Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Vatican Admits to Distorting Benedict’s Letter

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican admitted Thursday that it altered a photo sent to the media of a letter from retired Pope Benedict XVI about Pope Francis. The manipulation changed the meaning of the image in a way that violated photojournalist industry standards.


The Vatican's communications office released the photo of the letter on Monday on the eve of Francis' five-year anniversary. 

The letter was cited by Monsignor Dario Vigano, chief of communications, to rebut critics of Francis who question his theological and philosophical heft and say he represents a rupture from Benedict's doctrine-minded papacy.

In the part of the letter that is legible in the photo, Benedict praised a new volume of books on the theology of Francis as evidence of the "foolish prejudice" of his critics. The book project, Benedict wrote, "helps to see the interior continuity between the two pontificates, with all the differences in style and temperament."


AMDG

7 comments:

James said...

Communist tactics.

Jim Nichols said...

Communist tactics, rubbish. Steve Skojec of 1 Peter 5 is man enough to face the truth about the authenticity of the letter and its implications for the 'Conservative'/Trad, 'loyal, orthodox Catholics' cohort:
“I think it’s time to drive this home: Ratzinger isn’t coming to save us. He isn’t the pope. He wasn’t “coerced” into resigning. He hasn’t been intimidated into silence. All these people concocting hysterical fantasies about this have failed to do him the courtesy of taking him at his word. He has repeatedly told us, but we have continued to refuse to accept it.

We have to face some uncomfortable realities, not only about Joseph Ratzinger, but about ourselves. He was never a hero of orthodoxy. We were fooled. We bought the media propaganda. Maybe it’s wounded pride that keeps us trying to defend him. But it’s never a bad thing to apprehend truth, however belatedly or uncomfortable, or painful the implications.

Why did we think that Ratzinger, in this crucial role of CDF prefect, was a bulwark of orthodoxy? Is it simply that we have moved so far away from the ancient Faith that we no longer have a realistic notion of the Faith ourselves to make a comparison, to make an objective judgement?



… Perhaps the world of Catholic academic theology had become so corrupted that a man called “progressive” in 1963, but whose ideas remained the same, would look like a “champion of traditional Catholic orthodoxy” by 2005.

There’s nothing whatever to be gained by continuing to invest in this feminine Benedict-nostalgia. In fact, I would say that all this sighing and “Oh, I miss him” is a way of hiding from reality, clinging to a fantasy – not about him, but about ourselves: that we ourselves have become compromised, doctrinally. So much so that we can’t tell what a real “champion of Catholic orthodoxy” looks like.”


- Steve Skojec, “The Anatomy of Rejection Letter: Some Personal Thoughts on the Benedict Correspondence” 1Peter5 15 March 2018. LINK: https://onepeterfive.com/anatomy-rejection-letter-personal-thoughts-benedict-correspondence/

Tancred said...

Boo hoo. We’ve always known B16 had a “Hegelian Mind”, yet he was and remains infinitely more preferable to Bergoglio, but you don’t know whether he was coerced or not, unless you’re some kind of spook or a banker with access to classified info...

Anonymous said...

"Why did we think that Ratzinger, in this crucial role of CDF prefect, was a bulwark of orthodoxy? Is it simply that we have moved so far away from the ancient Faith that we no longer have a realistic notion of the Faith ourselves to make a comparison, to make an objective judgement?"

Exactly! Catholics have been slowly boiled frogs.

Tancred said...

The press presented him as a lion of orthodoxy as soon as he was appointed, but he was in the liberal party as a peritus during Vatican II. He may, like others of his training, have had a moment of conversion, but if he never underwent a personal conversion from the kind of man he was in the 60s, he at least let those of us who were have much more liberty, even defending and promulgating the Catholic Faith on our behalf. He did this in a way the papal rock star, JPII never did. While Paul VI was openly hostile to the pre-Conciliar Church, John Paul II was mostly malevolently neutral growing to some sympathy at the end of his life (some will remember the SSPX’s procession at the Jubilee as a turning point), and Benedict XVI’s recognition of the correctness of our aspirations with Summorum Pontificum and lifting the unjust condemnations of the Society Bishops, we were assured that we had a friend in the Holy See if not a co-religionist. Now in the age of Bergoglio, clerical professional parasites, Communists and fellow travellers, have attempted to restore their rule and turn back the clock to the witching hour of 1968.

SPC said...

I well only add my two cents by noting that those that think Benedict's resignation was o.j. substantial error have fewer dreams pod his orthodoxy than the opponents of that view would depict the holders of that view as having.

An Barnhart, who outs outspoken with that view, regularly points out Benedict as being the worst Pope in history precisely because of his resignation, and his own modernist views.

Tancred said...

Who?