UPDATE: Even more comes about The Letter™: additional missing text

Whatever it does it slams the lid shut on the proposal that Benedict is feeble of mind. Slams it and locks it. I don’t care what all he may appear to be, frail and elderly and half-blind, that seems all true, but if he wrote this, his neurons are all firing nicely. As Hilary White says he ought now to be taken at his word about things, including the current occupant of the Chair.

Ah, the Vatican bureaucracy, like all bureaucracies, thinks it can get away with any silliness it comes to mind to foist upon outsiders. Let us call to mind for this bureaucracy’s benefit the warning of Horace: “Vis consili expers mole ruit sua.” “Power separated from good sense collapses into a ruin of its own making.”

It appears Pope Emeritus Benedict was being depicted as taking a long walk off a short pier when in actuality he took one step forward and two steps back on the shallowest ledge. God reward him. Not a perfect situation, but he navigated it as best as can presently be expected. At this moment the “continuity” runs not so deep as some would like us to believe.

I thought Benedict was irrelevant to these people so it is amusing they felt the need to get his support for these books on Francis’ “theology”. And when he didn’t they pushed forward anyway. That says a lot about their fear of how these books would be viewed.

Oh. My. Word. !

Viganò must be a meathead for even thinking to use Benedict’s letter as support for the series. He should have just tossed the project off as impossible and left it at that. So what if he cannot promote them as “approved by Benedict”?

Well, at least to my thinking, there is no way in the world the Vatican authorities have any reason left to weigh and balance keeping Viganò versus canning him. This is malfeasance of the highest sort with respect to “news” and communications, and warrants immediate firing. He didn’t just “fudge” Benedict’s level of support, he outright contradicted it. It’s willful, it’s pre-meditated, it’s wrong, and and it shows terrible judgment.

How incredibly insulting to ask Benedict to write a glowing review of this set, when one of the authors behaved in such a disruptive way during Benedict’s papacy.

I agree that this does show that Benedict’s mind is still sharp.

Well, I guess Benedict did write the letter. I wouldn’t expect him to badmouth Francis in a letter to a third party, but I do sense an ongoing concern to try to keep warring factions within the same barque. At some point, someone is going to need to speak plainly and clearly about the damage that Francis is doing to the Church. The Body of Christ is sick, and needs to be publicly diagnosed and treated. Where is John the Baptist when we need him? It almost seems that (false) unity is trumping truth right now. What good is it if we tolerate heresy within the Church in order to keep everyone under the same tent, if that heresy is going to lead many in the tent to Hell? We sure aren’t going to retain that unity at the end when some go to Heaven and some go to Hell. Better to truthfully acknowledge the problem, even if some people leave the tent.

Two other thoughts:

Was the third secret of Fatima subjected to such treatment?

Some trad bloggers (whom I respect greatly) may owe Benedict an apology. While Benedict could have been counted as more of a liberal during VII, his thinking evolved as he grew older. While I still wouldn’t call him a trad, he is much closer to that end of the spectrum than he used to be. I am just as upset as anyone that he abdicated, and that he has failed to speak publicly about the current crisis, but I think that this letter shows that he is not uncritically approving of Francis’ manifesto.

It looks like the new church is coming to take the form of a high pressure boiler room marketing operation. Say whatever needs to be said to close the sale. Make the sale and charge the credit card.

For a long time now it’s been clear that the mission of the Vatican is not a wholly Catholic one. Confusion of the faithful, the publication of lies and heresies, has eclipsed the salvation of souls.

Enough is enough. The novusordoist regime clearly has no intention to either (a) knock it off, (b) make amends for decades of damage, and/or (c) take steps not to let it happen again. The SSPX would seem to be much more interested in the salvation of my soul and the nurturing and development of an effective witness to Truth.

Like several others here, I am mystified as to why the Vatican would have published any part of the letter or even acknowledged its existence. I’d think they’d want to pretend it had never happened.

It was a sleazy, stupid stunt, presumably an attempt to imply approval by BXVI, not only of Francis’ incoherent theological notions and his person, but of the heretical and actually anti-BXVI “theology” contained in the booklets. And apparently all done with the confidence that BXVI was too out-of-it to notice, and that the rest of us are so dumb that we’d never dream of questioning anything that comes out of their Lordships’ sacred precincts. So in addition to everything else, it’s a massive insult and a pretty clear sign of what Francis’ coterie thinks of everbody outside it.

The latest is that the Italian news agency ANSA was told by “authoritative Vatican sources” that there has [allegedly] been “no manipulation” of the letter. Rather, it is “clearly an artistic photo”.

If it is art, then Josef Goebbels was a great artist.