From Forums of the Virgin Mary [translation; views are those of Forums. They come at a time of wonderings by some if Francis will also step down]:
The main operators for Benedict XVI to resign.
The detailed plot of why Benedict XVI resigned from the Chair of Peter in 2013 we will surely not know, but we can establish what were the great pressures that forced him to withdraw.
Because it is almost certain that he resigned due to pressures that he could not handle (perhaps due to age, which was weakening him).
Benedict suffered great conflicts during his pontificate.
Some of internal origin and others of external origin.
But it would seem that those of internal origin became more problematic in the short term for Benedict, because they were used by external agents to destabilize him.
Here we will talk about the internal and external conspiracies that would have made Benedict XVI resign, how both conspiracies would be related, and what his successor did regarding these two sources of conflict.
On February 11, 2013, Benedict XVI resigned from the Chair of Peter, filling Catholics with bewilderment.
Some have said that he left due to lack of courage or cowardice to face the problems and others that they threatened him with death.
However, to this day no one knows for sure the reason for the resignation.
And the explanations that he himself has given are vague enough to justify such a tremendous decision.
Rather it seems that he chose to step aside because his speech had been too radical for the powerful secularist enemies and allies who were endangering the functioning of the Church.
And so he preferred to make that speech from a less compromising position for the Church.
In fact, the most reasonable information available would indicate that he was forced to resign by conspiracy. [scroll for more]
And there are two facts that clearly show this theory and are related to each other.
The first is the internal conspiracy that began with “Vatileaks.”
And the second fact was the external attack that deprived the Vatican of its participation in the worldwide Swift system, which meant that the Vatican Bank could neither send nor receive money.
But it was just a taste of things to come.
Let’s start first with the case of the so-called Vatileaks, which we remember as the leak to the press of papers stolen from the papal apartment and revealing how the Vatican was a center of intrigue and infighting.
The butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested and charged with stealing them and leaking papal correspondence, along with a computer scientist.
In the investigations, it was not entirely clear whether Gabriele had done it on his own or was being pressured and ideologically convinced by someone else.
Given this, Benedict XVI appointed three cardinals he trusted to investigate the case and inform him of any plot against him. He appointed Cardinals Jozef Tomko [below], Salvatore De Giorgi, and Julián Herranz.
And on December 17, 2012, the three cardinals delivered the result of their work to the ailing Pontiff.
The dossier is made up of two volumes of almost 300 pages, bound in red, under the title “papal secret” and was kept in the safe of the Pope’s apartment. The report allegedly contained a map of the tares within the Church.
And less than two months later the Pope tendered his resignation.
There are those who say he made the decision after reading the dossier.
Is there any clue as to what was in that dossier?
The leaks to the media indicated the three cardinals discovered that the problem revolved around the non-observance of the Sixth and Seventh commandments — you shall not commit unclean acts and you shall not steal.
In other words, there was a plot of theft and impure acts within the Church.
And how would these two transgressions be related?
There would be a transversal network united by homosexual orientation that would have a lot of influence in the Vatican and that would operate as a mutual-aid society, selecting its members for promotion — what is usually called “lavender mafia.”
These prelates were related to outsiders and had meetings in places like a villa on the outskirts of the Italian capital, a sauna in a suburb of Rome, a beauty salon in the center, and a former university residence that was in use by an archbishop of an Italian province.
And these prelates were being blackmailed by those external links.
That was tied, in turn, to the issue of theft and shady maneuvers with the IOR, the Vatican Bank.
This leak came to light after Benedict XVI declared his resignation.
And the press secretary at the time used the typical phrase of neither denying nor validating what the press said about the dossier, attributing the speculation to the maneuvers for the election of the next Pope, with the understanding that this information could persuade the cardinals to elect as Pope someone who was not Italian and did not reside in the Vatican, so he might try to impose some reform in the Curia.
This dossier then passed into the hands of Francisco and was never spoken of again. [scroll for more]
But let us remember that in the first months of his pontificate his activity regarding the reform of the Vatican Curia was widely promoted , news that later almost disappeared from the media headlines.
But there is a second fact that could be related to the red dossier.
In 2017, reports emerged about the pressure that the government of Barack Obama may have exerted on Benedict XVI (who though read one of the Pontiff’s encyclicals and seemed to respect him).
What might those pressures have been?
The discomfort, one suspects, would have come from two issues.
One was the conflict that Benedict XVI unleashed with Muslims at the 2006 Regensburg conference, during which Benedict charged that in the West the state was pushing a secular agenda of moral and cultural change. And that agenda was pulling the Church not only from the public square but from culture.
Above all, however, Benedict provoked the anger of Muslims when he spoke about the violence of Muslim fundamentalism and criticized Islam’s version of God, saying that a god who is beyond reason is a god who demands and demands irrationality, disorder, and violence. This provoked angry protests from Muslims around the world.
It also provoked resistance in the Obama administration, which counted on the political and strategic investments made by President Obama and Hillary Clinton in the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood during the so-called “Arab spring.”
And furthermore, another disagreement was the firm desire of Benedict XVI to achieve a historic reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate.
At the height of the crisis, Italy saw its access to international financial markets progressively blocked.
While the Vatican Bank was temporarily left out of the Swift financial circuit, which meant that the Vatican could not receive or send funds to other countries, a huge inconvenience for an organization as large as the Church Catholic.
How was this fixed?
In November 2011, Berlusconi left as Prime Minister, and in February 2013, Ratzinger resigned.
Strangely, the exclusion from the Swift system, due to alleged criminal maneuvers by the Vatican Bank, was resolved immediately after the resignation of Benedict XVI.
Professor Germano Dottori at the Institute for Strategic Studies at the LUISS-Guido Carli University in Rome wrote in an article in the April 2017 issue of Limes, an Italian geostrategic journal, that there were documents showing a strong desire by Hillary Clinton’s staff to provoke a revolt from within the Church in order to weaken the hierarchy.
They made use of external and internal pressures, among them those of the groups that appear in the red dossier mentioned before.
And what was the policy of the successor of Benedict XVI?
First, no reaction was seen to contain the lavender mob.
Because even some who are supposed to be part of it were promoted to key positions, such as Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (put in charge of the Academy for Life), or the greater power that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick acquired at the beginning of the administration before falling from grace.
And second, Francis displayed an extremely cold relationship with President Putin and a frankly friendly relationship with President Obama.
In short, the resignation of Benedict XVI seems to have been forced by great external forces, which used internal instabilities to put him between a rock and a hard place.
He had to resign to save the Vatican from further problems.
It was no longer acceptable to the great world powers.
And it remains to be seen whether the international policy carried out by Francis was in sync with Benedict XVI or not.
Although we Catholics are very papal, the Pope never makes decisions alone, without consultation.
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[Michael Brown online retreat, 6/25]