Archbishop Gänswein says he cannot explain mystery of Pope Benedict's abdication

Catholic Conclave ^ | 25/02/2023 | CG

[Gillibrand1]

After the interview book by Archbishop Georg Gänswein with Saverio Gaeta, which the Mondadori publishing house began to aggressively market immediately after the death of Pope Benedict XVI, a new book on the late pontiff has now been published in Italy by Orazio La Rocca at San Paolo Edizioni. It is entitled "Ratzinger. La Scelta. Non sono scappato' - I dieci anni di Benedetto XVI da Papa emerito" ("Ratzinger. The Decision. 'I have not fled' - The ten years of Benedict XVI as Pope Emeritus"). Gänswein wrote the author a preface to it last September 2022, which we publish here exclusively in our own translation. Last autumn's word is the first public pronouncement by Pope Benedict's former private secretary after his burial next to the tomb of the Apostle Peter in St Peter's Basilica on 5 January 2023.

[Quentin Quarantino]

Satan is a very clever breed of Pope.

[livius]

I still think it was because they had something on JPII, who was notoriously lax with powerful sex offenders, such as Maciel. Just about the first act of BXVI was to remove Maciel.

I think he didn’t want to ruin the reputation of JPII, who was the first complete media cult-of-personality pope. BXVI felt it would have scandalized too many people whose faith was built entirely on JPII.

JPII was more or less orthodox, but. sometimes less rather than more. However, he had absolutely no control over the underlings. But he seems to have been devoted to Our Lady, and that was probably what people really liked and what BXVI wanted to protect.

Otherwise, he was horrible…a poor and lax administrator with a cult of personality who traveled the world to keep it going. I travel a lot and everywhere that he had been, the JPII Foundation had put up huge statues of him, including one on Malta at St Paul of the Shipwreck that showed him praying there on his visit and occupied the entire altar rail area in from of the cave.

But people would have been scandalized and destroyed had bad news come out about JPII, how he permitted people like McCarrick, Mahoney and Maciel, for example. I think the Sankt Gallen mafia threatened to reveal this unless BXVI, who was beginning to punish them for their crimes, resigned and got out of their way.

[dangus]

JP2 had reduced the scope of the sex scandals by 90% before the media caught wind of it in the early 1990s, and stayed on it after the media dropped it for a decade when it turned out that what was really happening was a takeover by the Satantic left, led by the de-facto “American pope,” Cardinal Bernardin (and his then-poorly known minions, Saul Alinsky, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Before the horrors of leftists like Law and Mahony were revealed in “Sins of the Fathers” by Rod Dreher and the National Review, kicking up the issue again, JP2 had reduced the scope all the way to 97%. (I’m using the data from Gov. Keating-Johns Hopkins study.)

He fought the war against the Satanists by attrition and displacement, as Bernardin commanded a larger following of American intelligentsia than he did, by a shocking margin. Universities representing 99% of Catholic-university students had chosen Satan over Christ at the Land o’Lakes movement.

JP2 had also been slow to act because false claims of homosexuality were also how Russia waged war against Catholicism, and he was hesitant to recognize the truth of the scale of the problem; much of the gains he made against homosexual abuse were actually done through prayers, exorcisms, and combatting leniency towards heresy, which, go figure, happened to also work at combatting Satanism and sex abuse.