Pope Francis Vs. Shadow Pope Benedict — Who Is Infallible ?

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
January 27, 2015

http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-francis-vs-shadow-pope-benedict-who-is-infallible/

Hans Kung, who has known ex-Pope Benedict well for over a half century, warned Pope Francis about Pope Benedict’s remaining in his Vatican convent, noting that “Pope Benedict Will Be A ‘Shadow Pope’ “, see here, [Huffington Post] .

Archbishop George Ganswein, the ex-Pope’s personal “convent mate”, as reported recently by Crux, publicly expressed regret over specific cases in which Vatican spokesmen have had to issue clarifications about things his boss, Pope Francis, has said or done.

Now comes the “bomb”. In a new and significant Commonweal article by William McDonough, a theology professor, entitled “Right the First Time — Benedict XVI on Communion for the Remarried“, see here, [Commonweal], it is being reported that a very important moral issue for Pope Francis (and his theological adviser, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who was a longtime intellectual rival of the ex-Pope’s and former assistant to Fr. Kung) has been put in play by the ex-Pope. The matter is communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.

This is also a “big money” issue for top German Cardinal Reinhard Marx and other German bishops, who stand to lose at least some of their annual $6 billion governmental subsidy over an unsatisfactory resolution of this issue.

Both popes are already looking quite “fallible” over their mishandling of the contraception ban and the priest child abuse scandal, among other missteps, as discussed in my “Pope Francis Is Still Failing Too Many Abused & Abandoned Children, No??”.

Now this. Which pope is infallible here? Did Pope Benedict, a long time theology professor, lose his “infallible power” when he walked across the Vatican campus to his well renovated convent? Did non-theologian Francis receive a “cranial infallibility” implant when the papal crown was put on his head? Who is the real Papal Wizard now? Are they both serious about preserving the myth of papal infallibility? Will they now both infallibly declare the “principle of contradiction” to be false?

The new confusion being created by the ex-Pope is reported by Professor McDonough in pertinent part as follows:

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“In recent years Pope Benedict XVI has been overseeing the publication of his opera omnia, or collected works. Assisted by the current prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, Benedict is republishing, under the name Joseph Ratzinger, all his theological writings, nine volumes of which have been issued so far (in German, by Verlag Herder). The most recent volume contains a 1972 essay, on the indissolubility of marriage, whose conclusion Benedict has seen fit to rewrite. The original essay, written when Ratzinger was a forty-five-year-old professor of theology at Regensburg, had proposed that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics be allowed to return to Communion in some circumstances. In an important change, that proposal is conspicuously missing from the newly rewritten conclusion.”

“The original conclusion acknowledged both that the church is “of the New Covenant” and that it remains “in a world in which there continues to exist unchanged ‘the hardness of heart’ (Matthew 19:8)” of prior times. And so church practice “must begin in the concrete”—taking into account the damage done, even by the church itself, through such “hardness of heart.” Specifically, with regard to Scripture’s clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, Ratzinger in 1972 concluded that, in some second marriages, it would be “immoral” to demand separation as a condition for allowing the spouses to return to Communion. “When the second marriage produces moral obligations with regard to the children, the family, and even the wife and there are no analogous obligations stemming from the first marriage,” Ratzinger wrote, “openness to eucharistic Communion, after a trial period, certainly seems to be just and fully in line with the tradition of the church.”

“The new, rewritten conclusion retains the original essay’s observation about our human hardness of heart, but proceeds to note that we are in a new “concrete” situation—and then asks a question Ratzinger did not ask forty-three years ago: “So what can be done concretely, especially at a time in which the faith is being watered down more and more, even within the church?” Times have changed, Benedict seems to be saying, and readmission to the sacraments is no longer an option Instead he recommends that divorced Catholics who have civilly remarried be offered “intense spiritual communion with the Lord,” including a blessing at Sunday Mass when they “approach the altar with their hands folded over their chests.” Spiritual communion, yes; sacramental communion, no.”

“Times may indeed have changed since 1972—but have they changed so radically as to invalidate the earlier essay’s conclusion? … For remarried Christians that more “elastic practice” included, in some cases, returning to the sacraments. …”

“WHY DID HE change his mind? There is a complicated back story to Benedict’s revision, one containing some theological and ecclesial infighting. Last February the 1972 article by Ratzinger was cited—approvingly—by Cardinal Walter Kasper in his introductory remarks to the consistory of cardinals convened by Pope Francis to discuss the issue of the family, preparatory to last fall’s synod; in affirming his view that the divorced and remarried should be admitted to Communion, Kasper cited Ratzinger’s essay as offering “an appropriate solution” to the dilemma. Yet that 1972 article was the first and only time Ratzinger ever took such a position publicly. Thereafter he reverted to the traditional ban on Communion, and actually helped strengthen it when, as prefect of the CDF, he signed the September 1994 letter to the bishops in which the Holy See rejected the more liberal position staked out by certain bishops—including Kasper. Apparently Ratzinger’s dissatisfaction at Kasper’s use of his essay last year led to his decision to recast its conclusion in his collected works.”

“It is, in the view of many, an unfortunate alteration, a diminution of the vision of faith put forth in the earlier essay’s conclusion. In sum, for Ratzinger forty-three years ago, a willingness to live within the tension between a definitive doctrinal claim and a pastoral duty to embrace those of “particular need” was not a contradiction needing to be ironed out, but rather a sign of discipleship. This willingness is missing from the new conclusion, which dissolves that “essential contradiction” by dropping a pastoral embrace in favor of a definitive doctrine. Effectively, Benedict forgets what his earlier essay held as fundamental.”

“Such forgetting finds a sharp challenge in an idea first expressed by German Catholic theologian Johannes Metz in 1977, just a few years after Ratzinger’s original essay. Metz said that at the center of Christianity stands the “dangerous memory” of the death and resurrection of Jesus, with its promise of the coming Kingdom of God (Faith in History and Society). We must cultivate this dangerous memory to overcome any temptation to “bathe everything from the past in a soft, conciliatory light,” Metz insisted, and instead allow the past to “reveal new and dangerous insights for the present.” What we need is a fuller memory of the past, but Benedict’s rewritten conclusion moves in the opposite direction; it forgets what is difficult about the past and thus avoids “dangerous insights for the present.” …”

“In his fine essay on Johannes Metz and “dangerous memories,” Michael J. Iafrate cites Metz’s reminder that compassion literally means a “willingness to suffer the sufferings of others.” * I am not suggesting that Pope Benedict lacks compassion. But I am suggesting that something is missing from his account of the past—namely, that tension he earlier called essential to church faith. His new conclusion comes, he writes, “at a time in which the faith is being watered down more and more”; but in my view it is not adequate to what is being asked of us now. What we need is not to drop the “essential contradiction” he referred to in 1972, but to learn how to live with it, and in it, together.”

“In fact, Pope Francis seems now to be asking precisely this of us. At the end of October’s first installment of the two-part Synod on the Family, he asked all present to open themselves to a year of “true spiritual discernment,” so that when the synod reconvenes next October it can “find concrete solutions to so many difficulties and innumerable challenges that families must confront.’ “

“How do we achieve such discernment? In his 2011 book Katholische Kirche: Wesen, Wirklichkeit, Sendung, Cardinal Walter Kasper—appropriately enough—named three rules for discerning the movement of the Spirit in the church. I find the one Kasper calls “ecclesiological” especially timely. “The Spirit is a Spirit of unity,” he writes. “The Spirit does not divide, but brings together and orders charisms within the church into a whole…. Prophetic speech must serve the building up of the community.” This rule sounds very much like Ratzinger’s 1972 concern that we attend to those in emergency situations who “have a particular need for full communion with the Body of the Lord.” …” [My emphasis]

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So the German Shepherd has gotten his bark back, it seems. The man who seemingly, in effect, stabbed in the the back so many of his former German theological colleagues, e.g., Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, JB Metz, Bernard Haering, et al. , as the ex-Pope climbed the ecclesiastical ladder, is now back to take on Kasper and Kung again, and even Pope Francis, it appears.

It is time for our ex-bouncer Pope to stop dancing and remove the ex-Pope, and his apparent theological partner, Cardinal Mueller, from the Vatican campus ballroom, no? Mueller can then concentrate on cleaning up the child abuse mess, as he is supposed to be doing, instead of working on the ex-Pope’s books that few will likely ever read in any event.

Let the ex-Pope hire an editor, for God’s sake. Didn’t he cause enough problems as Pope working so often on his inferior books, instead of addressing the sexual and financial scandals that seemingly occurred right in front of him as he had his nose in a book?