Why I Believe Benedict Was Forced Out and Frances Chosen
Yesterday, a noted Vatican theologian called for an examination of the validity of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. You can read this article here:
Noted Vatican Theologian Calls for Examination of Validity of Pope Benedict XVI’s Resignation
Years ago, after Pope Benedict XVI “stepped down” from his papal role in the Vatican, many were shocked. It had not been since 1400 that a pope resigned.
Pope Benedict was a very conservative-minded man. There are two separate issues which came into play for this man to step down (perhaps pushed out).
Personally, I do not believe that he voluntarily stepped down. I believe that he was forced out and was given the option to tell the world that he was merely stepping down from his position.
I am republishing two separate articles I wrote to help the reader to understand what truly happened.
First article from 2017:
Why Pope Benedict XVI Really Stepped Down: the Insidious Relationship Between the Vatican and Islam
Remember when Pope Benedict resigned and how the world was so shocked? No pope had resigned since 1400. It certainly was a hush-hush matter at the Vatican. Not much was said or explained except that this was the choice of Pope Benedict.
I think not.
I think that this was the choice of the powers that be inside the Vatican – they made the decision that this man should step down; and the reason will shock you.
I was aware of what Pope Benedict had done before his resignation, but I did not know the impact it would have, or how the Vatican’s relationship with the Muslim world would be a key factor in the changes which came to fruition when Pope Francis took the papal throne.
At a commencement at a University in Regensburg, Bavaria, Pope Benedict spoke words which, although very true, Muslim clerics found to be offensive and disparaging to Islam.
The Washington Post did a piece on this topic in 2014, entitled “Regensburg Redux: Was Pope Benedict XVI right about Islam?” (ANALYSIS)
From the Washington Post piece: (Remember – this is the Washington Post)
Eight years ago this Friday, Sept. 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria in which he seemed to diagnose Islam as a religion inherently flawed by fanaticism.
It was an undiplomatic assertion, to say the least — especially coming a day after the 9/11 anniversary — and it sparked an enormous outcry among Muslims and came to be seen as one of a series of missteps that would plague Benedict’s papacy until he resigned last year.
Now, with the Islamic State on the march in the Middle East, leaving a trail of horrifying brutality and bloodshed that has shocked the world, some of Benedict’s allies on the Catholic right are saying, in effect, “He told you so.”
“Regensburg was not so much the work of a professor or even a pope,” wrote the Rev. Raymond de Souza in a column for the National Catholic Register, a conservative publication. “It was the work of a prophet.”
Eight years later “we have ISIS” — an acronym for the Islamic State — “And beheadings. And persecution. And hatred. And war,” added Elise Hilton in a blog post for the Acton Institute, a libertarian Catholic think tank.
“It appears that the world owes Pope Benedict an apology,” she wrote.
The lecture was meant to be a homecoming of sorts for the German pope who had been the chief guardian of orthodoxy for Pope John Paul II.
For it was as a teacher at Regensburg during the 1970s when he was the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, a leading Catholic theologian in Germany with a growing international reputation, that Benedict was happiest.
In his 2006 speech, simply titled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections,” Benedict characteristically took up a knotty concept — the interplay of faith and reason. He wanted to show how reason untethered from faith leads to fanaticism and violence.
To illustrate that case, Benedict dug up an obscure 14th-century dialogue between a long-forgotten Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar, about the concept of violence in Islam.
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Benedict quoted the emperor as saying to his Islamic interlocutor.
In Islamic teaching, Benedict said, “God is absolutely transcendent.His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”
Given the tinderbox that was the Muslim world then, as now, it was no surprise that Benedict’s citation of Islam as an example of a religion gone wild touched off the firestorm.
One of the quotes from Pope Benedict’s speech triggered an angry response from the Muslim world:
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” (emphasis added)
Not only were moderate Muslims offended but extremists attacked churches in the West Bank, killed an Italian nun in Somalia, and beheaded a priest in Iraq. Benedict’s allies saw those episodes as proving the pope’s point, and they cheered his willingness to “get tough” with Islam. “Benedict the Brave,” the Wall Street Journal called him.
But many in the West, and in Benedict’s own church, cringed at what they saw as his impolitic — to say the least — remarks, and criticized his analysis of Islam.
Fast forward eight years, and today the old pope’s allies say events have proved them — and Benedict, and Emperor Manuel II Paleologus — right.
“Today when the news from ex-Iraq is once more making history, and is showing to anyone who has eyes to see what the Quran translated into action looks like, they need to apologize to both of you,” Camillo Langone wrote in Il Foglio, a conservative Italian periodical.
Yet those reactions may not be doing justice to Islam, or Benedict.
For one thing, while many Catholic critics of Islam cheered Benedict’s Regensburg address, the pope himself tried to distance himself from the more anti-Islamic interpretations. He tweaked the wording of the official Vatican version of the talk to say that the emperor’s remarks were delivered “with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable.”
And he added explanatory footnotes saying that he is “in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.”
Meanwhile, the Vatican portrayed the speech as an attempt to open a dialogue with Islam, rather than representing it as the pope’s final word on Islam.
In fact, a number of Islamic scholars took the opportunity to invite Benedict and the Catholic Church to a deeper dialogue on the topic of religion and violence — a dialogue that in itself showed Islam may not be as reflexively violent as some said. And Benedict went out of his way to repair relations with the Islamic world, visiting a mosque in Turkey and saying many nice things about Islam during the rest of his papacy.
Moreover, the history of Islam and Christianity provide much evidence that counters the idea that Islam is always and everywhere violent, or that Christianity is inherently virtuous. There is no monolithic Islam just as there is no monolithic Christianity.
Islam in Spain throughout the Middle Ages, for example, represented a sort of golden age of religious comity and intellectual and artistic flowering that rivaled anything in Christendom.
Benedict “could easily have found other passages by Muslim scholars showing the compatibility, even the necessity, of faith and reason as allies not enemies in Islamic thought,” wrote Bruce Lawrence, Islamic scholar and professor emeritus at Duke University in an email from India, where he is delivering a series of lectures.
Lawrence cited the 14th-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun as an influential Muslim who argued that “’aql” (the Arab word for intellect) and “naql” (meaning tradition) “are as close in practice as they are in sound; i.e., they rhyme and complement one another.”
Others note that the religious wars that raged across Europe in the wake of the Reformation are among the many instances of brutality carried out by Christians that rival anything we see today in the Middle East. –source
*Coming from the Washington Post, it is no surprise that they equate Christianity with Catholicism. There is no truth to this. The Vatican has been responsible for the slaughter of untold millions of Protestants during the Crusades and throughout history.
The Muslim Response to Pope Benedict’s words
From Arabnews.com (March 3, 2013)
Pope Benedict’s Resignation and Interfaith Dialogues
WHEN Pope Benedict XVI formally resigned last Thursday (Feb. 28), it was a dramatic moment. No pope had resigned since 1400, historians said. However, what I would like to address here is how Benedict’s papacy tried to reverse advances made in Catholic dialogue with other religions, especially Muslims, and what to expect from the new pope.
Early in his tenure, Pope Benedict XVI set the tone in his relationship with Islam and Muslims. In a speech he gave in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006, he demonstrated poor understanding of Islam’s history and teachings.
The pope cited a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s offensive remarks about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He then went on to accuse Muslims of spreading their faith by the sword, of intolerance toward those who differed with them, and that those attitudes were deeply rooted in their faith. None of these claims were true, of course, as many historians have since taken the pope to task for being so cavalier about the facts of history.
Muslims were deeply offended. There was uproar and widespread public protests throughout the Muslim world, as well as condemnations by scores of heads of state and religious leaders.
Many took the pope’s 2006 remarks not as an academic faux pas, but as an expression of deep hostility toward Muslims and their faith, calculated to reverse decades of Muslim-Christian dialogue that had led to significant achievements in improving their relationship.
It was especially ironic that the head of the Catholic church was critical of what he claimed to be Muslims’ intolerance toward non-Muslims, and their hostility to science and reason during their history. He could not have been unaware of the church’s bloody wars against non-Catholics, Muslims included, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, burning at the stake of scientists and heretics. All of those events took place during a time when Muslims encouraged scientific innovation and tolerated heretics and non-Muslims, including many Christian churches that have survived until today, while they were made extinct in regions under the papacy’s influence.
Although Pope Benedict has since apologized for the Regensburg offensive remarks, the Vatican under his leadership continued to undo the work undertaken by his predecessors to improve dialogue within the Catholic Church and with other faiths.
It turned out that undermining dialogue with Muslims was just a small part of a greater project to unravel reforms undertaken under the Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 (Vatican II, for short), the most significant conclave in the Church’s modern history that has in many ways changed its character, direction and relations with the modern world. – source (Emphasis mine)
Read rest of article from Arabnews.com
The Second Vatican Council and Changes Towards Islam
Number 841 in the book of Catechism was added during the Second Vatican Council. It reads:
841 “The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” – source
I have written numerous articles on Islam vs. Christianity. The quote above from the Book of Catechism would have one believe that the Muslims and Christians worship the same God. This is a lie from the pit of hell. I have chosen two articles I have written to support the fact that the God of Christianity is in no way the same as the god of Islam – Allah:
The God of the Bible and Allah
The Real Jesus is NOT Isa from the Qur’an
I do hope that this article has brought clarity to why Pope Benedict had to step down from his position. I do not believe that this was a decision he made on his own. The globalists are pressuring many within the Vatican, and Pope Francis is quite obviously a Leftist/Marxist Globalist himself! The globalists were successful in getting “their man” into the highest position in the Vatican.
Now we see Pope Francis bringing Muslim clerics to pray with him into the Vatican. This pope seems to be striving for a One-World Religion. According to Francis – even atheists can go to heaven!
Second Reason Benedict Stepped Down
Because of Benedict’s conservative views, he was also very tough on priests who were caught after many years of molesting children in the church. He never made excuses for them. He demanded swift action by the Vatican to relieve these men of their position and to bring charges against them.
St. Sebastian’s Angels
I wrote an article not long ago about a large group of gay priests. They call themselves St. Sebastian’s Angels. They actually have their own website. It was a very difficult piece for me to write; I felt physically sick when I read the words of these men. One of the main points about this group of men is that they detested Pope Benedict.
I will post the link to the article here:
St. Sebastian’s Angels: A Network of Gay Priests <click to read
In the dialogue between these gay priests on their website, you will see how they talked about Pope Benedict. They HATED him because he was not putting up with homosexuality in the priesthood. They would laugh at him and disparage him because he was from Germany. Sometimes during the chat they called him Hitler.
Brethren, if we look at the years that Pope Francis has been in power, we see an ultra-liberal man who now is trying to cover up and even exonerate priests who are pedophiles and have ruined the lives of untold number of children through the years.
And do you remember Pope Francis bringing imams into the Vatican and he actually prayed with them? Francis has been calling for Protestants to “Return to Rome.” He is a pope who is striving for a One- World Religion – his Ecumenism is proof of that.
So, here we have two men – one very conservative who fought for the damaged children of abusers in the Catholic Church. A conservative who would not put up with homosexual priests. And a man who spoke truth to the world about Islam. He was in no way politically correct.
And then there is Francis who is the polar opposite of Benedict. He attempted to cover up the problem of pedophile priests, and now is wanting to pardon them. This, along with his liberal Marxist/Socialist ways, has prompted many in the Vatican to ask for his resignation. It will be so interesting to see how this plays out.
Now there is a theologian wanting to investigate the so-called resignation of Pope Benedict. Pope Francis has spoken more about “Global warming” and redistribution of wealth than he has about Jesus Christ and his Gospel!
But after all, we are talking about the Catholic Church which is a cult.
Many of us wondered if Francis might be the False Prophet spoken of in God’s Word. If he is not – he is certainly a “type” of that False Prophet.
I know that this article is so very long, but I had so much to tell the readers. I am hoping that this article has brought some clarity to many about Benedict and Francis as the events in the Vatican unfold.
Brethren, these are such wicked times, and they are such as we’ve not seen in our lifetimes. I pray right along with all of you that our Lord Jesus is coming soon to rapture His own!
This place is certainly not our home!
How Can I be Saved?
MARANATHA!
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