UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
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,
Archbishop George Gänswein, 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,
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?
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