Most of my week last week was taken up with this piece for the Remnant:

Et Tu, Benedict? (Some Final Thoughts on Joseph Ratzinger)

Why did Benedict resign? Why has he sat by passively while the Bergoglians eat the Church? And in a larger sense, why was Kasper never disciplined or removed from the College of Cardinals? Why were all the men whose names we know only too well allowed to continue attacking the Faith and the faithful for so many long years?

Because this is part of his programme. Bergoglianism is the logical conclusion of VaticanTwoism, and that, not the historic Catholic Faith, is what Ratzinger always believed in.

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I seriously had no idea there was this letter thing coming. I knew nothing about it before yesterday morning. And, as predicted by some Traddie pals, it has been leapt-upon by increasingly hysterical “conservatives”, desperate to make excuses for darling Benedict, concocting Dan-Brown-thriller conspiracies to explain it: Benedict was threatened. Benedict was coerced. Benedict didn’t write it.

“@Pontifex has just told the Pope Emeritus “Dear Joe – sign on the dotted line or we say you sadly slipped in the shower.’”

Yeah… seriously…

Vatican: “So, Benedict wrote us this nice letter telling us how on board he is with Francis…”

Conservatives:

Me: Guys, search your feelings…

When I called bull____, I got…

You never earned him…and it's your loss.

— OnTheSideOfTheAngels (@OTSOTA) March 13, 2018

Uhhh… OK, Unhinged-Guy… whatever you say…

This is the “conservatives’ conundrum” – if Ratzinger isn’t a “champion of orthodoxy” then the Trads are right, and if the Trads are right, then I’m wrong, and HOW CAN THAT BE?!?!”

Guys, really and for realsies: only the Real counts.

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But I think it’s time to drive this home: Ratzinger isn’t coming to save us. He isn’t the pope. He wasn’t “coerced” into resigning. He hasn’t been intimidated into silence. All these people concocting hysterical fantasies about this have failed to do him the courtesy of taking him at his word. He has repeatedly told us, but we have continued to refuse to accept it.

We have to face some uncomfortable realities, not only about Joseph Ratzinger, but about ourselves. He was never a hero of orthodoxy. We were fooled. We bought the media propaganda. Maybe it’s wounded pride that keeps us trying to defend him. But it’s never a bad thing to apprehend truth, however belatedly or uncomfortable, or painful the implications.

Why did we think that Ratzinger, in this crucial role of CDF prefect, was a bulwark of orthodoxy? Is it simply that we have moved so far away from the ancient Faith that we no longer have a realistic notion of the Faith ourselves to make a comparison, to make an objective judgement?

…

…  Perhaps the world of Catholic academic theology had become so corrupted that a man called “progressive” in 1963, but whose ideas remained the same, would look like a “champion of traditional Catholic orthodoxy” by 2005.

There’s nothing whatever to be gained by continuing to invest in this feminine Benedict-nostalgia. In fact, I would say that all this sighing and “Oh, I miss him” is a way of hiding from reality, clinging to a fantasy – not about him, but about ourselves: _that we ourselves have become compromised, doctrinally._ So much so that we can’t tell what a real “champion of Catholic orthodoxy” looks like.

Here’s a hint: this man was that thing.And this is the man that Joseph Ratzinger the “progressive” peritus of Vatican II helped to destroy.

This man was not:

The truth is the man we loved never existed. He was created for us out of a blend of wishful thinking and secular media narrative, propaganda which we heavily bought into because we were terrified of the alternative. Well, here’s that alternative, grabbing us by the arms every day and screaming his blasphemies and heresies into our faces. The alternative is simply that the “conservative” proposal is false, based on false premises, a matter of clinging to our personal preferences in opposition to the evidence; a habit that I have called “Fantasy.”

The evidence is starting to be gathered, in fact, that Ratzinger himself had more than a little to do with the debacle of the Synods and Amoris Laetitia. Far from “standing firm” against the pressure, Pope Benedict Ratzinger had wavered on the issue for a long, long time. As Sandro Magister wrote in 2011:

The ban on Eucharistic communion for divorced and remarried Catholics is increasingly contested and disobeyed. Benedict XVI is standing firm. But he is republishing an essay from 1998 that opens two loopholes, the second entrusted to conscience. 

An important footnote, because it concerns precisely one of the points on which Benedict XVI maintains that an exception could be opened in the general ban on communion.

In the first part of his essay, the pope reiterates that this ban is not an invention of the Catholic Church. The Church has no choice but to adhere to the teaching of Christ, who expressed himself with absolute clarity on the indissolubility of marriage.

But of what kind of marriage? Saint Paul – the pope recalls – recognizes the absolute indissolubility only of sacramental marriage, between Christians. For marriage between a Christian and a non-Christian, the apostle admits the possibility of separation, if the purpose is that of safeguarding the faith of the baptized spouse. And the Church also does so today with the “privilegium paulinum,” when it permits the dissolution of a non-sacramental marriage.

In the second part of the essay, pope Ratzinger addresses the objection of those who maintain that the Catholic Church should imitate the more flexible practice of the ancient Church and of the Eastern Churches separated from Rome. 

Yesterday, One Peter Five ran a piece suggesting that in fact Ratzinger did intervene at the Synods; to get Muller to stand down and give up his objections to the Kasper Proposal…

As we at the time reported, Marco Ansaldo – Italian journalist for La Repubblica – had a source that told him that Cardinal Christoph Schönborn and Pope emeritus Benedict had met in the last week of the synod at the pope’s residence Mater Ecclesiae for a lunch meal at which the Austrian cardinal received Pope Benedict’s encouragement for a sort of compromise between Cardinals Müller and Kasper. Our recent research has given us new sources that seem to confirm this original 26 October 2015 story; but, then, we have also still received some denials.

I know the big, bitter Red Pill is hard to choke down, but once you do you will feel so much better. That blue one is just a sugar placebo anyway, and was making you sick. You can’t fight the war when you’re still on the Blue Drug.

 

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