Posted on 02/11/2013 7:52:09 PM PST by haffast
When the news came out at noon on Monday that Pope Benedict XVI would step down at precisely 8 p.m. on Feb. 28, it came as a surprise to more than just the Catholic faithful and priests around the world. "It was a bolt out of the blue," said Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals.
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But it seems likely that the move also came out of the realization that he no longer had complete control of the church. During the so-called "Vatileaks" affair last year, secret documents and letters were smuggled out of the Vatican over a period of months. They bore witness to intrigue and a shocking power struggle among top Catholic cardinals. Pope Benedict XVI has been unable to put a stop to it. Nor was he able to reform the Vatican Bank following a series of obscure deals apparently aimed at money laundering.
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But Benedict, who holds a Ph.D. in theology, has also had difficulties addressing other issues facing the church. He has proven unable to adequately deal with the seemingly unending series of sex abuse scandals that has shaken Catholic institutions around Europe and the world in recent years. Furthermore, his hard-line stance on faith has done little to slow down the widening cleft between today's believers and the Vatican. Huge numbers have left the church in recent years, particularly in well-off dioceses in Europe and the United States as Rome has become increasingly inflexible in its orthodoxy under Ratzinger's leadership.
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Lombardi added that the pope did not expect that a schism would result from his decision to step down -- hardly the kind of statement that will resole doubts about the crisis now facing a deeply fractious church leadership.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
The African bishops in both the Catholic and Anglican Churches are among the most conservative. I’d take one of them any day of the week over some of the European or American white bishops/Cardinals.
Mr. Bishop sends his regrets.
Ya might haftabe Catholic, tho, to be Pope. Not sure about that.
The talking heads will drive us batty with their nonsensical hope for a “modern” “progressive” Pope that will give them a more likeable and squishy church.
In the end - the new Pope will be catholic, and the MSM will have glum faces and wonder how long it will take to get a modern progressive guy in there.
Technically, you need to be an adult Catholic male. But practically, it has been a long time since something other than a cardinal was selected.
Yep! And don’t you DARE ‘modernize’ Hinduism, Islamism, Buddism, etc. They are “exotic” and “progressive”, donchyano. They’re “kewl”. Just modernize Catholicism and Christianity. They’re “old school”.
Maybe Obama can get the divorce files of the leading defenders.
the reason Ratzinger was so unpopular is that he pressured the bishops to remove the priests. The “memo” cited was taken out of context, and was about a bishop who didn’t follow the procedure for removing a priest (who was no longer in parish work, but the bishop was trying to make a splashy “see I am taking care of it” headline to cover up his own sexual picadillos).
Look at Mahoney: All Catholics knew he was covering up for years, but he was popular in the Mainstream media for backing the “correct” causes, and he had friends in the Vatican bureaucracy that covered up for him. That was an open secret, for when he tried to get the Vatican to “remove” Mother Angelica and let the bishops take over her TV station (after she criticized his bad theology), the Vatican sent an “investigation” to check her out, but John Paul II backed her and stopped it.
The truth is that a lot of career types who are atheists are kicked upstairs into the offices, and many of them are doing their best to remake the church into something more politically correct. .
There’s always the possibility of intellectual decline due to age related reasons.
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