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Saturday, April 23, 2022

IS HAVING A POPE EMERITUS LONGER THAN THE CURRENT REIGNING POPE AN ACT OF GOD OR JUST HUMAN FOLLY OR A COMBINATION OF BOTH?


Book focuses on anomaly of two popes, as Benedict XVI turns 95

  The link above is a good article from the Associated Press concerning the issues Pope Francis has experienced by having a high caliber theologian-pope, now emeritus, living so long and at times inserting himself into the drama that is the current papacy with it incoherence. 

On one hand, I feel for Pope Francis, who is the first pope ever to have an emeritus pope living next door and being an emeritus longer than he has been pope. New pastors who have to contend with former pastors hanging around their parish and critiquing the new pastor is bad enough, just imaging an emeritus pope doing the same thing. 

But on the other hand, Pope Francis, from the first hour of his papacy has shown himself to be the anti-John Paul II/Benedict. He appears to many to be not only incoherent in his thought, especially the off-the-cuff way too many comments, but also in his theology. But he certainly seems to have come in to undo everything that Pope John Paul and Benedict have done to clarify what the Church’s true identity is in the aftermath of the confusion caused by competing views of how to implement Vatican II and that progressives in the Church have deified or made into an idol an ecumenical council, namely Vatican II in order to shift Catholics from God to man (humans) in order to social engineer a new Church that worships itself and not God.

And to complicate things for Pope Francis, some of his choices for cardinal have said that Pope Francis desire was to reset the Church to 1978 in order to recover the mentality of that period of the post-Vatican II Church in order to move forward with the chaos of that period in the modern age. 

Thus having an emeritus pope who often has spoken publicly about his sentiments about the current course of the current papacy may be indelicate and unfortunate for the current pope, but is it an act of God too?

How has the God of surprises been present in the extended life of an emeritus pope who many thought only had months to live after his abdication? 

Why at this juncture in Church history, politics and self awareness, has God allowed two popes of basically the same generation but with two different views of how to interpret Vatican II, one correct and one deleterious for the people of God, the Church, to coexist and temper the return to the 1970’s for ideological purposes in order to move forward again?

It must be the God of surprises, as there is no other explanation other than supernatural. 

1 comment:

TJM said...

AP = American Pravda. Read with a huge grain of salt