shattered the unity of the Church in his nation by separating it from Peter and Peter’s successors, the bishops of Rome.

St. Thomas More’s life is recounted in a famous play, later made into a motion picture called, “A Man for All Seasons.” The two saints, St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher, are men for our season, for the times in which we live.

Today, a regime of “political correctness” wishes to impose itself on us and force us to conform ourselves, our values and our beliefs to the ascendant secularism of our time.

When “peer pressure” convinced almost everybody in Tudor England “to go along” with the King in order to “get along,” Thomas More and John Fisher dissented. At first cajoled and tempted with bribes, then imprisoned and tortured, they refused to break away from the Church founded by Jesus Christ on the rock of Peter. As Thomas More famously said, “I am the King’s good servant but I am God’s servant first.”

For some years now, the Catholic bishops here in the United States have wanted to focus our attention to the threats to religious freedom both at home and abroad. And so, beginning with the feast days of John Fisher and Thomas More and ending with our July 4th celebration of our nation’s independence, we observe a “Fortnight of Freedom,” two weeks of prayer petitioning our Lord that this most basic right, and the foundation of all other human rights, the right to religious freedom, the right to freedom of conscience, be protected.

If anyone thinks that religious freedom is not under assault in our world today, or that our concerns are a bit overwrought, I would remind you of the ongoing genocide against Christians in the Middle East.

We have seen on our evening news programs images of Christians beheaded, crucified or burned alive in cages simply because they professed what Peter professed in today’s Gospel: that Jesus is 'the Christ, Son of God'.

In the second decade of the 21st century, some 150,000 Christians are killed for their faith every year. Like St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher, and like Sts. Peter and Paul, St. John the Baptist and the first martyrs of Rome, whose feast days the Church observes during these last days of June, these modern-day martyrs are victims of a despotism in its hardest and harshest form.

Yet, in this country and in other liberal democracies, people of faith are being increasingly subjected to a soft despotism in which ridicule, ostracism, and denial of employment opportunities for advancement are being used to marginalize us. We see this when butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers are being put into the legal dock for refusing to renounce their religious beliefs.

A new religious intolerance is being established in our country. We see this when Christian pastors are stalked and threatened for being “Christian” pastors, when social scientists are expelled from universities for having turned up “politically incorrect” facts, when charitable organizations and confessional schools are harassed if they take seriously their faith’s moral precepts and require their employees to support their missions. We see this in the refusal of the Administration to accommodate Catholic institutions and businesses because of their conscientious objection to subsidizing contraception and abortions.

Sometimes, we are told, “Keep your religion to yourself.” It is becoming almost the new conventional wisdom that religion is private. That faith is something to be practiced in the privacy of one’s home, by consenting adults, at that.

Religious faith is personal but it should never be “private.” And professing a religious faith should not make anybody a second-class citizen or worse. But to stand up for the rights of conscience, could require us, as Jesus reminds in the Gospel today, “to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily.” This is the cost of discipleship — a cost that Thomas More and John Fisher paid courageously with their lives.

Of course, it is only one week since the tragic events in Orlando that saddened and shocked us all. We grieve for all victims and their families. On Wednesday, I spoke to a mother whose son was killed last Sunday in Orlando. He was buried yesterday from one of our parishes here in Miami. Her grief was a double grief — last month her mother died and this week she had to do what every parent dreads, to bury a child. She told me that she would never look at an image of the “Pieta” in the same way again. And anyone who has lost a child would understand what she meant.

Yet, in our confusion and in our anger, we must be careful lest we make truth another casualty in the aftermath of this lone-wolf terrorist attack. And to blame a particular religion or religion in general for this atrocity would do just that.

CNN's Anderson Cooper rejects Pam Bondi's expressions of sympathy because she opposed same sex marriage. The New York Times editorialized that the victims were "casualties of a society where hate has deep roots.” They weren't talking about ISIS's caliphate but America. And one bishop who should know better even opined, and I quote: “It is religion, including our own which targets…and often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgendered people.”

Where in our faith, where in our teachings — I ask you — do we target and breed contempt for any group of people? In today’s second reading, St. Paul teaches us: “Through faith you are all children of God in Christ Jesus. There is neither Jew nor Greek… there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Our faith, our religion gives no comfort, no sanction to a racist, or a misogynist, or a homophobe.

In any case, Christians who support traditional marriage did not kill 49 people. Omar Mateen did. Religion and freedom of religion did not enable the killing and the maiming that we witnessed last Sunday. An evil ideology which is a corruption of Islam did.

The right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person. Religious freedom is the human right that guarantees all other rights — peace and creative living together will only be possible if freedom of religion is fully respected.

Yet, even in the face of a growing intolerance of religion, we must as Catholics give witness. To fail to do so would be to fail in the charity we owe our neighbor.

If we honor the memories of Thomas More and John Fisher, if we invoke their intercession today, it is because they would not contradict, by behavior or lifestyle, what they preached and what they believed.

Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher are “Men for this season.” May their example inspire us and their prayers sustain us.

As Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice… I know them and they follow me.” (John 10: 27)

Orlando in hindsight:
What the West refuses to see about Islam
by Fr. James Schall, SJ

June 24, 2016

As it turns out, the killings in Orlando were not what they seemed to be or what too many wanted them to be—that is, simply a random act of “hatred” caused by a deranged young man with no real relation to any religion. Or, perhaps, if we insist in relating it to religion, then, as some prelates argued or suggested, all religions are equally guilty.

if the killings were by a “loner”, he was an active radical Muslim killer whose rationale was from this tradition. The killings remain one more careful, calculated move of ISIS to seize on every opportunity to continue a grand, too long delayed and neglected plan to undermine the stability of every non-Muslim country in the world not as yet under Islamic control. he Islamic countries that oppose ISIS can be dealt with later.

In pursuing this goal, Islamic advocates think grandly. Opponents to it often think so narrowly that they cannot understand what is happening to them in the world.

A coherent approach to an historic mission is only a recently realized possibility on the part of many in modern Islam. In this view, things are now moving quickly in the right direction. Opportunities must be and are being seized.

We see thousands of unidentified Muslims, usually young men of fighting age, continue to pour into Europe and now America under the guise that they are just like other needy immigrants. Be it noted that they do not “pour” into other nearby Muslim states where they presumably would be right at home. No pressing need can be found to conquer what is already conquered.

Besides, Muslim lands are among the poorest in the world so no reason exists to flee to them unless for reasons of political control. Their poverty is almost directly related to their religious culture with its ideas about the direct causality of all things by Allah.

Moreover, when Islam emigrates, it takes its culture with it. It implants it into Europe or into the new world. Islam does not often assimilate; that is an alien idea. It thereby denies and undermines all the presuppositions of western liberal politics which insist on seeing it as just another religion.

In new lands, when it settles there, it reproduces what it brought with it. It gradually imposes its culture on others when it can, even by sophistical use of “democratic” means. Several Muslim groups are now realizing that this latter way may be a faster way to achieve this end than the violent way. But both options remain open.

An American-born member of a politically active Afghani family [Omar Nateef] showed up as the next in a long, mostly forgotten, succession of such attacks by similar unknowns in this and other countries.

Such an act cannot be explained in psychological, anti-gay, or “terrorism-for-the-sake-of terrorism” terms. Each “individual” Muslim killer, including the man in Orlando, ritually affirms his loyalty to Islam.

Many in the West refuse to believe that such a religious motive could be serious. But unwillingness only reveals an ignorance of Islam and the paucity of much Western thought. This or any other “terrorist” has good religious reasons in Muslim tradition and scripture to do so. This affirmation is accepted as such by ISIS and other Muslim groups even if the deed is committed by an individual not directly commanded by an “official” Muslim group. In many ways, it is more effective for the ISIS cause if no direct connection is made.

The attacks are, in one way or another, the result of an “inspired” politico-religious belief that incites such acts to put the Islamic way of life into effect. Such actions have been going on more or less successfully since the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century.

By any standards, it has been an enormously successful endeavor. It usually expanded and conquered by quick military or terrorist strikes. But now many Muslim leaders also recognize the importance of demographic growth to gain its ultimate goal of the eventual submission of every nation to Allah.

But the use of terror is not underestimated. It also is relied on as a direct means to undermine the stability of modern cities and economies.

Such is the poverty of our politically-correct educational systems, aided by governmental policies, that we generally have few intellectual tools available to us that enable us to comprehend the persistence of an idea over centuries, one capable of being carried on to a logical conclusion in historic time. And this mission predates western Hegelianism.

Islam is what it is. “May Allah be praised!” is not just a slogan. The obtuseness in understanding is perhaps one of the greatest self-imposed blindnesses ever shown forth by supposedly rational leadership. But this blindness too can be explained, even in biblical terms. We do not see what we choose, for other reasons, not to see.

The rise of Islam may be made more feasible by the modern decline in reason and in Christianity’s understanding of its own revelation. But opportunism is not the heart of the matter.

Islam proposes itself as the successor — or better, as the replacement of both reason and Christianity. But it also proposes itself to and seeks to expand in other cultures, to India and to China, as the way Allah should be worshipped in these places also.

In India, Islam gained much ground by conquest but came to a standstill when India finally resisted. The China opening has begun, though China probably presents a much more difficult task than the West.

II.
I write these comments as an admirer of the Islam of ISIS. I do not, of course, admire what it does in terms of terror or destruction. While Islam is, as I judge it, a false religion, it is held by true believers who are much more accurate in their reading of their own classical texts than any of their critics.

The struggles within Islam itself between Sunni and Shiite interpretations of Islam do not, as such, disagreement about these ends or even the means to obtain them.

What is going on cannot simply be explained in terms of modern political theory, by psychology, by economics, or by social science. It can only be explained by taking what the Qur’an and Muslim tradition say of itself and the means by which it can propagate itself.

A report from Judicial Watch (June 15, 2016) recounted the arrest in New Mexico of a Muslim lady coming out of Mexico who just happened to have in her possession the blueprints of the gas system in that area of New Mexico. As far as I know, she was not a lesbian or a drug smuggler, though the drug smugglers evidently, for a price, will see to it that such folks do make it across any existing or non-existing wall into the States. Her motive seems to have been to further the cause, not to repair gas works in New Mexico.

We must wonder how many blueprints of various electrical grids, gas lines, power lines, rail lines, airports, highways, bridges, tunnels, school campuses, churches, sports complexes, TV stations, or government buildings are already in the hands of ISIS members and sympathizers. We should not think that they do not know how to read them. Many of the “terrorists” are well-educated and well trained.

To assume that any place in Europe, America, or Canada is safe, at this stage of the game, is naïve. In every major and minor city in the world, we can likely find ISIS sympathizers who are willing to sacrifice their lives for this cause either when ordered to do so or when they see an opportunity.

We have caused this situation ourselves by failing to understand Islam and what men and women will do to foster it. We have major Muslim centers in every major city, often financed by Saudi money; we know little of what goes on in them. What we do know is often more than unsettling.

We have a President who has refused to name the enemy in any but vague, general terms. His policies have been almost invariably favorable to the Muslim cause in one form or another.

After Orlando, columns by Mary Jo Anderson, Carl E. Olson, Maureen Mularkey, Pat Buchanan, Andrew McCarthy, George Rutler, Joseph Pearce, and a host of others have pretty well gotten it right. The President of the United States, the Democratic Candidate, even Mr. Trump, much of the press, many bishops, college professors, and foreign politicians have it wrong.

To acknowledge that it is what it is would be to admit that practically speaking their whole intellectual and political life has been wrongly directed. And it has been. We keep hearing pleas for them to “wake up”, but it isn’t happening.

ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood thinkers, each in their own way, pretty well know this refusal to take them for their word and take comfort in it. They know that their likelihood of being caught is slim if their enemies won’t see and understand.

It has long been noted by some perceptive thinkers that Islam will expand, and rapidly expand, if it is not stopped by superior force. This is a truth that pacifist-minded people do not like to hear.
I also think that Islam’s ideas and texts need directly to be confronted. They cannot be simply set aside and unexamined as too controversial to talk about, analyze, and criticize.

Since almost all versions of Islam react angrily or even violently to any fundamental criticism of its basic positions, we have backed off on prudential or diplomatic grounds to talk only of things “about which everyone could agree.”

It is what we do not agree with in Islam that needs to be talked about most. This delicate approach has not worked and never will.
But the actual expansion of Islam, whenever and wherever it was able to increase, has only been stopped by superior force.

Superior force is usually only a passing thing. Indeed, modern military force may not be able to stop the kind of expansion that does not depend on superior military hardware but on direct killings and self-sacrifice of true believers. The brutal beheading of Coptic Christians in Libya was much more terrifying than the counter picture of seeing helicopter gunships shoot at ISIS fighters in the desert.

There is only one good reason why Europe is not Muslim today (as it probably will be eventually, through its own political choices). This non-Muslim Europe is the result of the two great battles at Tours in the eighth century and Vienna in the seventeenth.

The historic, self-defensive efforts of European powers to eliminate the constant danger of Islamic attack failed when it could not permanently retake the Holy Land and Byzantium. This counter-attack failed because of inferior force used to dislodge Islam in the face of superior Muslim force in defeating them.

But Europe also did not understand the importance of knowing what Islam was. It was this closing off of lands south and east of Europe that gave rise to the inner European development of modern states, cultures, and economies.

Likewise, most Islamic bastions in the Near East and in Africa were controlled by European powers from the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800’s to the end of World War II.

What is interesting, if not frightening, about this record is that Islam proved largely impervious to change. After accepting voluntarism in theology, no science came out of Islam. Most of the science that was in earlier ages of Islam came from scholars who were originally Christian or Persian.

In this aspect, it has not much changed. Its oils, the source of much of its riches, is mostly a result of economies and technologies that do not originate in Islam.

The notion that it ought to change is not an Islamic idea. Its idea is closer to the view that it ought not to change. Islam in its closed family and community traditions manages effectively by a combination of faith, persuasion, and force to keep its masses loyal to itself.

The Muslim idea is, again, that it ought not to change its essentials. It ought to set up and impose Sharia law everywhere. It ought to remain true to Allah. It turns out that they seem to have the better part of the argument. Their will to resist change is stronger than our will either to change them or to prevent them from changing us.

The following comment of an Englishman in a recent Financial Times makes the point:

---

It is more likely that ISIS is modeling itself on the Islamist military strategy of the 7th and 8th centuries. It was then easy to offer stunned opponents the choice of conversion to Islam, death, or the adoption of dhimmi status, and so achieve the ultimate objective — the continuous expansion of the area subject to sharia law.

Modern authorities may care to note that this strategy had one weakness: it failed when the initial violence was met with a robust military response which demonstrated a level of determination even greater than that of the Islamists.

---

This is well-said and true to experience and theory. Islam must expand or suspect that Allah has willed against it by Muslim defeats. It is part of the logic of its theology.

III.
Orlando — like San Bernardino, Fort Hood, the Spanish trains, the Paris concert hall, and the Mumbai hotel — will soon be forgotten or minimized in the light of ever new events of the same order.

Radical Islam is now a two-pronged force: the ISIS side and the Muslim Brotherhood side. Both have the same goal. The first relies on more direct military and terrorist methods. The latter does not shun these means but finds that more effective ways to gain control is through the shrewd use of democratic methods themselves.

Both are aware of the demographics that Islam has over cultures that have been breeding themselves out of existence. This decline in willingness even to have children in any significant numbers is not the result of Muslim thought which, in its odd way with multiple wives, is pro-natal, however disordered a polygamous family may be for men, women, and their children. In this sense, numbers count.

Islamic thinkers have every right to expect that numbers are in their favor. Several European countries can expect to be Muslim in ten to thirty years.

Aristotle had already said that large changes in population and culture would transform any existing regime into something else.The American regime, in particular, has doggedly maintained that it could welcome any one into its country. It took this position on the assumption that certain basic ideas about human nature were agreed on.

Most of the immigrants, until recent years, came from the same broad European Christian culture that had much in common. It was not until the twenty-first century that its political culture decided that there was no human nature to agree about and that religion was not relevant. Everyone had a “right” to his own view of the cosmos. The effects of this relativism are straight-forward. All individuals and institutions must accept the principle of relativism to continue in the public order.

What is unique about Islam is that it has been able to use the principles of relativism to secure a place within the legal world that has no means to reject it other than to call it “terrorism”. But in a relativist world, even terrorism has a theoretic place. If there are no real standards, it is difficult to see on what grounds it can be excluded.

What Islam seems to understand more clearly than those who welcome it into their presence is that it does not accept either the Christian or relativist premises of the culture. All factions with Islam positively reject them. It does not follow from this rejection that what Islam does hold is therefore correct. It is in fact just another danger from another direction, one rooted in ideas unique to itself.

The opposite of truth is usually not just one error but many. Islam, however, has the advantage in being able to close itself off from the surrounding social and political order, especially from one that will not confront it on the grounds of its own presumed truth.

If we only deal with Islam as just another “right” among other equally indefensible “rights”, it will thrive in a liberal environment. It will vote en bloc for its own interests.

The advantage that the surrounding relativist culture gives to Islam is enormous. In a way, it has the best of both worlds. That is, it can operate as “legitimate” within and demand protection of democratic systems that are based on willed “rights”. It can also attack such a system as corrupt from both the inside and the outside with those ISIS type forces that maintain that, when using these forces, their understanding of Islam is the correct one.

IV.
Meantime, in conclusion, Iraqi forces finally seem to be having some success in retaking cities that ISIS, with much publicity and violence, had taken over.

This scene is again a reminder that much of the violence that we see in the Islamic world is directed at each other. We see the Sunni/Shiite division, the Wahhabi influence, the de facto frontiers of Islamic states, the claim that a single caliphate has been established, Hamas, al-Qaida, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Governments in Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as those in the smaller Muslim states like Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, and others, are themselves under internal and external pressure to adopt the ISIS form of Islam. Many would prefer to let the Muslims fight it out among themselves. The complications of internal Muslim politics and controversies are no doubt bewildering.

It does not take many people to cause a revolution in fact, though it does require ideas. [I digress, but please, somebody remind someone named JMB that no, reality is not 'more important' than ideas because man-made reality is always the result of ideas- in the same way that all of creation started from God's Logos!]

That Europe and America could be seen as targets of Muslim rule seems at first sight preposterous. Yet, a method, an opportunity, and an organization have arisen that thinks the conquest of good parts, if not all, of Europe and America is possible. It understands that its enemy is itself confused and bears within itself as many diverse and conflicting currents as are found within Islam.

But this lack of any unified faith in itself in the West is precisely why it is seen to be vulnerable by those whose faith in Allah is absolute.

Islam is a shrewd religion that grew by the violence that is part of its sacred book and its heritage. Terror need not always be used; some Muslims oppose it. But it can be and often is most effective for its own ends. It is not contradictory to the understanding of Allah in the Muslim mind.

Islam has not repudiated its own heritage. It is bound by it. It has in our time seen the possibility of universalizing it to subject the whole world to Allah. We continue to think this hope is naïve or impossible. But the brains behind ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood are right. The opportunity is there for the taking. As yet, they do not see any sufficient force or ideas sufficient to deter them.

To look back “retrospectively” on Orlando is to see it as one more successful example of what one person can do if he has a mission and a worldview to justify it. The Orlando killer was not alone. He was a true believer and other believers in the mission of Islam inspire him.

Neither he nor any of his predecessors or future companions are to be explained by psychology, economics, or sociology. They are to be explained by taking their word for what they are doing.

If the President of the United States or the British Prime Minister, the media, the professors, the clerics, cannot or will not understand this reality, we cannot blame ISIS and its friends. They are also realists who understand where ideas and reality meet, sometimes on a battlefield in Iraq, sometimes in a night club in Orlando.

ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Saudis may lose. But, as of now, they have a good chance of winning. Whether a victory of Islam in subjecting the world to Allah would be a victory for the world or a disaster is best answered when the conquest has succeeded. And then no other answer would be allowed in this world but “Allah be praised!”

One last thing is clear, Christians and other non-Muslims in any existing Muslim state are still denied religious freedom, full civil rights, full freedom of speech. They remain second-class citizens. Most Christians are now out of many Muslim states.

Orlando, in other words, is an isolated “incident” that forces us [should force us, but does not seem so, thus far] to see what is happening. Its second lesson is that many, even in the highest places, refuse to see. In this, they are not innocent.

It's creeping, but it will get there, Bergoglio volent...

Jeanne Smits is a prominent and militantly pro-life French Catholic journalist whose accounts I have posted here of the massive 'MANIF FOR TOUS' demonstrations that protested the French government's passage of a law legalizing same-sex marriage in 2012. She is the Paris correspondent for LIFESITE NEWS, for whom she provided this English translation of her latest blogpost about what is, in effect, a trending Bergoglio position on pastoral leniency for homosexual practices. This, of course, apparently looms as the next orthodox Catholic taboo to be breached by this pope, for which his pastoral leniency towards RCDs was the opening wedge...

Dutch priest jubilant after giving
Pope Francis a book of pro-gay homilies
by Jeanne Smits




ROME, June 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – At the end of the general audience in Saint Peter’s Square on Wednesday, Pope Francis spoke affectionately with a Dutch priest who had gained permission to present him with a compilation of funeral homilies about the theme of homosexuality.

After the short meeting, Father Pierre Valkering, a parish priest from the diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam, told the press that he had been “profoundly touched” by the Pope’s welcoming attitude. Gay websites in the Netherlands gave prominence to the meeting, underscoring the way Pope Francis went out of his way to show his affection and interest for Fr. Valkering and his work.

The book is a collection of about 30 sermons given by a well-known “chaplain of the gays” on the occasion of young gay men’s deaths in the 1980s and 1990s, most of whom died of AIDS.

Father Jan van Kilsdonk (1917-2008), a Jesuit priest and student pastor, started reaching out to the gay community in Amsterdam in 1982 when he retired from his official job. He had a clearly unorthodox point of view, calling homosexuality a “brainwave of God” and seeking to value “homosexual love.”

Even though Dutch Catholicism is renowned for its progressivism, Fr. van Kilsdonk did have problems with his superiors. His stance was all the more shocking because he saw the dark side of the gay lifestyle first-hand and yet he did not clearly preach the Catholic doctrine on repentance and the need for spiritual healing.

He became well-known on the gay night scene in Amsterdam and personally accompanied some 200 young AIDS sufferers to their deaths, with a great deal of warmth and pastoral care. There is nothing wrong with that; on the contrary. But Van Kilsdonk went a great deal beyond that, justifying their lifestyle and berating the Church for its lack of openness to their tendencies.

He even went on to sign a petition launched in 1987 by a Dutch gay rights group, COC, asking the Minister of Justice to decriminalize sexual contact by and with young people under 16, recalls Pascal Beukers of Katholiek Nieuwsblad.

It was in 2004 that Van Kilsdonk told the gay support group Mannenwerk (“Men’s work”) that homosexuality is not “an abnormality or a disorder” but “a brainwave of God.” [What madness! It is equivalent to saying that all sins are 'brainwaves of God'! And is JMB going to credit any such 'discernment' by Van Kilsdonk? I don't think Ignatius of Loyola ever intended his 'discernment' to be interpreted as individual subjective discernment independent of what natural law and Catholic teaching consider good or evil!]

Fr. Valkering met Fr. van Kilsdonk during a sabbatical in Rome in 2003. It was then that Fr. Valkering decided to work on the Jesuit’s sermons and to edit and publish a selection of them. The two men were to meet often to talk about the project and Valkering was touched to see the profound feelings and memories stirred up in the “gay chaplain’s” mind – although it must be said that Van Kilsdonk never claimed to be homosexual.

The book, Farewell, Young Men of Light, came out in Dutch a few years after his death in 2012 and has now been translated into Italian under the title Addio ragazzi di luce, with the gay rainbow symbol on its cover. It is the Italian version that was presented to Pope Francis on Wednesday morning.

“It was tremendous. I am so happy! It couldn’t have gone better,” Fr. Valkering said after the meeting. “I was sitting with a score of other priests right in front of the Basilica. The Pope came over to me. What a sweet, lovable man, he warms your heart! I put on my best Italian – and the Holy Spirit really helped me – and told him this book can encourage the Church to give more thought to homosexuality because it contains a treasury of experience on homosexuals, their loves, their lives and their sorrows. The Pope answered that he gives them a great deal of attention and that he always carries them in his heart.”

According to Dutch Vatican journalist Andrea Vreede, the fact that Valkering was allowed personally to present his compilation to Pope Francis is “remarkable.” “Every day, the Pope is overwhelmed by requests. It is he who decides to answer them or not. The presentation of this book was suggested to him, he thought about it and deliberately said ‘yes’,” she commented. The “taboo” of homosexuality is not going to disappear any time soon in the Catholic Church, she added. “But at least, this Pope is ready to listen.”

Gay news sites in the Netherlands are more forthright: commenting on the event, one of them recalled the Pope’s words “Who am I to judge,” and: “It’s not a problem to be a homosexual, no, we should be brothers.” They are definitely using the event as proof that the Church is changing.

That is exactly what Fr Valkering is working towards. He openly campaigns for the modification of Catholic teaching on homosexuality, according to the Catholic TV broadcaster KRO, which titled its piece on the event: “The Pope greets Dutch homosexuals.”

“The Pope asked me to present his greetings to the homosexuals of the Netherlands,” Fr Valkering told the news source in a telephone interview. The article ends with a reminder of the Church authorities’ stance on homosexuality that Valkering wants to see changed: “Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”

The working group of “Catholic Homo-Pastors,” WKHP, which welcomes activist homosexual priests and religious, greeted the event enthusiastically, hoping that it would have a “positive outcome on the way the universal Church and the Dutch ecclesiastical province think about the love-life of homosexuals.” “The WKHP is prepared to play a part in this!” according to their communiqué.

One can understand their point of view: Over the last years and months, Pope Francis has gone out of his way to meet members of the LGBT community, including a transgender man and his “wife” and child from Spain in January 2015 and an old Argentinian friend and his lover during his visit to the United States last October.

His insistence on giving prominent roles to clerics who favor the recognition of homosexual “unions” and who value their “fidelity” during the successive Synods on the Family points in the same direction.

The Dutch publisher of Farewell Young Man of Light, Valkhofpers, translated five of the homilies included on the book into several languages, including English, available online here.

Here is a short excerpt, from the funeral homily for Ronald Heitkamp, a general practitioner from a sturdy northern Dutch Catholic family:

---

Ronald’s development as a child and adolescent took place during the revolution of the Sixties, when a novel spontaneity immersed the age-old roles of man and wife into a melting pot.

It must have been bewildering, especially for father Heitkamp, when Ronald – radiant, talented, virtuous, well-proportioned and no doubt the apple of his father’s eye – began to express the suspicion, indeed the certainty, that he felt himself to have been created – more even than for the intimate and fertile relations of man to woman – for the rather uncodified tenderness of a man to a man, of a boyfriend to a boyfriend. And that he perceived this deep experience not as some disastrous and dark fate but rather as a felicitous advantage from the Creator.

But especially in his father’s conscience, it was as if something broke that had been deemed unbreakable. This was in part because the classic pattern of living as man and wife, stabilized in marriage and parenthood, was held to belong to the dogma of the Mother Church, which to the Heitkamps was something sacred.

Naturally this collision with his father left a trail of pain in Ronald’s soul. But this was only where the miracle began. Not for a minute did Ronald doubt the good faith of his father. He always felt that, in his heart, his father was better than this dogma and than this cultural model, even though the son understood very well that his powerlessness also had something to do with a certain diffidence and guardedness that was inherent to the Heitkamps.

---

Later on in the homily Fr. van Kilsdonk talks gushingly about Ronald’s physical attractiveness and his successive lovers. He called him “perhaps one of those 36 Righteous Ones" who in the Old Testament are said to “bear the world.”

Van Kilsdonk was clearly deranged by his unbounded 'sympathy' for homosexuals which made him completely oblivious to 1) natural law, in which same-sex coupling is obviously unnatural and disordered, and to 2) Catholic teaching which urges chastity for persons who feel attracted to persons of their own sex instead of indulging their sexual urges. To praise a homosexual and his 'successive lovers' as Van Kilsdonk did in his funeral eulogy is even more shocking for any Catholic priest to do.

But it is obviously a terrible trend that Fr. Valkering, as Van Kilsdonk's 'spiritual son and heir', and his fellow Dutch priests have been campaigning to have 'the love-life of homosexuals' accepted by the Church. Now encouraged very much by our current pope's words and actions that imply homosexual practices are not sinful in any way.

By now, of course, it is quite clear that what JMB means by pastoral mercy is nothing less than a condoning of certain offenses against the Word of God that he apparently does not consider offenses - SINS - at all.

If this pope can so cavalierly declare mortal sins - and worse, chronic states of mortal sin - to be not sinful at all, then why should any Catholic whose sins are routinely venial have to worry about sinning at all? Quite as Eugenio Scalfari extrapolated, JMB is trending towards an eventual 'abolition of sin'.

I am not exaggerating about JMB's 'trending' towards condoning homosexual practices, considering that he did want to propose to the Argentine government back in 2010 a 'compromise' law that would recognize same-sex unions as long as they were not called 'marriage'. By what logic does homosexual practice within a same-sex union not called marriage become acceptable to Bergoglio - in which case, he does not therefore consider the practice sin - but become unacceptable when the union is called a 'marriage'?

For all his pro forma pronouncements against 'gender theory', JMB has been telling us by all his other words and actions vis-a-vis aberrant sexuality that deviant forms of human sexuality are not really aberrant at all, and it is the Church that is aberrant and wrong in considering deviant sexuality a sin at all.



Meanwhile, consider this news from the Orthodox Church in America:


Orthodox Church in America lays groundwork
to enforce ban against use of its churches
for same-sex 'marriage'
by Howard Friedman
THE RELIGION CLAUSE
June 24, 2016

The Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America last week adopted a statement entitled "Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs Regarding Marriage".
www.pravoslavie.ru/english/94608.htm

It is apparently designed to allow parishes and monasteries to legally enforce restrictions on use of their facilities for same-sex or transgender marriage ceremonies without courts invoking the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine to refuse to do so.

The introduction to the statement says in part: "The purpose of the statement is to articulate the basic and fundamental beliefs of the Orthodox Church in America regarding marriage, and to do so in terms which could be understood and applied by federal, state, and local governmental officials, without the necessity of any probing inquiry or interpretation which might require them to transgress limitations imposed on them by the First Amendment."

It sets the premise that "Marriage can only be between two people whose birth sex is male and female."

It then calls for each diocese, parish, institution and monastery to adopt a statement declaring:

---

The (Name of the Parish/Hall/Facility) is the property of the (Name of the Parish/Institution/Monastery), a non-profit church organization located in (Location).

Due to sincerely held religious beliefs, documented in the Biblical, dogmatic and canonical documents of the Orthodox Church, we do not permit the (Name of the Parish/Hall/Facility) to be used for the following purposes: events, services or receptions related to non-Orthodox sacraments (including, but not limited to, baptisms, weddings or funerals); non-Orthodox worship services; and partisan political or social rallies.

---

One doubts very much whether the politically correct USCCB will do any similar thing about Catholic churches in the USA.

Please consider the ff item advisedly. It is CNA's English translation of an article from its German edition. Unfortunately, I have been unable so far to find the original interview on which it was apparently based - by Paul Badde, longtime Vaticanista.

www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/is-francis-the-last-pope-a-rare-interview-with-archbishop-gnswei...

Obviously, it is not a 'rare interview' at all, and the teaser about 'Is Francis the last pope?' simply refers to the popular interpretation of the so-called Malachi prophecy.

I do want to see the original interview because the CNA article quotes GG claiming that "I was imputed to have said a number of things that I did not say. Of course, Pope Francis is the legitimate and legitimately elected pope. Any talk of two popes, one legitimate, one illegitimate, is therefore incorrect.”

Which was, of course, not what was questioned about his May 22 statements at all, but his hypothesis of an 'expanded Petrine ministry' and saying, textually, "we have an active pope, and a contemplative one" (when he could so easily have said 'a contemplative ex-pope' to avoid any misunderstanding!)

Last year, JMB/PF made news when he referred publicly to the 'Armenian genocide' of the early 20th century, provoking some pro forma diplomatic protest from Turkey.

Yesterday, on the first day of his apostolic visit to Armenia, the pope said the word 'genocide' once again in the opening words of his address to Armenian political leaders and the diplomatic corps in Yerevan, recalling a visit to the Vatican by the Armenian President and the heads of the Armenia Christian Churches last year. He said:

---

The occasion was the commemoration of the centenary of the Metz Yeghérn, the “Great Evil” that struck your people and caused the death of a vast multitude of persons.

Sadly, that tragedy, that genocide, was the first of the deplorable series of catastrophes of the past century, made possible by twisted racial, ideological or religious aims that darkened the minds of the tormentors even to the point of planning the annihilation of entire peoples. It is so sad that – in this as in the other two – the great powers looked the other way".

---

I doubt that Turkey will react this time, though he grouped the Armenian genocide with, apparently, the mass killings perpetrated under Nazism and under Communism. But why he says 'the great powers looked the other way' in 'the other two' puzzles me. World War II and the Cold War took place precisely because some 'great powers' decided Nazism and Communism could not continue to perpetrate their crimes against humanity.

As for the Armenian genocide, it took place while the rest of the world was occupied with World War I, in which Turkey, the country responsible for the genocide, fought on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. A brief summary of the Armenian genocide says this:

---

In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country.

Today, most historians call this event a genocide – a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. However, the Turkish government does not acknowledge the enormity or scope of these events. Despite pressure from Armenians and social justice advocates throughout the world, it is still illegal in Turkey to talk about what happened to Armenians during this era.

---

Last year, Aram I, Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Cilicia, made it clear, in an interview with VATICAN INSIDER, that the genocide had nothing to do with religion at all but because of racial cleansing in the Young Turks' drive to 'Turkify' the nation.

---

Turkey’s reaction [to the pope's use of the term genocide] resorts to the religious clash between Christianity and Islam. It says the Pope was discriminative, speaking only about the suffering of Armenian Christians and ignoring that of Muslim Turks.
ARAM I: I think they are putting deliberately these things in a wrong, debatable and dangerous context. I’ll tell you why. What happened against the Armenians, the genocide, was not because the Armenians were Christians. This was part of the pan-Turkish ideology and politics and plans of the Young Turks. And the Armenians
were a major obstacle in terms of realising their pan-Turkish policy. [So it was about race, not religion, even if most of the Armenian victims happened to be Christians. But would they have been have been wiped out if they were Muslim?]

They wanted to bring all these nations and countries of common Turkish ethnicity and culture together, under one pan-Turkish umbrella. And the Armenian persons were an obstacle. So they organised this crime, this genocide, because of that. Religion was not a factor. Now they are using religion in order to create this sensitivity [???] between Christianity and Islam. That is not acceptable.

---

The Pope visited the memorial to the victims of the genocide today and later said Mass in Gyumri, Armenia's second largest city, but has not referred directly to the genocide or the Great Evil again. In fact, the Vatican bulletin on the event said it was "the memorial to the massacre of the Armenian population under the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Inaugurated in 1967, a museum was added during the 80th anniversary of the massacre (1985), conserving evidence and documents relating to the "Great Evil" and a research centre affiliated to the Armenian National Academy of Sciences."

Benedict XVI like Leo the Great
by Michelangelo Nasca
Translated from

June 24, 2016

"Before being a very great theologian and teacher of the faith, it is obvious that he is a man who truly believes, who truly prays. It is obvious he is a man who embodies holiness, a man of peace, a man of God."

These are the first observations Pope Francis sets in writing in a Preface to an anthology of texts on the priesthood by his predecessor, Insegnare e imparare l'amore di Dio, published by Cantagalli.

It is a document that highlights the great esteem that the reigning pope has for the emeritus pope, which he has widely shown from the start of his pontificate.

He continues: "Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has authoritatively stated that the theological work of Joseph Ratzinger and later of Benedict XVI places him among the greatest theologians who sat on Peter's Chair, like, for example, Pope Leo the Great, saint and Doctor of the Church.'

Pope Leo I was the first pope to be given the title 'the Great', subsequently given to Pope Gregory I (590-604) and to Nicholas (858-867). Hi biographers describe him as an energetic and generous man who had a great sense of duty.

Born in 4th century Rome, he contributed during his pontificate (440-461) to elevate the importance of the Petrine primacy, being the first to formulate the conviction that it is the Bishop of Rome who receives Peter's legacy and his authority from God.

He firmly opposed the currents of Pelagianism and Manicheism, and in 451, authoritatively sustained the arguments against the monophysite heresy which did not recognize the fusion of two natures, divine and human, in the person of Christ.

Much celebrated is the episode in which he was a protagonist against the advance of the Huns on Rome, going forth to meet Attila himself and, according to tradition, making him desist from sacking Rome.

Leo the Great showed a similar tenacity three years later in 455 with Genseric the Vandal, however failing this time to stop him and save the city of Rome.

In the years when the Roman Empire was approaching its end, Leo the Great successfully did all he could to defend the Christian faith from the heresies of his time and from the degradation of some part of the clergy.

The work of Leo the Great that remains with us - letters and about a hundred homilies - has great stylistic strength. He died on Novemebber 10, 461. In 1754, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Benedict XIV. He became the first Pope to receive the title 'the Great'.

The juxtaposition of Benedict XVI to the historic figure of Leo the Great - underscored by Cardinal Mueller [not the first one to do so, since the comparison was quickly established from the first years of Benedict XVI's Pontificate in terms of their homilies] - is not at all disproportionate.

Indeed, in certain aspects, the theological and cultural contributions of Joseph Ratzinger as cardinal and Benedict XVI are greater, and doctrinally more detailed. A particular distinction that may well earn Benedict XVI himself the title of 'the Great'.

BREXIT was clearly the voice of Britain (and Wales), considering how it was virtually blanked out in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the two other
parts of the United Kingdom. As someone quickly noted, BREXIT appears to have halted at Hadrian's Wall...

A Europe that must be re-established:
Benedict XVI's warnings in 2007
by Robi Ronza
Translated from

June 25, 2016

The British people have chosen to leave the European Union. Now it remains to be seen what price the 'elites' of Europe will exact from them for defying their pretext that they had constructed a Europe that was also ours (that of the European peoples).

But the first thing that must be said is that the British referendum was a great act of freedom - which opens up great hopes. The voters voted above all against a politically and mediatically constituted order that had wanted [and expected] them to choose to remain in the EU, to which end the 'elites' literally did everything they could to defeat Brexit.

Speaking to RAI state TV and radio in a widely heard broadcast yesterday morning, former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano called British Prime Minister David Cameron 'incautious' to have brought the issue to a referendum. On questions of this nature, Napolitano said, it is better to leave the people out of it. [Dear, dear! Spoken like a former militant Communist! In the so-called 'people's democracies', the people never decide anything, and everything is imposed on them from the top.]

And to prove a remarkable lack of common sense among our leaders, Napolitano's pupil, former Prime Minister Mario Monti, said something worse. A head of government who had been imposed on Parliament back in 2012 - and for that reason, named 'senator for life' before he formally took office as Prime Minister, Monti said that in calling the referendum, Cameron had 'abused democracy' no less!

In short, when a people vote their mind, as the British did - and not as the elites would have wanted them to, having been so used by now to consider European institutions 'cosa nostra' [our own thing, to adopt the Mafia slogan] - then the masks come off.

For the past two days, the Napolitanos and Montis all over Europe have been beside themselves with chagrin, to the point of failing to even hide the underlying authoritarianism - whether it is post-communist or masonic - which has characterized their political vision.

Brexit should be a healthy shock for the EU. It is doubtless extraordinary. As I said, the elites who did not want or expect the outcome of the UK referendum will seek to make, not just the UK, but the world, pay for the failure of their project [not that it is a failure they will ever acknowledge - how could they dismantle their gigantic bEurocracies lording it over the continent in Brussels and Strasbourg???]], seeking a scapegoat on which to unload irrelevant emergencies.

It is the case for instance with the stocks of the major Italian banking groups on which destinies one cannot see how Britain exiting the EU could possibly weigh. But one must take it for granted that days of turbulence on the world's financial markets await us, yet whoever is able to do that also has the responsibility to stabilize them.

Meanwhile, the 'machine' to falsify the profound significance of Brexit has already geared up. Because ultimately, the episode is a sensational sign negating their claim to have constructed a political Europe based only on contingent interests while obstinately rejecting the history and values that had shaped the continent.

Europe can save itself only if it resolutely changes direction by rediscovering the best of itself. On the other hand, the elites are already purveying the idea that the EU can get out of the crisis brought on by Brexit by not changing anything at all but simply forging ahead bullishly as if nothing had happened.

For obvious reasons, the key to solving this crisis is held in great part by men of faith. Provided men of faith are faithful to themselves and their faith.

In this light, let us turn to a document that is very relevant today: Benedict XVI's address to the participants of the Congress of the Episcopal Conferences of the European Community who met in Rome on March 24, 2007, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Rome Treaty that instituted the European Economic Community [or European Common Market, parent organization of the current proliferation of European institutions based in Brussels and Strasbourg.]

[The writer proceeds to quote large excerpts from the address, but I will reproduce the body of it in full].

---

ADDRESS BY HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS OF EUROPE, 3/24/2007

At 11:15 today, in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace, the Holy Father greeted the participants of a Congress on the theme "50 years after the Treaty of Rome: Values and perspectives for the Europe of tomorrow", promoted by the Commission of Episcopal Conferences of Europe [COMECE from its Italian acronym].

...I am particularly happy to receive so many of you today, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

It marked an important new stage for Europe, which was just coming out of the extreme effects of a world war and which was desirous of constructing a future of peace and better social and economic wellbeing, without dissolving or denying its diverse national identities...

From that March day 50 years ago, this Continent has gone a long way, which has led to reconciling its two 'lungs' - East and West - which are linked by a common history but were arbitrarily divided by a curtain of injustice.

Economic integration has stimulated a policy and a still arduous search for an institutional structure that would be adequate for a European Union which now has 27 member nations and wishes to take a leading role on the world stage.

Through these years, the need has been increasingly felt to establish a healthy balance between the economic and social dimensions, through policies which could produce wealth and increase Europe's competitiveness, without neglecting the legitimate expectations of the poor and the marginalized.

But demographically, one must unfortunately take note that Europe appears to be on a path that could lead to writing itself out of history. Besides placing economic growth at risk, this could cause enormous problems for social cohesion and, above all, favor a dangerous individualism which is heedless of the consequences for the future. One would think that the European continent is, in fact, losing faith in its own future.

Moreover, insofar for example as respect for the environment, or the systematic access to energy resources and investments, solidarity is hardly given an incentive, not just internationally, but even internally within nations.

The process itself of European unification does not appear to be agreed to by everyone, the widespread impression being that various 'chapters' of the European project have been formulated without taking into account the expectations of the citizens themselves.

It emerges quite clearly from all this that one cannot think of building an authentic 'common house' for Europe by ignoring the identity of the peoples on our Continent.

This is a historical cultural and moral identity that precedes geographic, economic or political identity - an identity made up of a sum of universal values which Christianity helped forge, acquiring thereby not only a historic role, but a foundational one with respect to Europe.

Such values, which constitute the very soul of Europe, should be safeguarded in Europe during this third millennium to serve as a ferment for civilization. If these values were to play a lesser role, how can the 'old' Continent continue to be 'yeast' for the whole world?

If, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the governments of the Union wish to get close to their citizenry, how can they exclude an essential element of European identity like Christianity, with which a great majority of Europeans continue to identify themselves?

Is it not a cause for surprise that Europe today, while it aims to propose itself as a community of values, seems to dispute increasingly that there are any absolute universal values at all?

Does not this singular form of 'apostasy' of itself, even before it is a denial of God, lead it to doubt its own identity?

In this way, it will end up spreading the belief that a 'consideration of benefits' is the only criterion for moral discernment and that the common good is synonymous to compromise.

But although compromise may represent a legitimate balance among conflicting interests, it becomes a common evil every time it means sanctioning agreements that offend human nature.

A community that builds itself without due respect for the authentic dignity of man - forgetting that every person is created in the image of God - ends up by doing good to no one.

That is why it becomes even more indispensable that Europe guards against a purely pragmatic attitude, widespread today, that systematically justifies compromise on essential human values as an inevitable acceptance of a presumed lesser evil.

Such pragmatism, presented as balanced and realistic, is really not, essentially - precisely because it denies that ideal dimension of values which is inherent in human nature.

When such pragmatism is exercised in the context of secularistic and relativistic tendencies, it ends up by denying Christians their very right to engage in public discourse as Christians, or at the very least, their contributions are rejected on the grounds that they simply wish to retain unjustified privileges.

In the present historical moment and in the face of the many challenges that characterize our time, the European Union - in order to be a valid guarantor of rights and an effective promoter of universal values, cannot but recognize clearly the existence of a stable and permanent human nature, which is the source of common rights for every person, including those who would deny those rights.

In this context, the right to conscientious objection must be safeguarded every time fundamental human rights are violated.

Dear friends, I know how difficult it is for Christians to defend the truth about man strenuously. But do not tire of doing so, and do not be discouraged!

You know you have the task to contribute to build, with the help of God, a new Europe which is realistic but not cynical, rich with ideals and free from ingenuous illusions, inspired by the perennial and life-giving truth of the Gospel.

Therefore, be actively present in the public debate at the European level, knowing that it is also part of national debates, and couple such mission with effective cultural action. Never yield to the logic of power for its own ends.

Let Christ's own advice be your constant stimulus and support when He said: "If salt loses its taste...it is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot" (Mt 5,13)...

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These are urgencies, we might observe, that were already at the center of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's reflections in a 1992 book published in Italy as Svolta per l’Europa (A Turning Point in Europe)(Edizioni Paoline, Milano, 1992) that deserves to be reread today.


Perhaps no European leader or intellectual has spoken and written so much about the crisis of Europe, and so prophetically, than Joseph Ratzinger. The address he gave in March 2007 could well have been given today and entitled 'Brexit illustrates the crisis of Europe'. (Did someone say 'Charlemagne Prize'? How much more out of the spirit of Charlemagne could those Eurocrat dimwits giving out the prize be!)

When Benedict XVI gave this fairly short address in March 2007 - the AP called it 'passionate - reports and commentaries on it took up almost a full page on the NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT thread in PAPA RATZINGER FORUM.

Speaking of Leo the Great (see post preceding this), I remarked once that a modern equivalent of Leo seeking to keep the Huns and the Vandals from sacking Rome was Benedict XVI trying to hold the new Euro-barbarians at the gate.

Brexit and the failure of Europe
The continent that once ruled the world seems adrift
as its soul is consumed by bureaucracy and political correctness
by Samuel Gregg

June 26, 2016

It’s difficult for most non-Europeans to grasp the scale of the devastation that overtook Europe twice in the twentieth century. Having descended into the abyss between 1914 and 1918, European nations were at it again twenty years later. They consequently endured an apocalypse of death and destruction from Normandy in the West to Stalingrad in the East.

“Never again!” became the lodestone of numerous European politicians, most notably Catholic statesmen such as West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, and France’s Robert Schuman (presently being considered by the Catholic Church for beatification), all of whom headed Christian Democratic-led governments in the immediate postwar years.

It was against this background that European unification became seen as a surefire way of securing peace and damping down the fires of nationalism. And from a certain perspective, that made sense. For all their differences, European nations had much in common.

These ranged from a rootedness in Christianity and a substantial Jewish influence to the legacies of the Greeks, Romans, and the various Enlightenments. Then there was the fact that intra-European trade had existed for centuries, forging not-easily broken economic bonds.

The Treaty of Rome, which sought to create a common market by securing the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labor between the 6 original signatory countries, was signed on 25 March 1957.

It’s no coincidence that the ceremony was held at the Palazzo dei Conservatori on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Built on top of a sixth century BC pagan temple and refurbished by no less than Michelangelo, the Palazzo functioned as a center for businesses and entrepreneurs from across medieval Europe to come together to engage in peaceful trade.

Given that the European continent had been laid waste by war only 12 years earlier, the establishment of the then European Economic Community (EEC) was seen as a great achievement and cause for celebration.

All this seems far removed from today’s European Union. The common market certainly exists and has even expanded to 28 nations. But the continent is flooded with political movements and parties which differ about many things but share a deep distrust of — and an increasing antagonism towards —the EU.

It’s a hostility that transcends more traditional divides such as right and left, employers and employees, Catholic and Protestant, Western and Eastern Europe, or Northern and Southern Europe.

Now it has claimed its first major victory, when Britain — the EU’s second-biggest economy — voted by a relatively comfortable margin to formally exit the supranational union.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as the result of resurgent nationalism and fear of immigrants, something accentuated by the EU’s inept handling of the 2015 migrant crisis and the outbreak of Islamist jihadist violence. Certainly, there is something to this.

But it’s also a distraction from an even bigger source of alienation: namely, the form assumed by the contemporary EU, especially its political leadership and bureaucracy. These groups are, in many Europeans’ view, deeply anti-democratic, downright contemptuous of anyone who expresses misgivings about their agenda, and inclined to insist that most problems can be resolved by giving the EU — and therefore EU officials — more power.

People in Britain voted for Brexit for many, often different reasons. It’s hard, however, to deny that the EU’s top-down approach to public life, its stealth supplanting of national laws, and, perhaps above all, the sheer arrogance of its political-bureaucratic leadership played a major role in causing 52 percent of British voters to say that enough was enough.

Any visitor to Brussels these days is bound to be taken aback by the sheer number of EU agencies and organs housed by the city. Leaving aside the aesthetically questionable architecture of many of the buildings inhabited by such organizations, the EU gives whole new meaning to the word “bureaucracy.”

Brussels teems with hundreds of EU politicians and representatives of member-states as well as thousands of assorted advisors, civil servants, and (invariably state-funded) NGOs. Only a handful of these people are actually elected by normal citizens.

It’s this world of unaccountable political insiders and the perception (fair or otherwise) that the only interests they serve are their own which drove many people in Britain to tick “Leave” on June 23. Yet it’s a world whose emergence was also predicted in the 1950s by one economist who, in this regard, truly merits the title “prophetic.”

Most early opponents of European political and economic integration were old-fashioned socialists. They worried that a common market might impede implementation of socialist policies. A rare exception to this rule was the German economist Wilhelm Röpke. Today Röpke is known as the foremost intellectual progenitor of the postwar German economic miracle.

A devout Lutheran deeply versed in Catholic social teaching, Röpke was also one of the very few free market economists who loudly and publicly criticized what would become today’s EU even before the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957.

Röpke’s proto-Euroscepticism didn’t arise from nationalist sentiments. His experiences as a highly-decorated combat soldier fighting in the German army on the Western front during the First World War left him with an enduring aversion to militarism and nationalism, especially its fascist varieties — so much so that Röpke was one of the first academics dismissed from German universities by the National Socialists in 1933.

Moreover, as an economist unusually well-read in other disciplines, Röpke recognized that modern nation-states have not, historically-speaking, always been freedom’s allies. Nevertheless, Röpke was highly critical of the Treaty of Rome and made several predictions about how the EEC was likely to develop.

It’s striking just how much Röpke got right about the character that’s been assumed by the European integration project. In 1958, for instance, Röpke forecast that it would eventually pit fiscally-responsible European nations against less-economically disciplined countries. In our own time, this division has become one of the major cleavages that, for instance, distinguishes fiscally-responsible Germany and Finland from economic disasters such as France and Greece.

On the topic of a single European currency, Röpke insisted that it would work only if member-states followed disciplined fiscal policies and that there were mechanisms available to oust any nation that violated tough rules regarding spending.

He doubted, however, that such conditions would be met in a Europe in which (1) governments were proving skilled at skirting rules, (2) generous welfare was increasingly regarded as a human right, and (3) political parties habitually used the government’s tax-and-spending powers to buy the electoral support of various constituencies. In retrospect, Röpke’s prediction proved, once again, to be spot-on.

Röpke also conjectured that the EEC would aggravate the bureaucratization of European life. Every postwar creation of supra-European institutions, he illustrated, had produced thousands of civil servants predisposed to expand their numbers and influence.

A mere 6 years after the EEC’s founding, Röpke observed that its executive organs had already become “an enormous administrative machine,” imposing thousands of regulations upon member-states.

Even worse, he added, the EEC’s various departments had been taken over by “socialists and ingrained interventionists” who regarded top-down planning by political-bureaucratic elites as superior to the workings of markets within a framework of rule of law, constitutionally-limited government, and a basic safety net.

Röpke was no naysayer about Europe. Indeed, he supported the continent’s economic integration. He maintained, however, that it should develop “from below” rather than be imposed from the top-down. It would be best actualized, Röpke held, by European countries unilaterally opening up their economies not just to each other but the rest of the world. That would, Röpke stated, remove any need for supra-European bureaucrats and organizations to “manage” the process.

At the same time, Röpke didn’t hide his conviction that the core of European identity went far beyond the world of supply and demand. To be European, he argued, meant affirming those specific religious, political and cultural traditions which made Europe different to those cultures shaped by other heritages. It wasn’t a matter of denigrating other societies. Rather, it was simply acknowledging those things that gave Europe, and therefore the West more generally, its distinctiveness.

Such notions are given short-shrift by contemporary EU officialdom. Any discussion of values is invariably dominated by words like “diversity” and “non-discrimination” and a near-obsession with equality. To be sure, such phrases can assume positive meaning, but only if grounded in a coherent understanding of the nature of man.

In an EU increasingly inclined to aggressively promote nonsensical concepts such as “gender theory”, all these things take on rather different meaning.

In as de-Christianized a country as Britain, it’s unsurprising that concern about these problems didn’t feature in the Brexit debate. The EU’s adoption of such specific ideological agendas are symptomatic, however, of a trend that many who voted for “Leave” did rebel against.

And this is the imposition of ideas simply assumed to be correct by the EU’s political classes, bureaucracies and their intellectual enablers. This goes hand-in-hand with an associated habit of labelling anyone who questions their positions as a troglodyte or words to which the suffix “phobic” is regularly attached. Rather than actually debating ideas, it’s much easier to suggest that someone’s views are akin to some form of mental illness.

Given the economic sclerosis, political inertia, and creeping bureaucratization that characterizes much of the EU today, it’s sobering to realize that, 100 years ago, this continent dominated the rest of the globe: economically, culturally, politically, philosophically — even religiously.

On June 23, 2016, however, a majority of British voters decided to detach their nation from what is, as no less than the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker conceded in a September 2015 speech, a “European Union [which] is not in a good state.”

In the short-term, negotiating the terms of the divorce — not least among which will be trade arrangements and the untangling of English and Scottish law from the labyrinth of EU law — will require considerable dexterity from Britain’s next prime minister.

Still, it’s difficult not to conclude that the United Kingdom has detached itself from a political experiment that once offered hope but presently appears
(1) incapable of substantive reform;
(2) disposed to take refuge in denial;
(3) awash in a fever-swamp of political correctness;
(4) beset by aging and falling demographics;
(5) enduring catastrophic youth-unemployment levels; and
(6) dominated by a political class that lives in an echo chamber and won’t acknowledge that many of their actions have helped reignite the very tensions which the European project was designed to obviate.

The future, alas, for Europe is not bright right now. One can hope that Brexit serves as a long-overdue wakeup call. Unfortunately, present trends don’t provide many grounds for optimism. Quite the contrary.

The pope on Brexit, gays,
female deacons and Benedict XVI
'He is the emeritus pope - he is not the second pope!"
by Jean-Marie Guénois
Translated from

June 27, 2016

I have not yet seen a transcript of JMB's latest media performance at 30,000 feet, but thanks to Beatrice, I have read the excerpts that Jean Guenois published in Le Figaro, and I will start with his comments on Benedict XVI. (Obviously, someone asked him about Georg Gaenswein's controversial statements about an 'enlarged Petrine ministry, etc'.) This is what he answered:

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At certain times, the Church has had three popes. Benedict XVI is the emeritus Pope. He said it clearly when on February 11, 2013, he announced his resignation as of February 28. And he has retired to help the Church through prayer.

He lives in a monastery. He prays. I have gone to see him there many times. I have been on the telephone with him. The other day, he wrote me a little note with his signature [who else would sign it???] to wish me bon voyage.

It is a grace to have a wise grandfather* in the house. When I tell him this, he laughs. For me, he is the emeritus pope, the wise grandfather. He's the man who watches over my shoulder with his prayers.

I will never forget the address he gave the college of cardinals on February 28: "One of you will be my successor, and to him, I promise my obedience". And he has done that.

Then, I have heard, though I do not know if this is true, that some had gone to him to complain about the new pope, and that he shooed them away. In the best way - Bavarian, educated - but he shooed them off... [This is the pope who always denounces gossip purveying gossip!]

It is a grace to have a wise grandfather in the house. That is who he is. He is a man of his word. He is a man who is correct, correct, correct. [Guenois uses the French word 'droit' - which in this context, means upright, straight, right. I have to wait and see what the pope said in Italian.] He is the emeritus pope. I have thanked him publicly for having opened the door for emeritus popes.

With longer life spans, can one effectively lead the Church at a certain age? He - with courage, in prayer, in conscience and in full theology, decided to open this door, and I think it is for the good of the Church.

But there is only one pope. Perhaps one day there will be to or three emeritus popes. But they will be emeritus.

On Tuesday, he will mark the 65th anniversary of his ordination as a priest. His brother Georg will be there because they were ordained on the same day. There will be a small gathering with the heads of the Curia. Not many people because he prefers it that way. He accepts the principle, very modestly. [What principle? That he is emeritus pope, or that he does not want a large gathering? Either way, isn't it obvious?]

I will be there, and I will say something for this man of prayer, of courage. But he is the emeritus pope, not the second pope. He is faithful to his word [How could he not be, in any way?], he is a man of God, very intelligent, and for me, it's like having a grandfather in the house.[dim]

---

*I've always wondered why JMB never refers to B16 as a 'brother' - they are brothers as pope (even if the other is now ex-), they are brothers as priests and bishops. And even in the literal sense, B16 is only 10 years older than he is. It is as if by suggesting he considers B16 a grandfather - as he does on every occasion - that he is exaggerating their generational difference (even if being born within 10 years of each other puts them chronologically, though not culturally, in the same generation). If he were talking about one of the older cardinals, for instance, would he not talk about them as 'his brother bishop'?

Anyway, I will post the rest of Guenois's report as soon as translated. What JMB had to say about 'gays' is undoubtedly going to grab the headlines.

Not only does he repeat 'Who are we to judge?' - even if this time he says 'we' not 'I' - though now it is very clearly said about persons with deviant unnatural lifestyles in general, but he says we - he means all Catholics - should all beg forgiveness from them for having treated them badly. Of the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, how many do you think have ever treated gays badly?... Once again, JMB is extrapolating from his limited personal experience, since he claims that growing up in Argentina, divorced persons were not allowed into Catholic homes!


'The Church should apologize
to the persons she has offended'
[It's not 'the Church' that offends anyone -
it's the persons in the Church because we are all sinners]

---

I shall repeat what I have already said and it is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: Homosexuals are not to be discriminated against. They should be respected and accompanied pastorally. [Of course, he carefully omits what else the Catechism says - that homosexual acts are sinful, and that Catholic homosexuals should choose to be chaste rather than to sin.]

One can condemn - but not for ideological reasons - certain manifestations that are too offensive for others, but that is not the problem. ['Manifestations that are too offensive for others'? The Church teaching that homosexual acts are sinful is not about offending others, but about offending God to begin with, because to offend nature by indulging habitually in unnatural acts is to offend God. And who has been using 'ideological reasons' to condemn - in this case, Catholic teaching about homosexuality - if not the LGBTs themselves and their militant advocates in the media and the so-called intelligentsia.]

The problem is that a person who has this condition, who has goodwill and seeks God. Who are we to judge? [But who is he talking about here? Has there been any great public outpouring of sexually disordered Catholics seeking God - or even just seeking out their local priest's help - to deal with their 'condition' as the pope calls it? No, all the publicity and the hype has been about sexual deviants asserting their right to be deviant and to practice accordingly. Does JMB call that good will and seeking God?]

We should accompany them as the catechism says. [But accompany them how? By indulging them in their sinful preferences and cooing to them, "Go ahead. Do what will make you happy!"? How about this pope saying, at least once, that indulgence in sexual deviancy is sinful and that is what the Church opposes?]

Some cultures or some countries have different mentalities about this question. I think that the Church should present her apologies to gay persons whom she has offended, as Cardinal Marx recently said, but she should also apologize to the poor, to abandoned women, unemployed youths, and for having blessed so much use of weapons! [This is so stupid it would be even more stupid of me to comment on it any farther!]

The Church should apologize - or let us say, Christians should, because the Church is holy, and we are the sinners. [Well, thank God, he remembered that! But why should I, sinner that I am in many other ways, apologize to anyone for the social ills of the world, for which I am not personally responsible in any way, and of which I am a victim myself in many ways???]

We Christians should apologize for not having accompanied so many heartbreaks in so many families... [As if the Church and other Christian organizations have not been doing all that is possible within their capabilities to help the less fortunate! For most other Christians, are we not dutybound to deal first with the problems that we ourselves and our families face daily and routinely? That's usually more than enough to deal with, and God helps those who help themselves.]

I remember the culture of Buenos Aires when I was a child - the closed Catholic culture, from where I came. A divorced family could not be admitted to your house. Catholic culture has changed, thank God, but Christians must apologize and ask for forgiveness. It's a word we often forget.

[Wait, how are we supposed to apologize and ask forgiveness? Not that anyone, starting with progressivist Catholics and of course all Catholic-hating persons, would forgive the Church for anything! Will the Church organize occasions for this specific purpose - gathering groups to represent all the categories of persons the pope says we have all collectively offended? Will Bergoglio formulate new prayers for this purpose to be incorporated into the Mass canon?

Are the Confiteor ("I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through fault, through my most grievous fault") and all the other prayers at Mass ("to atone for my countless sins, offenses and negligences") not confession and daily reminder enough of our personal shortcomings and failures, for which we ask God - not other people - for forgiveness??? Don't we mean it, does every priest who offers the Mass merely mouth these prayers???

And yes, each of us is obliged to apologize and ask forgiveness from persons we have directly offended, but since when have 'mass confessions' become legitimate???]

The priest as master, no, but the priest as father, yes. The priest who uses a club on the faithful, no, but the priest who embraces, pardons and consoles [by allowing the sinful - as in remarried divorcees, practising homosexuals and cohabitating couples - to go on sinning??? Mortal sin is mortal sin, so if JMB's church condones chronic states of mortal sin, why not condone all mortal sins - serial murders and child rape and the like?]

There are so many priests like this - hospital almoners, prison chaplains, so many saints we do not see because holiness is modest, it does not flaunt itself. The opposite is to call attention to oneself, so that one is noticed. And we have done that - Christians, priests, bishops.

But we also have Teresa of Calcutta and so many like her! So many sisters in Africa, so many laymen, so many holy marriages. The good grain and the chaff. It's the kingdom, and we should not be scandalized by it as Jesus said. We should pray that the Lord will make the chaff perish and that there will be more good grain.

We cannot set boundaries. We are all holy because we have the Holy Spirit but we are all sinners. Me first of all! But [we need] not just to make apologies but to ask forgiveness. [From God, not from an abstract mass of human beings just as sinful as we are!]

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An initial reaction from John Vennari at Catholic Family News:


Father Z, who reproduces Mons. Pope's last NCR blog decrying JMB's tendency to put down priests, also referred to one of his recent 'Action Items' that I had missed, but which is of course, very much apropos...

Fr. Byer identifies himself on his blog as a parish priest in the Appalachian region who has been named one of the pope's Missionaries of Mercy during this Holy Year. I find his prayer intention particularly significant - "May he begin his day dedicated to Jesus and free from all diabolical assault!" Wouldn't each moment for the Vicar of Christ be dedicated to Jesus? Perhaps for that, he is more subject to diabolical assault than any of us.

I certainly will add that thought to my own daily prayer for the pope, but I ask Fr. Byer: Who, apart from cloistered monks and nuns, would have one hour to spare everyday just praying for JMB? Things have come to a pretty pass in the Church indeed, when one of the pope's own missionaries of mercy thinks such an intensive prayer campaign for the pope rather than his intentions is necessary...

Me, I continue to pray for the intentions of Benedict XVI who would, I think, know best to formulate what we want for the Church, all who labor in the Lord's vineyard, and all men of good faith and good will.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/06/2016 19:30]

A few days ago, Beatrice referred on her site www.benoit-et-moi.fr/2016 to an article by Vittorio Messori which was obviously his first reaction to Benedict XVI's surprise announcement on February 11, 2013, that he was renouncing the Papacy. And I realized with a shock that I had not seen the article before. My only excuse is that I was in a state of traumatic stress for quite a few days after that, trying to function on autopilot and kept more than busy by the flood of almost overwhelmingly benevolent and laudatory reactions that I wanted to have on record and post on the Forum...

So I am posting my translation of it, having recovered the original article from Messori's current website, www.vittoriomessori.it. It is also timely in view of the uproar that greeted Mons. Gaenswein's hypothesis of an 'expanded Petrine ministry'.

We can see in Messori's initial reaction to February 11, 2013, that, knowing B16 in a way few people do, he grasped immediately what Benedict XVI had in mind as a 'continuation', if you will, of his ministry - clearly not in any active exercise whatsoever, but in 'prayer and suffering', spiritual offerings no one can deny him from making, and which do not detract in any way from the full uncontested authority of the reigning pope [whose answer to the question asked of him on the flight back from Armenia about Mons. Gaenswein's hypothesis, was clearly intended to assert "Let there be no question - there is only one pope, and I'm it", after claiming that he had not read GG's statements at all!]...

Benedict XVI's renunciation:
An offering of suffering and prayer
Translated from

Originally written for

February 12, 2013

There will be time enough for analysis, for assessments, for predictions. Today, still disconcerted, we can only seek to give a possible answer to three questions which immediately came up.

First, why such an announcement on this day in February?
Then, why during a consistory of cardinals that was meant to be routine?
Finally, why he has chosen to spend his retirement in the Vatican.

Upon reflection, after the almost brutal surprise at something that had been so unexpected (for everyone, including those in the Vatican hierarchy), I think we can attempt a possible explanation.

February 11, anniversary day of the first apparition of Our Lady in Lourdes, had been declared by his "beloved and venerated predecessor', as he always refers to him, World Day for the Sick.

He said, in the Latin of his brief but shattering declaration: "I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering."

Terence, and later Seneca, Cicero and so many others have said it: senectus ipsa est morbus (old age itself is a disease). And so, someone like him who is 86, is infirm. He added: "Both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me".

So what could have been a more appropriate day to let the world know of his infirmities as an old man than that dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, protrectress of sick people? Moreover, he also sends out a sign of fraternal solidarity with for all those who, because of actual sickness or old age, can no longer count on their own strength.

But why (the second question) the announcement, ex abrupto, at a consistory of cardinals who were to decide a date for the canonization of the 800 martyrs of Otranto, who were massacred by the fury of Ottoman Muslims? I don't think it had anything to do with recalling the violence of extreme Islamism which is actual today as it was in the 15th century for the Otranto martyrs.

Rather, one must think that in the past months, Benedict XVI has meditated on the first and only case of a formal papal abdication in the history of the Church, that of Celestine V on December 13, 1294. There had been, during the 'dark centuries' of the High Middle Ages, some cases of papal renunciation but these took place in obscure circumstances and under the pressure of threats and violence.

Only Pietro da Morrone, the Benedictine hermit literally dragged from his mountain retreat to be elevated to the Chair of Peter, officially abdicated with full freedom, also invoking his advanced age (about to turn 80) and the weakness that goes with it.

Before taking the unprecedented decision, he had consulted leading theologians who confirmed to him that resignation was possible, but that he had to do it "before many cardinals". And that too is what Benedict XVI decided, having only that precedent to go by.

A precedent moreover that was spiritually right because the good Pierro da Morrone was declared a saint of the Church shortly thereafter and had never deserved the accusation of cowardice made against him by Dante [a Ghibelline] for political reasons.

In short, in the absence of rules, Papa Ratzinger, ever respectful of tradition, looked back to what took place eight centuries earlier with his predecessor whose destiny he has chosen to share. And probably, it was not by chance either that he read his unexpected announcement in Latin, evoking that long-ago precedent.

But to come to the last question: why, after a brief stay in Castel Gandolfo (which is available during the sede vacante), would the ex-pope retire into what had been a cloistered monastery within the Vatican? At least, that is what Fr. Lombardi announced, and we do not know if it will be his final retirement home, but in any case, it could not have been a random decision.

The last words of Benedict XVI's announcement yesterday were: "With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer."

During his Pontificate, he often said: "The heart of the Church is not where one plans, administers and governs, but where one prays".

And so, his service to the Catholic Church will not just go on, but in the perspective of faith, it becomes even more important: If he did not choose a far-off hermitage - perhaps in his native Bavaria or in MonteCassino which Papa Wojtyla had thought about as a last refuge - it was probably to bear witness, by his very proximity to the tomb of Peter, how much he wants to be close to the Church to which he wants to give himself to the very end.

Nor is it any accident that he has chosen to retire in a a former monastery for cloistered nuns whose walls are impregnated with prayer.

Nonetheless, if his retirement within Vatican walls proves to be definitive, Joseph Ratzinger's proverbial discretion assures us that he will not interfere at all in the government if his successor.

We can be certain he will refuse to be an 'adviser', given with the weight not just of his years but of his experience and wisdom, even if he should be asked by the next pope.

In his view of the faith, the only 'adviser' to the Pope is the Holy Spirit who may have pointed his finger at him in the Sistine Chapel.

And it is precisely in this religious perspective that we find perhaps an answer to another question: Would it not have been more 'Christian' to follow the example of John Paul II in his heroic resistance to the very end, rather than that of Celestine V?

Thank God that there are as many personal histories, temperaments, destinies, charisms and ways of interpreting and living the Gospel. Despite what those who do not know the Church from within think, Catholic freedom is great, very great.

Many times, Cardinal Ratzinger had told me, in the conversations we have had over the course of the years that those who profess themselves most troubled about the difficult state of the Church (and when, after all, was she ever not troubled?) have not understood that the Church belongs to Christ, it is Christ's own Body. And so, it is He who will guide it, and if necessary, save it, he says.

"We are nothing but servants of the Church, the gospel tells us, sometimes useless servants. We should not take ourselves too seriously, we are just instruments who are, moreover, often ineffective. So let us not torment ourselves about the future of the Church - let us do our duties as best we can, and He will take care of the rest". [This is a constant thought that, as Pope, he always sought to convey to priests. "Do the best that you can, but do not expect to be able to achieve everything. If you keep close to God in daily prayer and do the best that you can with what you have to do, he will do the rest".]

There is also - and perhaps this is more important - his humility in passing over the reins: The instrument is worn down, the Lord of the harvest (as he loves to call him, according to the Gospel term), needs new workers who are there among the subordinates.

As for the old workers, once they are exhausted, they can yet do more precious work: offering their suffering and the most effective commitment they can make - that of inexhaustible prayer while they are waiting for the final call to our definitive home.


Also, courtesy of Beatrice, I have now seen the original CNA-Deutschland report on a new interview with GG with longtime German Vaticanista Paul Badde, who apparently is also now CNA/EWTN's correspondent in Germany. It is not the interview itself, which was apparently set to air today on German EWTN as part of special programming from June 27 to July 2 to mark the 65th anniversary of Benedict XVI's priestly ordination. Perhaps we will get the full interview transcript afterwards.

Also, the English translation of the report that was posted this weekend on CNA's English edition was substantially right. He does say that certain things were attributed to him that he did not say about the 'two popes' idea, which was rather disingenuous, I thought, and perhaps Badde should have challenged him that he did speak about an 'expanded Petrine ministry' that would be 'collegial'. Anyway, I will translate the article for the record, even if he really didn't say anything new. Perhaps the full interview will have something new..

39 years ago today
Joseph Ratzinger was made cardinal

It was to be Paul VI's last consistory, at which he named only five new cardinals, including the new Archbishop of Munich-Freising who had been consecrated bishop barely a month earlier.


Thanks to the Fondazione Vaticana for the Facebook reminder!


Meanwhile, there's this story:

'Ratzinger Foundation is at the service
of the Church and the Holy See'
by Francesco Peloso
From the English service of

June 27, 2016

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican-based Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Foundation places all its scientific and charity activities at the service of the Church and the Pope, whoever he is. At the moment that would be Francis.

The institution said this in a statement published today, which reads: “Ever since its establishment in March 2010, the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI and all of its activities has had the one and only aim of serving the Supreme Pontiff and his magisterium, in the ways that characterise this Foundation, dedicated since the very start by Benedict XVI to the Holy See and the Pontiffs who succeed him”.

Each year, the Foundation has been awarding ten scholarships to theology students in Italy and abroad. Then there are all the formation activities, conferences, seminars and Theology training courses which are offered throughout the world and funded by the Foundation’s proceeds.

These partly come from the royalties that derive from the sale of almost 100 volumes written by Joseph Ratzinger. Sales peaked when the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith was elected Pope; this success continued throughout his pontificate and was fuelled also by the celebrated trilogy on Jesus, authored by Benedict XVI.

The Foundation’s statement was issued following the publication of an article which appeared on Italian website Tiscali.it. The article contains a statement from the body’s president, Mgr. Giuseppe Scotti, who said: “Now we work for Francis, even though the Foundation was created with Benedict XVI’s money”.

Benedict XVI’s royalties from his books written as Joseph Ratzinger now bring in around 300,000 euros per year. When he became pope, he signed an agreement ceding all the royalties from his writings as Joseph Ratzinger and then as Benedict XVI to the Vatican Publishing House. At some point, it was decided to separate the royalties from his Ratzinger books to fund the Foundation which was established on 2010. The Foundation’s statute was definitively approved by Pope Francis in 2014.

Now, the Foundation manages the proceeds from the Ratzinger royalties. It is estimated that the institution initially had several million euros’ worth of endowments.

The Foundation’s website explains: “The assets of the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI include: the initial endowment from royalties deriving from the texts authored by Professor Joseph Ratzinger; all movable and real estate property as well as sums and other transferable securities which should result from the acquisition of inheritance, legacies and bequests from all sources, in favour of the Foundation; any assets which the administrative council decides, upon consultation with the college of auditors, to earmark for the enhancement of the Foundation’s holdings.”

Every year the Foundation sets aside 120,000 euros for scholarships, as well as a sum for the Ratzinger Prize (the winner is announced by Pope Francis), while another chunk is allocated to high-level scientific conferences involving Catholic universities and their collaboration over important and current theological issues.

Meanwhile, tomorrow, a solemn ceremony for the celebration of the 65th anniversary of Ratzinger’s ordination to the priesthood is to be held in the Clementine Hall in the Apostolic Palace.

This is a rare papal record, since Leo XIII, who lived to be 93, was the last Pope to achieve a similar milestone at the beginning of the last century.

Perhaps the timing of the statement from the Foundation is just coincidental, but might it not be an effort somehow to mitigate the infelicitous effect of Mons. Gaenswein's statements on an 'expanded Petrine ministry'?

It turns out the Vatican Press Office today released this story to clarify a misleading story about the Foundation that appeared on an Italian website. The INSIDER story did not use the wrong information.

Ratzinger Foundation corrects
misleading article


Vatican City, 27 June 2016 – This morning Tiscali News published an article containing an interview with the president of the Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation, Msgr. Giuseppe Scotti, entitled “To Pope Francis, Ratzinger’s money: a donation of four million euros. Tiscali.it exclusive: Benedict XVI hands over to Bergoglio his foundation, with its huge capital. An act that demonstrates the unity between the current Pope and his predecessor”.

As both title and subtitle may be misleading, the Foundation has issued a communiqué to provide the correct information, reproduced below.

---

Communiqué of the
Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation
27 June 2016

Since its creation in March 2010, the Joseph Ratzinger–Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation through all the activities it promotes has as its sole scope that of placing itself at the service of the Supreme Pontiff and his Magisterium, with the characteristics specific to the Foundation, donated by Benedict XVI from the beginning to the Holy See and to his successors in the papacy.

In particular, with regard to the charitable work of the Foundation, this is exercised through the annual assignment of ten scholarships to students in Italy and abroad. In 2015 scholarships were awarded for a value of 120,000 euros. The ways of obtaining study grants and the students who have benefited from them may be consulted on the Foundation’s website.

Secondly, the organisation of conferences at high cultural and scientific level, as set out in the Foundation’s statute, is guided by what Pope Francis recalls in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “Universities are outstanding environments for articulating and developing this evangelising commitment in an interdisciplinary and integrated way”.

Finally, with the assignment of the Ratzinger Prize to scholars whose names are submitted by the Foundation’s scientific committee to the Pontiff, the Holy Father wishes to highlight the work of these men and women – Catholic and non-Catholic – who with their life of study have placed themselves fully at the service of the Gospel, making it comprehensible to their contemporaries.

This is because, as we read again in Evangelii Gaudium, “proclaiming the Gospel message to different cultures also involves proclaiming it to professional, scientific and academic circles”.

---

The Vatican did put out a story today about JMB's latest gabfest at 30,000 feet - not a transcript, but almost the full answers to the main questions asked. After 'Who am I to judge?-2' (in its variant 'Who are we to judge?) about gays, perhaps the more attention-getting answer was about Martin Luther and the Reformation.

---

A German radio reporter asked the Pope about the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and whether the moment had arrived to recognise not only its errors but also its gifts.

“I believe that Martin Luther’s intentions were not mistaken”, Francis replied. [Of course, he had good intentions - so does everyone who wants 'reforms'. But obviously he decided he could only do that by breaking away from the Church. Does JMB not even fault him for the schism he created - the second Great Schism in the Church after the Orthodox Churches broke off in 1045?]

“He was a reformer. Perhaps some methods were not correct, but at that time … the Church was not exactly a model to imitate. There was corruption in the Church, worldliness, attachment to money, to power, and for this reason he protested. He was intelligent and took a step forward, justifying what he did. [He really thinks the Reformation was 'a step forward'? By whom and for whom? Not for the Church, certainly! And that Luther 'justified' what he did?]

"And today Lutherans and Catholics, Protestants, we all agree on the doctrine of justification. On this very important point he was not mistaken. He made a medicine for the Church, [What medicine?!?! He caused a major amputation in the Church, that led others over the next several decades to chop off a bit more each time from the Church!]

"But then this medicine consolidated into a state of things, into a state of a discipline, into a way of believing, into a way of doing, a form of liturgy. He was not alone: there was Zwingli, there was Calvin, each one of them different, and who was behind each one? The princes, ‘cuius region eius religio’ [a saying that means every region adopted the religion of its leader] [But the princes - he means the German princes of the time - did not start their own religions (although Henry VIII did in England) - they did pick and choose among the new protestant 'faiths' over the Roman Catholic Church.]

"We must place ourselves in the history of that time. It is a history that is not easy to understand. [So he has a historical as well as a theological justification for Luther's schism. Are we hearing in preview what he is going to say in Lund, Sweden, when he helps open the fifth centenary year of Luther's Schism? The Church was bad, Luther was right, Protestantism 'prospered' (forget that too many of them thought they could each set up their own sect), and here they are today, 900 million strong or thereabouts, and projected to outnumber Catholics by 2050.]

"Then things moved forward, [What moved forward? That since 1517, the Protestant world has given rise to some 30,000 denominations (there are said to be 9,000 Protestant denominations but another 21,000 'independent' Christian non-Catholic denominations)? To all of which he says, "Stay as you are, where you are. We all have different ways of reaching Jesus, that's all". By everything he says and does, JMB has been spitting at DOMINUS IESUS!]] and today the dialogue is very good. [Ah yes, DIALOG! To which ecumenism has been reduced! Does JMB think he can dialog away the fact that Protestants do not believe in Trans-substantiation, to name just the most outstanding difference in their beliefs and ours? But, as we know, he would have no qualms about letting a Lutheran receive Catholic communion! So who cares about Trans-substantiation? No big deal! Right?]

"The document on justification is, I think, one of the richest and most profound ecumenical documents in the world. There are divisions, but these also depend on the Churches. … Diversity is perhaps what hurt all of us so badly [DUH!] and today we seek to take up the path of encountering each other after 500 years.

"I think that we have to pray together. Prayer is important for this. Second, we must work together for the poor, for the persecuted, for many people, for refugees, for the many who suffer; to work together and pray together and the theologians who study together. But this is a long road, very long.

[And does he think that concelebrating the fifth centenary of the Protestant Schism will be a shortcut in any way? I don't think even the most 'open' minds at Vatican II ever thought a pope would have such a distorted idea of ecumenism! "Hey, thanks for splintering Christianity into so many shards!" What, aside from gaining some transient headlines and fleeting praise does he think will come out of his self-indulgent exercise in brown-nosing the Protestants?]

"One time jokingly I said: ‘I know when the day of full unity will come’ – ‘when?’ – ‘the day after the Son of Man comes’, because we do not know...

"The Holy Spirit will give us this grace, but in the meantime, praying, loving each other and working together, especially for the poor, for people who suffer and for peace, and many other things, against the exploitation of people, and many things for which we can be working together”.

[And I wish he would name just one concrete major worldwide initiative undertaken or that could be undertaken by Catholics and Protestants together 'for world peace and to end world hunger'. BTW, we can't get worse than having a pope whose goals sound as meaningless and even silly, as when the same words are said by a beauty contestant! Utopia is not a goal, it's pigs-will-fly never-going-to-happen madness.]

---

Sorry to have had such a late start on this day of all days!



OH BLESSED DAY!
To hear Benedict XVI speak in public
for the first time since February 28, 2013



And how typically Benedict XVI were his extemporaneous words! 'Print-ready' as his words have always been...

The Vatican has provided the texts of the addresses delivered today at the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace for a ceremony to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger's priestly ordination tomorrow, Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Pope Francis spoke, as well as Cardinal Angelo Sodano, in behalf of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, who presented the emeritus Pope with the book especially published simultaneously in 5 languages to commemorate this extraordinary anniversary.




Here first is Benedict XVI, even if he spoke last:

---

Holy Father, dear brothers,

Sixty-five years ago, a brother priest who was ordained with men decided to write on the commemorative card of his first Mass - apart from his name and the date - only one word, in Greek: Eucharistomen*, convinces that this word, in its many dimensions, says all that could be said on that occasion.

[*Eucharistomen means "Let us give thanks", thus, Eucharistia, Eucharist=Thanksgiving.]

'Eucharistomen' expresses human gratitude - thanks to everyone.

Thanks above all to you, Holy Father! Your goodness, from the first moment of your election, and in every moment of my life here, has struck me, has truly reached deep within me. More than the Vatican Gardens with their beauty, your goodness is the place I inhabit - I feel protected.

Thank you also for your words of thanks, for everything. We hope that you may go forward with all of us on the way of Divine Mercy, showing the way of Jesus, towards Jesus, towards God.

Thank you also, Your Eminence (Cardinal Sodano), for your words which have truly touched my heart: Cor ad cor loquitur [Heart speaking to heart], you made present both the day of my priestly ordination, as well as my visit to Freising in 2006, when I relived it. I can only say that with these words you interpreted the essence of my view of the priesthood, of how I function.

I am grateful for the bond of friendship between us that has continued for some time, from roof to roof, as it were - almost palpably present and tangible. [The reference is to the fact that their retirement homes are 'rooftops apart' within the Vatican Gardens.]

Thank you, Cardinal Müller, for the work you have done in presenting my texts on the priesthood, texts in which I sought to help my brother priests enter always anew into the mystery that the Lord has given to our hands.

“Eucharistomen”! On that occasion, my friend [Rupert] Berger wished to evoke not just the dimension of human gratitude, but of course, to the more profound word it hides which appears in liturgy, in Scripture, in the words "Gratias agens benedixit fregit deditque" ["giving thanks to thee, blessed it, broke it and gave it (to his disciples"].

“Eucharistomen” brings us back to the reality of that thanks giving, the new dimension that Christ gave it. He had transformed the cross, suffering, all the evils of the world, into a thanksgiving and therefore a blessing.

Thus, fundamentally, he trans-substantiated life and the world, and he gave us - and gives us every day - the Bread of true life which triumphs over the world, thanks to the power of his love.

In the end, we wish to be included in the Lord's 'thanksgiving, so that we may truly receive a new life and help in the trans-substantiation of the world - that it may be a world not of death but of life, a world in which love has triumphed over death.

My thanks to all of you. May the Lord bless us all.
Thank you, Holy Father.

---

Unfortunately, Mons. Georg Ratzinger did not come to Rome for this anniversary. But Fr. Berger, the third man in the well-known photograph taken outside the Cathedral of Freising after the ordination, must surely be very touched to have been remembered by his friend the way he was today!



Before proceeding to the other translations, here is the AP report - which is what most of the world will learn about the event. Unfortunately, its title and the conclusion it draws in the lead paragraph are misleading, reading into Benedict XVI's words an 'endorsement' where, IMHO, none was intended, as any objective reading of his words will bear out. But since the AP account does not contain the full text of what Benedict said, readers will never know otherwise.

Indeed, what struck me was that the words he addressed to the Pope were a very personal, extraordinary and most beautifully expressed appreciation of Francis's goodness towards him, not about the Pontificate at all.

Retired pope endorses
successor's ministry
By NICOLE WINFIELD


VATICAN CITY, June 28, 2016 (AP) — Retired Pope Benedict XVI endorsed Pope Francis’s mercy-filled ministry Tuesday during an unprecedented Vatican ceremony featuring a reigning pope honoring a retired one on the 65th anniversary of his ordination as a priest.

The ceremony in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace served in part to show continuity from Benedict to Francis amid continued nostalgia from some conservatives for Benedict’s tradition-minded papacy.

Francis had invited the entire Vatican Curia, or bureaucracy, to celebrate Benedict’s anniversary, and prelates turned out in force for the rare occasion of being able to greet each man in white.

While Francis presided, it was Benedict who stole the show with an off-the-cuff, mini-theology lesson sprinkled with Greek and Latin that showed that the mind of the German theologian is still going strong at 89.

In it, Benedict thanked Francis for letting him live out his final years in the beauty of the Vatican gardens, where he said he felt “protected.”

“Thank you, Holy Father, for your goodness, which from the first moment of your election has struck every day of my life,” Benedict said, speaking without notes. “We hope that you can go forward with all of us on this path of divine mercy, showing us the path of Jesus toward God.”

Benedict’s vote of confidence may help quell conservative criticism of the current pope’s loose theology, lack of attention to liturgy and emphasis on mercy over morals.

Francis has recently dismissed new questions about the implications of Benedict’s resignation by insisting that there is only one pope — himself — and that Benedict had pledged his obedience to him on the day he resigned.

He told reporters this weekend he felt that Benedict “had my back” ['watching over my shoulder' was the Italian idiom he used] and was continuing to help the church through his prayers. He added he had heard that Benedict had even chastised some nostalgic faithful who were complaining about the “new pope.”

During Tuesday’s ceremony, Francis entered the Clementine Hall to applause from the gathered cardinals and went straight to embrace Benedict, who stood up and removed his white skullcap in a sign of deference. They embraced several more times during the ceremony.

Benedict listened intently as Francis addressed him — as “Your Holiness” — lauding his 65 years of service to the church and saying his decision to retire to a life of quiet prayer to a small monastery in the Vatican gardens was a very “Franciscan” thing to do.

The monastery “is nothing like those forgotten corners where today’s ‘throwaway culture’ tends to put those who lose their strength with age,” Francis said. “Quite the contrary!”

The monastery, the pope said, is similar to the Porziuncola, the small chapel in Assisi where his namesake St. Francis founded his order and then spent his dying days.

The Fondazione Vaticana JR/B16 has a full account of the ceremony, which I will translate along with the three other addresses.

From the Fondazione's Facebook page, other videoclips of the event:

Benedict arrives at Sala Clementina
www.facebook.com/566735950151496/videos/635172829974474/

Pope Francis arrives
www.facebook.com/566735950151496/videos/635172829974474/

I have to find a link to the full video of the event.

What I most regret - and detest - about the misleading headlines is that anti-Benedict 'traditionalists' (and there are quite a few of them, including those who have a following) will use them to claim that Benedict is thereby endorsing all the errors and heterodoxies that have marked his successor's pontificate so far. This will only reinforce the wrong impression already given by the headlines.

Textually, this is all he said:

---

We hope that you may go forward with all of us on the way of Divine Mercy, showing the way of Jesus, towards Jesus, towards God.

---

While he was almost profuse in his words of appreciation for Francis's personal treatment of him, I think he was very careful in his choice of words to avoid giving the impression of an endorsement of his Pontificate in any way.

He expresses a hope that it may continue along 'the path of 'Divine Mercy' where Francis almost always only says 'mercy' (even the Holy Year we are observing is not called 'Year of Divine Mercy' but 'Year of Mercy'), often meaning Francis's personal mercy and 'pastoral mercy' in general, as well as human mercy for one another - rather than Divine Mercy.

Indeed, in what is a most subtle but nonetheless emphatic way, Benedict XVI gave a subliminal message that could not be missed by any who has been following what Pope Francis has been saying recently about Martin Luther.

Benedict XVI's repeated use of the word trans-substantiation - applied not just to what happens in every Mass but also to its eventual implications in the world - appears a reminder (if not a rebuke) to his successor that the greatest distinction between the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches Luther spawned is that the latter do not believe in the Trans-substantiation that takes place at the Consecration. (In fact, except for the Anglicans, I don't think any Protestant service recreates that moment at all!).

As if he was saying, "So enough already about this Luther revisionism!" (and the attendant 'concelebration' of the Schism by the church of Bergoglio).

Fisking JMB's remarks on the flight from Armenia the other day, one of my remarks had been this:

---

Ah yes, DIALOG! To which ecumenism has been reduced! Does JMB think he can dialog away the fact that Protestants do not believe in Trans-substantiation, to name just the most outstanding difference in their beliefs and ours? But, as we know, he would have no qualms about letting a Lutheran receive Catholic communion! So who cares about Trans-substantiation? No big deal! Right?]

---

P.S. Serendipitously - or maybe, by design - Cardinal Mueller's introduction to the book of homilies by Joseph Ratzingfer/Benedict XVI on the priesthood that has been published for the occasion touches on yet another fundamental divergence of Protestantism from the Church - its dismissal of the sacramental priesthood.

If only for that, JMB has been very wrong in addressing any and all Protestant bishops as 'Brother Bishop' - Protestant bishops are not just not sacramental priests, they also do not have any apostolic succession...

Joseph Ratzinger 65 years later
'And so on the Catholic priesthood fell the fury of Protestant criticism.'
For the anniversary of the priestly ordination of the future Benedict XVI, Cardinal Müller
recounts his unyielding resistance to the Protestant assault on the sacramental priesthood
by Sandro Magister


ROME, June 28, 2016 – “At the moment in which the elderly archbishop imposed his hands on me, a little bird - perhaps it was a skylark - raised itself up from the main altar of the cathedral and intoned a joyous little song. For me it was as if a voice were saying to me from on high: this is well, you are on the right path.”

This comes from the autobiography of Joseph Ratzinger (MILESTONES, 1977, published on the occasion of his 50th birthday), recalling his ordination to the priesthood, which took place 65 years ago, on June 29, 1951, feast of Saints Peter and Paul, in the cathedral of Freising and at the hand of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber.

Celebrating the commemoration with the pope emeritus today, in the Sala Clementina, is also Pope Francis.

For the occasion, the friends of Joseph Ratzinger put together a book that collects 43 of his homilies on the priesthood, with a preface by Francis himself, previewed a few days ago by “la Repubblica” and by “L'Osservatore Romano":

The book is being published contemporaneously in six languages: in Italy by Cantagalli, in the United States by Ignatius Press, in Germany by Herder, in France by Parole et Silence, in Spain by Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, in Poland by the Catholic University of Lublin.

The following passage is taken from the introduction written by Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and curator of Ratzinger’s opera omnia.

At the anniversary of the priestly ordination of the future Benedict XVI, the Cardinal recounts his unyielding resistance to Luther’s followers.


Catholic priesthood and Protestant temptation
by Gerhard L. Müller
Excerpt from his Introduction to
'DIE LIEBE GOTTES LEHREN UND LERNEN'

...Vatican Council II sought to reopen a new path to the authentic understanding of the identity of the priesthood. So why in the world did there come, just after the Council, a crisis in its identity comparable historically only to the consequences of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century?

I am thinking of the crisis in the teaching of the priesthood that took place during the Protestant Reformation, a crisis on the dogmatic level, by which the priest was reduced to a mere representative of the community, through an elimination of the essential difference between the ordained priesthood and the common one of all the faithful.

And then of the existential and spiritual crisis that took place in the second half of the 20th century, which in chronological terms exploded after Vatican Council II - but certainly not because of the Council - the consequences of which we are still suffering from today.

Joseph Ratzinger highlights with great acumen that, wherever the dogmatic foundation of the Catholic priesthood declines, not only does there dry up that spring from which one can in fact drink of a life of following after Christ, but there also disappears the motivation that introduces both a reasonable comprehension of renouncing marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (cf. Mt 19:12), and of celibacy as an eschatological sign of the world of God that is to come, a sign to be lived with the power of the Holy Spirit, in gladness and certainty.

If the symbolic relationship that belongs to the nature of the priesthood is obscured, priestly celibacy becomes the wreckage of a past hostile to corporeality and is singled out and fought as the only cause of the shortage of priests.

Not least, there also disappears the obviousness of the fact that, for the magisterium and the practice of the Church, the sacrament of Orders must be administered only to men. An office conceived of in functional terms, in the Church, is exposed to the suspicion of legitimizing a dominion when instead it should be founded and limited in a democratic sense.

The crisis of the priesthood in the Western world, in recent decades, is also the result of a radical disorientation of Christian identity in the face of a philosophy that transfers to the world itself the deepest meaning and ultimate end of history and of every human existence, thus depriving it of the transcendent horizon and of the eschatological perspective.

Waiting for everything to come from God and founding all of one’s life on God, who has given us all in Christ: this and only this can be the logic of a choice of life that, in the complete donation of self, sets out on the path of following after Jesus, participating in his mission as Savior of the world, a mission that he carries out in suffering and in the cross, and that He unavoidably revealed through his Resurrection from the dead.

But at the root of this crisis in the priesthood there are also intra-ecclesial factors that must be emphasized. As he shows in his first statements, Joseph Ratzinger possessed right from the beginning a lively sensitivity in perceiving immediately those tremors with which the earthquake was announced: and this above all in the openness, on the part of many Catholic circles, to the Protestant exegesis in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s.

Often, on the Catholic side, there was no realization of the biased views underlying the exegesis unleashed by the Reformation. And so on the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church there fell the fury of criticism of the ministerial priesthood, on the presumption that this does not have a biblical foundation.

The sacramental priesthood, entirely centered on the Eucharistic sacrifice - as had been affirmed at the Council of Trent - at first glance did not seem to be biblically based, either from the terminological point of view or from that which concerns the particular prerogatives of the priest with respect to the laity, especially when it comes to the power to consecrate.

The radical critique of worship - and with it the overcoming, which was the aim, of a priesthood limited to the claimed function of mediation - seemed to reduce the scope of priestly mediation in the Church.

The Reformation attacked the sacramental priesthood because, it was maintained, this would bring into question the unicity of the high priesthood of Christ (on the basis of the Letter to the Hebrews) and would marginalize the universal priesthood of all the faithful (according to 1 Pt 2:5).

To this critique was added, finally, the modern idea of the autonomy of the subject, with the individualistic practice that results from it, which looks with suspicion upon any exercise of authority.

What theological vision did this unleash?

On the one hand it can be observed that Jesus, from a sociological-religious point of view, was not a priest with ceremonial functions and therefore - to use an anachronistic formulation - he was a layman.

On the other hand, on the basis of the fact that in the New Testament, for the services and ministers, no sacred terminology is adopted but rather designations that are maintained to be profane, it seemed that one could consider demonstrated as inadequate the transformation - in the early Church, starting in the 3rd century - of those who carried out mere “functions” within the community into the improper holders of a new ceremonial priesthood.

Joseph Ratzinger subjects to detailed critical examination, in its turn, the historical criticism imprinted on Protestant theology and does so by distinguishing philosophical and theological prejudices from the use of the historical method.

In this way, he succeeds in demonstrating that with the accomplishments of modern biblical exegesis and a precise analysis of historical-dogmatic development one can arrive in a very well-founded way at the dogmatic statements produced above all at the Councils of Florence, Trent, and Vatican II.

That which Jesus means for the relationship of all men and of the whole of creation with God - therefore the recognition of Christ as Redeemer and universal Mediator of salvation, developed in the Letter to the Hebrews by means of the category of “High Priest” (Archiereus) - is never made to depend, as a condition, on his belonging to the Levitical priesthood.

The foundation of the being and mission of Jesus resides instead in his coming from the Father, from that house and that temple in which he dwells and must be (cf. Lk 2:49). It is the divinity of the Word that makes Jesus, in the human nature that he assumed, the one true Teacher, Shepherd, Priest, Mediator, and Redeemer.

He makes participants in this consecration and mission of his through the call of the Twelve. From them arises the circle of the apostles who found the mission of the Church in history as a dimension essential to the ecclesial nature. They transmit their power to the heads and pastors of the universal and particular Church, who operate on the local and supra-local level...

Pope Francis's greeting
to Benedict XVI
June 28, 2016

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Holiness,
Today we celebrate the story of a call initiated 65 years ago with your priestly ordination in the Cathedral of Freising on June 29, 1951.

But what is the fundamental note that runs through this long story and which has increasingly beee dominant from that beginning up to our day?

In one of the so many beautiful pages that you have dedicated to the priesthood, you underscore how, at the moment of the definitive call to Simon, Jesus, looking at him, asked him just one thing: "Do you love me?"

How beautiful and true this is! You tell us, the Lord based our pastoring on that "Do you love me?", because he can pasture his sheep through us only if we love the Lord. [And Peter answers:] "Lord, you know everything. You know I love you" (cfr Jn 21,15-19).

This is the note that dominates a whole life spent in priestly service and in theology, which you have defined, not by chance, as 'the search for the beloved'.

This is what you have always borne witness to and continue to do so today: that the decisive thing in our days, rain or shine, the only thing after which everything else will follow, is that the Lord be truly present, that we desire him, that interiorly we are close to him, that we love him, that we truly believe profoundly in him, and that believing, we truly love him.

It is this love for him that fills our hearts. It is this belief that makes us walk securely and serenely over water, even in the midst of a storm, exactly as it was with Peter.

This love and this belief allow us to look at the future not with fear or nostalgia, but with joy, even in the advanced years of our life.

Thus, living and bearing witness this unique and truly decisive thing today in such an intense and luminous way - with your regard and your heart turned to God - you, Holiness, continue to serve the Church; you have not stopped contributing with vigor and wisdom to her growth.

And you do so from that little monastery Mater Ecclesiae in the Vatican which is anything but one of those forgotten corners in which a throwaway culture tends to relegate persons when their strength diminishes with age. It is the complete opposite.

And allow your successor, who has chosen to call himself Francis, to say so. St. Francis's spiritual journey began in San Damiano, but the place he truly loved, the pulsing heart of the Franciscan order, the place where he had founded it and where in the end he gave up his life to God, was the Porziuncola, the 'little portion', a nook beside the Mother of the Church [it is located in the Basilica of Santa Maria degl'Angeli]. Beside Mary who, for her faith which was so firm and for a life entirely for the love and in the love of the Lord, all generations call Blessed.

Thus, Providence has willed that you, dear Brother, now live in a place that one might call 'Franciscan', from which emanates a tranquillity, a peace, a force, a confidence, a maturity, a faith, a dedication and a fidelity that do me so much good, and which give so much strength to me and to the whole Church.

Allow me also to say that you yourself bring us a healthy and joyous sense of humor.

The wish with which I wish to conclude is therefore a wish I address to you, as well as to all of us and the entire Church: that you, Holiness, may continue to feel the hand of the merciful God who supports you; that you may continue to experience and bear witness to the love of God; and that with Peter and Paul, you may continue to exult with great joy as you journey on towards the goal of faith! (cfr 1 Pt 1,8-9; 2 Tm 4,6-8)

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Cardinal Mueller's tribute

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Holy Father,
It is a great honor to be able to participate at this festive occasion which you wished to mark the joyful 65th anniversary of the priestly ordination of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI.

A few weeks ago, for the Holy Year participation of priests and seminarians, you yourself recalled to the center of our reflections the essence of the priest's mission: to allow ourselves to recreate in us the heart of God's mercy so that we ourselves would be able to help men allow him to form their hearts.

You cited the great French writer Georges Bernanos, who, in his novel The Diary of a Country Priest, said joy is the immense gift that the Church is called on to offer the world: above all the joy of the announcement that God's forgiveness already awaits our sins.

'Announcement; and 'joy' are words that are at the heart of the Gospel. They are also dominant notes that belong to your Magisterium as they do that of your predecessor.

Dear Emeritus Pope, for many years you kept reminding us - with words as well as with your life - that this joy comes first of all from trustfully abandoning ourselves to that mysterious and good plan that the Risen Christ wishes to fulfill in each of us.

The joy of the Gospel is, above all, his. It is a gift of the Lord, it comes from his heart, he who has compassion for our nothingness and loves us, indeed re-creates us with his eternal love.

It is this love that is referred to in the title of the book published today in five languages which we have the honor to offer you on this joyful occasion: Die Liebe Gottes Lehren und Lernen - to teach and to learn the love of God.



Basically, it says it all: that we are called to teach that which we, in turn, have learned from the love of God. Sixty five years ago, you were consecrated to this love by the seal of priesthood, along with your brother Georg, on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul.

In the words of Saint Irenaeus, whom we commemorate today, the two princes of the Apostles are the apostolic foundation of the Roman Church. And that feast prefigured, so to speak, the essential features of your mission: to announce the Word of God, as Paul did, and to confirm your brothers in the faith, as Peter did.

Time subsequently revealed in wondrous ways what had been mysteriously pre-contained in that beginning.

Dear Emeritus Pope, we are grateful to have been able to follow for many years, together with you, what the Lord has been making real through your priestly action. Now we ask with all our heart that you may bring to fulfillment what he has worked in you which has already borne abundant fruit among us.

Thanks once again, Holiness, for everything. Thank you from the heart.

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Cardinal Sodano's tribute:
A time for gratitude

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Venerated and dear Pope Francis,
today on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the priesthood of yopur beloved predecessor, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, you wished to render him a dutiful tribute in the name of the whole Holy Church, which has benefited for 65 years from his pastoral ministry, first as a priest, then successively as Archbishop of Munich-Freising and then Bishop of Rome, “mater et caput omnium ecclesiarum” (mother and head of all churches).

Holy Father, allow me also to present our dear celebrant with the tribute of his brother cardinals, as the words of Psalm 133 pour out from my heart, “Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum” (Behold how good and pleasant it is to live as brothers ion unity).

Yes, at this moment, we are living an atmosphere of great spiritual joy and intense fraternity in the common bond of service to the Holy Church of Christ.

Dear and venerated emeritus Pope, on that far-off June 29 of 1951, on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, you received priestly ordination from the hands of the late Cardinal Faulhaber, along with your brother Georg and 38 others. It was a great feast for your beloved Bavarian Archdiocese.

You wished to recount to us the sentiments you felt on that day when you returned as Successor of Peter to your dear Archdiocese in September 2006. Celebrating Holy Mass in the Cathedral of Freising, where your ordination had taken place, you re-evoked for the many priests who were present the feeling that had pervaded your heart then.

I too was present under the vaults of that stupendous Cathedral and I recall very well the emotion with which you spoke to the priests who were there. These days, I have re-read your homily and I seemed to hear again the words that came from your heart then. In the Italian translation, you said:

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When I was prostrate on the ground as though wrapped in the Litany of all the Saints, I became aware that on this road we are not alone - that the great assembly of the saints are walking with us and that the saints who still live, the faithful of today and tomorrow, support and accompany us.

Then came the imposition of hands, and when Cardinal Faulhaber said to us, «Jam non dico vos servos, sed amicos» (I don't call you servants any more but friends), then I experienced priestly ordination as an initiation into the community of the friends of Jesus, who have been called to be with him and to announce his message (cfr. L’Osservatore Romano, Sept. 16, 2006)

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Then you described the nature of this message that priests are called on to spread in the world, synthesizing it in two phrases: the priest should bring to men of today "the Light of God and the Love of God", or to use your words in German, the priest should bring men Gottes Licht und Gottes Liebe”.

Moreover, in your homily, you added an urgent invitation to all the priests present, namely to bring to the world the Light and Love of Christ with the same disposition Christ had, or to use your words, with the same Gesinnung Jesu Christi.

It was the concept expressed by the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Philippians (2,5-8). This 'attitude' of Christ therefore should include a great love for those who are distant, for the poor, the sick, the old and the young.

Reading your words today, they seem to anticipate the Magisterium of Pope Francis who always asks us to go out towards those who suffer most, bringing them our brotherly love. This is, moreover, the message of the Holy Year of Mercy that we are celebrating.

Venerated and dear Pope emeritus, on the happy anniversary of that far-off day 65 years ago, the College of Cardinals, together with Pope Francis, are around you to thank you for your long and generous service to the Church.

At the same time, we ask you to continue in another form your long ministry as you promised us on February 24, 2013, after having announced your decision to leave the Barque of Peter for new hands to steer. At that time you told us:

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The Lord calls me to climb the mountain, to dedicate myself even more to prayer and meditation. But this does not mean abandoning the Church. On the contrary, if God asks this of me, it is so that I may continue to serve him with the same dedication and the same love as I have sought to do till now, but in a way more suited to my age and to my capabilities (cfr. Insegnamenti di Benedetto XVI, vol. IX, pag. 263).

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We are happy for that promise, certain that you will always be near us with your prayer and with your affection.

Finally, we say with a typical wish from your Bavarian homeland: “Behüt’s Sie Gott”! May God watch over you!

Meanwhile, the Church of Rome, under the leadership of Pope Francis, the venerated Successor that Providence has given us, will continue with renewed vigor her journey in history, in the service of the Christian community and of all mankind.

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First, the full video - about one hour, 5 minutes - of the event at Sala Clementina yesterday.


Father De Souza has given us an unusual tribute piece...


An anniversary for Joseph Ratzinger -
and reflections of an unexpected
encounter with the Pope Emeritus
BY FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA, S.J.

June 29, 2016

On June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI celebrates the 65th anniversary of his priestly ordination.

It will be a day of pairs: the twin princes of the apostles — Peter and Paul; the two priests marking 65 years, as Benedict XVI will be joined by his older brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, also ordained on the same day; and the celebration in the Vatican on the vigil of the feast, June 28, included two “popes,” as it were, the Pope and the pope emeritus, as Pope Francis paid tribute to his predecessor.

What is there to say on such an occasion? Too much, really, for a short reflection, as Joseph Ratzinger is the greatest Catholic theologian of his generation and perhaps the only man who could have immediately succeeded the great John Paul II.

Perhaps, then, I might share a memory instead, one that involves another pair — the protagonists of that extraordinary 35-year pontificate in two acts, John Paul and Benedict.

In 2015, for our annual St. John Fisher Dinner in Kingston, Canada, I wanted to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of John Paul and the election of Benedict. I commissioned an original portrait by Canada’s leading portrait artist, Cyril Leeper, who often paints cardinals and bishops, as well as university chancellors and, recently, the chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court.

I asked him to portray the moment during John Paul’s inaugural Mass on Oct. 22, 1978, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger offered his homage to the new Pope. For our portrait, Leeper used the conté style of drawing, rather than an oil painting.



The scene that Leeper depicted marked a historic moment in the life of the Church — the date that would become St. John Paul’s feast day and upon which he exhorted us to “Be not afraid!” In turn, Benedict XVI interpreted those words in his own inaugural homily of April 24, 2005, addressing them to young people.

In our mission on campus, we never cease quoting Benedict’s assurance that “nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing” is lost when we allow Christ into our lives.

I had been invited to address a clergy conference in Rome in January 2015 and had the idea of showing the portrait to the pope emeritus, asking him to bless it. I wrote in advance, but was informed that it would not be possible to meet Benedict XVI. So who would bless it?

Cardinal Raymond Burke attended the talk I gave during the conference, and so I asked if he might be willing to do so, which he kindly agreed to do after the closing Mass of the conference in St. Peter’s Basilica. He did so with great graciousness, in a lovely little “chapel of the canons” just off the main sacristy of St. Peter’s.

Neither Cardinal Burke nor I had seen it before, so that added a special grace to the portrait blessing. The Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, Dennis Savoie, former deputy supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, and his wife came for the Mass, so they were able to join us for the blessing, which was suitable, as he was given a copy of the portrait, which now hangs in his residence. I was most pleased at how everything had turned out.

Then — the extraordinary: A last-minute call came from the papal household, inviting me to meet Pope Emeritus Benedict that afternoon.

I invited Father Anthony Denton, my Australian friend from our days together as seminarians in Rome, to join me, as his Italian is better than mine, and he was also present at the clergy conference.

We were taken up to the Lourdes Grotto in the Vatican Gardens at 4pm, and after a short wait, Benedict came to the end of his daily afternoon walk. He was quite frail, was using a walker and was wrapped up in a warm white jacket, white scarf around his neck and an
insulated white cap with a long brim and flaps down over the ears.

We spoke in Italian, and he spoke very quietly. I was rather nervous, you can imagine, about my Italian in such a setting, but I was able to express myself adequately, if not well! Anthony’s Italian is much better than mine, so once or twice he was able to clarify a question that I did not understand properly. [Dear Fr. De Souza, you could have spoken to him in English! Or, in your excitement, did you forget he speaks English quite well? His extemporaneous words in St. Patrick's Cathedral in April 2008 to thank the gathering for their good wishes on the third anniversary of his election as Pope are among the most beautiful and touching words he has said about his Petrine ministry! And as cardinal, he had that famous hour-long interview with Raymond Arroyo for EWTN.]

Benedict was accompanied by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his secretary, and his older brother, Msgr. Georg, who was in a motorized wheelchair. We greeted the pope emeritus and introduced ourselves, and the Holy Father asked Father Denton about his graduate studies.

In due course, I told him that I was a university chaplain in Canada and showed him the portrait of St. John Paul II and him. He immediately recognized it as their embrace from the Oct. 22, 1978, Mass at which the saintly Pope began his pontificate with the famous “Be Not Afraid — Open Wide the Doors to Christ” homily.

He pronounced it “molto bello,” and then I explained the various symbols. When I told him that the window of the apostolic palace was a reference to the “window of the Father’s house” from his funeral homily for St. John Paul II, he looked at me with a small smile, recalling what must have been one of the more profound moments of his own life. He asked about the artist.

I told him that the image would hang in our chapel, and he blessed the image with a discreet Sign of the Cross, typical of the reserved gestures that marked his liturgical style.

I then thanked him for all his service to the Church and promised our prayers for his continued service, to which he rather firmly responded “Si, in un’altra forma” (“Yes, in another form”), lest there be any confusion about how he would serve the Church.

“Thank you for all you have given us — in your teachings, in the liturgy …” Father Denton said. Benedict interrupted him and responded immediately, “Il Signore ha dato; il Signore ha dato. … Tutti ha dato” (“The Lord has given; the Lord has given. … He has given everything”).

It was a very beautiful and moving meeting for both Father Anthony and me. We spent about 10 minutes with Benedict. We then both greeted Msgr. Georg, but he did not respond — perhaps he could not hear us, as he was quite well-wrapped up, too. The Ratzinger brothers were feeling the January chill.

After Benedict left — in a very elegant white golf cart, with tan leather seats and covered with a glass top like a miniature popemobile — the guard told us we could stay, so we prayed the Rosary at the grotto together for Pope Benedict and for Pope Francis, commending them both to the intercession of the Blessed Mother and St. John Paul.

It was a beautiful encounter with a beautiful and great soul — a priestly soul living out the evening of a life in which great things were accomplished for God and his Church.

Of course, I had to google to find the Cyril Leeper portrait online (reproduced above) - where it turned up in a post by Fr. De Souza in April 2015 - one I had completely missed (it came out in a Canadian Catholic newspaper), but have now felicitously recovered for this occasion:

The great collaboration
BY FR. RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA
THE CATHOLIC REGISTER
April 16, 2015

This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, a treasure for the Church in his long theological service as a scholar, his more than 20 years at the side of St. John Paul II as the chief lieutenant of the signal pontificate of our era, his eight years as perhaps the clearest and most profound papal preacher and writer of our time, and finally for the courage and humility of his abdication.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the death of John Paul and the election of Benedict, I commissioned a portrait to be done by Cyril Leeper, one of Canada’s leading portrait artists and a Catholic of deep faith and love for the Church.

I asked Mr. Leeper to depict the famous scene on Oct. 22, 1978, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger embraced Pope John Paul II at the latter’s inaugural Mass, during which John Paul preached his famous “Be Not Afraid” homily.

Ten years ago, Benedict’s inaugural homily returned to that “Be Not Afraid,” urging all of us not to be afraid to put Christ at the centre of our lives. That encounter between the Polish pope and the German cardinal would determine in many ways the life of the universal Church for the next 35 years.

The portrait was unveiled last month in Kingston, and now hangs in our chaplaincy chapel.

In January this year, I took Mr. Leeper’s image to Rome, a copy of which was given to the Canadian ambassador to the Holy See. I had written to the papal household telling them of the project and asking to show the image to Pope Emeritus Benedict. It was a great blessing to be granted an audience with Benedict, who of course immediately recognized the image, pronounced it “molto bello” and blessed it for our use.

I asked Mr. Leeper to include four special symbols in the portrait. The first is at the bottom, a book representing the documents of Vatican II, at which both John Paul and Benedict were present, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which remains their greatest collaboration.

Second is the window of the papal study in the Apostolic Palace, where John Paul blessed the Church on his last Easter Sunday, unable to speak. During his funeral homily, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke with great emotion of “our beloved Holy Father at the window of the Father’s house.”

Third, from the window are the red and white rays of Divine Mercy, which Cardinal Ratzinger preached was the heart of John Paul’s pontificate.

Fourth, the rays stretch out from the window down toward barbed wire wrapped around the papal cathedra, a symbol of Auschwitz. In the age of the wickedness of Auschwitz, God sent the Church first a Polish pope and then a German pope. The answer to the wickedness in the world, St. John Paul taught, was divine mercy.

[Unfortunately, the illustration for this article - the portrait reproduced above - appears to have been cropped because we do not see the books and the Auschwitz imagery described by Fr De Souza painted at the bottom of the portrait... May be I will find an uncropped image...]

The great collaboration of John Paul and Ratzinger, perhaps unprecedented in the history of the papacy, is the enduring gift of Providence to the Church in our time, the fruit of which needs to be harvested for generations to come.

In his inaugural homily on April 24, 2005, Benedict concluded by returning to the inaugural Mass of his saintly predecessor. I never tire of quoting those beautiful words, Benedict interpreting with beauty and depth the words of the one he called “the great Pope John Paul”:

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At this point, my mind goes back to 22 October 1978, when Pope John Paul II began his ministry here in St. Peter’s Square. His words on that occasion constantly echo in my ears: ‘Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!’ …

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to Him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us?

Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful?

Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?

And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No!

Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.

And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and He gives you everything.

When we give ourselves to Him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ — and you will find true life. Amen.

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