2017 Skojec: Was there "a Political Faction in the Church [and outside the Church] trying to Force" Benedict to Resign & were "Threats to his Brother" Involved?

Today, Catholic pundit Ann Barnhardt reported the death of Pope Benedict XVI's brother Msgr. Georg Ratzinger and the speculation that "threats to" his sibling could have been part of the reason he was "coerced" to resign:

"Pope Benedict’s brother Msgr. Georg Ratzinger died just a bit ago in Regensburg."

"If the assumption in Rome is true that Pope Benedict XVI was at least partially coerced by threats to his brother, that is now over."

"Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen."

 Uncategorized on July 1, ARSH 2020 by Ann Barnhardt. 

 [https://www.barnhardt.biz/2020/07/01/rest-in-peace-monsignor-georg-ratzinger/]

 

So the apparent unasked question is:

 

Is it possible that Pope Benedict XVI was "coerced" to resign and therefore his resignation is invalid?

In January, LifeSiteNews reported:

"Cardinal Walter Kasper – a close collaborator of Pope Francis – has expressed concern over a possible attempt at removing the current Pope from office but makes it clear that 'a forced resignation would be invalid.'”
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lifesitenews.com/mobile/news/cardinal-kasper-a-forced-resignation-of-pope-francis-would-be-invalid#ampshare=https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-kasper-a-forced-resignation-of-pope-francis-would-be-invalid]

In September, Reuters made the same statement saying that if pressure is put on "Pope Francis to resign [it] could make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to do so, Church experts say":

“'The pope has the right to freely resign. That’s what the canon says. The doubt is whether the situation Francis is in now really allows for a free choice because there is a political faction in the Church trying to force it,' said Nicholas Cafardi, former dean of Duquesne University School of Law."

“'I don’t see how (the pope can resign freely) when you have people campaigning for it,' said Cafardi, who is also a former member of the Board of Governors of the Canon Law Society of America."
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1LN1IL#ampshare=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-abuse-law/can-the-popes-accusers-force-him-to-resign-idUSKCN1LN1IL]

If Kasper, Reuters and canon law expert Cafardi are right that it is "difficult, if not impossible" for a pope to resign "if a political faction in the Church [and outside the Church] if trying to force it" then Pope Benedict XVI probably, if not for sure, is still Pope which would mean Francis is not a valid or real pope.

Was there "a political faction in the Church trying to force" Benedict to resign which put into "doubt... whether the situation [Benedict was] in... really allow[ed] for a free choice" as Cafardi said to Reuters?

Was Benedict's stepping down "a forced resignation [which] would [make it] invalid" according to Kasper?

Was there "a political faction in the Church [and outside the Church] trying to force" Benedict to resign in which "threats to his brother" could possibly be involved?

 

On July 18, 2017, One Peter Five publisher Steve Skojec mentioned one possiblity:

 

On Saturday, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had a message read to those gathered at the funeral of the late Cardinal Meisner. In it, he said something that drew a great deal of attention:

"What particularly impressed me from my last conversations with the now passed Cardinal was the relaxed cheerfulness, the inner joy and the confidence at which he had arrived. We know that this passionate shepherd and pastor found it difficult to leave his post, especially at a time  in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination. However, what moved me all the more was that, I'm this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even if [sometimes] the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing."

Some German speakers have since pointed out that the last sentence was slightly more conditional than our translation read. That the word “sometimes” should appear before “the boat”, as I’ve placed it in brackets above. But I find this to be a distinction without a difference. Like many, many others, I had the distinct impression when reading this that the former pope was blinking a message in Morse Code...

 

...  But clearly, the impression his statement gave was nearly universal. Many, many Catholics saw the comments as a shot across the bow. As a man forced into a compromise position who was desperate to convey that things in the Church are not as good, in his view, as he has given the public impression he believes.

 Which is, perhaps, why I find it exceedingly odd that just today — three days after the former pope’s comments began their viral circulation of the Internet — a new report has come out concerning alleged abuse of members of the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir in Germany, of which Georg Ratzinger, the 93-year-old older brother of the former pope, served as head for 30 years. The report that was issued in 2016 alleged 231 victims; the new story claims at least 547 victims.  The initial abuse allegations surfaced in 2010.

Now of course, it’s likely just a coincidence. Clearly, the investigation has been ongoing for the better part of a decade. Perhaps this new report had been scheduled to come out this week all along. But the timing certainly is interesting — a former pope speaks up in a way the world interprets as a criticism of a pontificate known for its autocratic and controlling style, led by a pope a pope known as one who keeps and settles scores, and within 3 days an international news story implicating his elderly brother in a sex abuse scandal is making headlines around the globe.

If nobody is using this as leverage to pressure the former pope into silence, then the odds are simply fascinating. Make of it what you will.
[https://onepeterfive.com/for-the-pope-emeritus-a-strange-sort-of-coincidence/]

One Catholic website made the pointed remark about Skojec's piece, who appears to claim it is impossible for Francis to be an anti-pope, that the article was ironic:

"Funny though - Steve says that Pope Francis is the Pope, but if Skojec believes that Pope Benedict was forced into resigning under threat of black mail and held captive against his will then that would mean that the election of Francis was invalid and that Pope Benedict is still the Pope."

"This is lost on Steve and his followers."

[https://www.priestshavebecomecesspoolsofimpurity.com/2017/07/conspiracy-website-claims-pope-benedict.html]

 

Just as ironic, on August 11, 2017, one month later, Skojec's One Peter Five which apparently claims Francis is infallibly and definitely the pope was this post showing that there was "a political faction in the Church [and outside the Church] trying to force" Benedict to resign according to Italian journalist Alessandro Rico:

 On May 17, I published an article in the Italian newspaper La Verità about pope Benedict’s abdication. A few days before, in a renowned Italian geopolitical magazine called Limes, Professor Germano Dottori had argued that Joseph Ratzinger’s 2013 abdication, and the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation in 2011, after a financial storm sold to public opinion as a “public debt” crisis, were the result of pressures on the part of Obama administration in the United States.

According to Dottori, Obama was eager to dethrone Benedict XVI for two reasons. On the one hand, his presidency was close to fundamentalist Islam (de facto fostered by regime change in Libya and Egypt and civil war in Syria, provoked by U.S. former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy design), whereas Ratzinger, ever since his famous Regensburg lecture, had been identified internationally as a strong opponent of Islamism. On the other hand, Obama was worried about the Church’s reconciliatory efforts toward Moscow’s Orthodox patriarch, within the scope – Dottori wrote – “of a geopolitical project aimed at European-Russian integration, actively supported by Germany and Italy.”

 The Obama administration may have resorted to two instruments: fostering scandals within the Church and the Italian government and threatening to drain away Italian and Vatican financial resources. Italy was at risk of being excluded from international financial markets. The menace against the Vatican was to bar the IOR (Istituto per le Opere di Religione, the Vatican bank) from the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network. Taking as an excuse the fact that the IOR did not abide by international rules of transparency, Deutsche Bank (which runs point-of-sale payment systems in the Vatican and was suspected by Bankitalia of hosting an IOR account where all money earned within the Vatican converged) had been induced to block all ATMs in Vatican City, a service curiously reactivated, Dottori noticed, right after Pope Benedict’s abdication.

With regard to this story, it is useful to spend a few more words on an important figure: former president of the IOR Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. Chosen by Pope Benedict in 2009 to reform the IOR and bring it back to international standards of transparency, in 2010, Tedeschi was the subject of a money-laundering investigation.

Notice how suspicious the events look: two years after the beginning of the inquiry, in 2012, Tedeschi was fired from his office; in 2014, after Pope Benedict’s resignation, Rome’s judge dismissed the inquiry and all allegations against Tedeschi; in 2015, in an interview with The Catholic Herald, Tedeschi declared that he had been kicked out by the IOR’s board of directors because of his intention to make radical reforms. And in a 2012 interview released to the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, Tedeschi had already revealed that in those months, he was so scared of being assassinated that he had written down a secret report on the IOR. (According to my sources, he had written his will as well.) The secret report had been entrusted to two of Tedeschi’s close friends as a sort of insurance policy on his own life. Tedeschi stated that he had discovered “something scary” and had engaged a struggle against the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who was resolutely opposing any disclosure of the IOR’s secret archives to Italian authorities.

If you connect Tedeschi’s story to Dottori’s claim regarding financial blackmail enacted against the Vatican Bank in order to pressure Pope Benedict, you might suspect that Tedeschi was well aware that obscure forces, from within and without the Vatican, were swarming, and that his opposition to those influences was probably the cause of his misfortunes...

 

...  Now, while Laporta claims to be “90% sure” of this report, it is much harder to ascertain whether, or to what degree, Pope Francis was aware of a financial and political operation that, nonetheless, was likely to have been buttressed by the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, and to have required the American Apostolic Nunciature’s mediation. Laporta hypothesizes that during his visit to Rome, in June 2017, President Donald Trump might have had an animated discussion with Pope Francis, as he asked for elucidations on the Church’s aid to Clinton. According to him, the pope’s waxen and scrawny expression in the photographs taken next to the American president was due precisely to their quarrel and to Francis’s embarrassment. 

 

Elucidations are precisely what we need. In the spirit of the letter addressed by The Remnant to Donald Trump, American Catholics should ask their new president to investigate the Obama administration’s involvement in the events that led to Pope Benedict’s abdication.

[https://onepeterfive.com/obama-benedict-abdication/]

 

Was there "a political faction in the Church [and outside the Church] trying to force Benedict to resign in which "threats to his brother" could possibly be involved?

 

"[I]f Skojec believes that Pope Benedict was forced into resigning under threat of black mail and held captive against his will then that would mean that the election of Francis was invalid and that Pope Benedict is still the Pope."

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of the Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of the Mary. 

Please, pray an Our Father now for President Trump and our Church as well as our country now because this is the important fork in the road for the Catholic Church and the United States. Please, keep this intentions in your prayers.