Fatima Perspectives #1295
As if there were not enough absurd novelties to contend with in the post-Vatican II epoch, Benedict XVI’s novelty of “Pope Emeritus” has given rise to a whole new set of ecclesial absurdities. Hence this mocking headline in the New York Times following the publication of Benedict’s letter on the homosexual clergy crisis and its origins: “Dueling Popes? Maybe. Dueling Views in a Divided Church? Definitely.”
Yes, yes, of course, there is — altogether now! — only one Pope, and that Pope is Francis. But at the same time there are two Popes, sort of. The elected Pope and the emeritus Pope, who is sort of like a Pope but not exactly the Pope, of which there is only one. Or so the theory goes, as the Church is afflicted by yet another incoherent equivocation masquerading as a legitimate ecclesial development. To quote Archbishop Gänswein, Benedict’s personal secretary who reportedly helped draft the letter: “Therefore, from 11 February 2013, the papal ministry is not the same as before. It is and remains the foundation of the Catholic Church; and yet it is a foundation that Benedict XVI has profoundly and lastingly transformed during his exceptional pontificate.”
How, one might ask, can anyone, even a Pope, “profoundly and lastingly” transform the foundation of the Church established by Christ Himself nearly 2,000 years after He laid it down with the Rock of Peter? A good question, to which — in keeping with the flood of nonsense that has inundated the Church since the Council — there will never be a sensible answer.
I suppose we are expected to believe that something akin to a spooky quantum entanglement has happened here: The Pope Emeritus retains an attachment to the papacy analogous to the linkage of two paired photons sent in opposite directions from a central source to remote detectors, where measurements at both detectors indicate that one entangled photon still affects the other instantaneously at a distance. Perhaps we have here a kind of Bell’s Theorem of the papacy, demonstrating its non-locality in one person as opposed to a system of papal “quanta” spread out across the space-time continuum.
Francis is evidently not pleased with what his entangled emeritus counterpart has done. For while Benedict’s letter generally hews to the “pedophilia” cover story hiding the homosexual crisis, there is one glaring and embarrassing exception: “In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established, which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.” Oops! There was no way that was supposed to happen. But then in the quantum world events tend to be unpredictable.
As Sandro Magister reports, while Benedict had earlier submitted his letter to the Secretary of State for use at the sham “pedophilia” summit convened to ignore the plague of clerical homosexual predation of young men and homosexual relations with “consenting” adult males, “none of the participants at the summit received Ratzinger’s text. Francis thought it better to keep it to himself, locked away in a drawer.” This suppression is what led to the letter’s ultimate publication in an obscure German journal, followed by a round of denunciations by Francis’ courtiers to the effect that a Pope Emeritus should be seen occasionally but heard never.
Think of the “two Popes” then as entangled papal “quanta” with opposite “spins” (not really spins, but this is not the place for a physics lesson). One entangled photon spins up, while the other spins down. But when the up-spin photon is given a down-spin and measured as such, the entangled down-spin photon at the other detector is instantaneously anti-correlated with a measured up-spin relative to its partner.
The analogy might be a joke, but it serves to illustrate the grave consequences of the novelty Benedict has introduced into the ecclesial commonwealth: yet another element of indeterminacy in the sea of indeterminacy that is the post-conciliar human element of the Church. In a word: chaos.
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