B16 Turns Back the Clock

[Doug]

See here.

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.


Now those calendars from 1350 can be re-used!

Benedict approved a document from his old offices at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that restates church teaching on relations with other Christians. It was the second time in a week the pope has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that modernized the church.

On Saturday, Benedict revisited another key aspect of Vatican II by reviving the old Latin Mass. Traditional Catholics cheered the move, but more liberal ones called it a step back from Vatican II.

...The document, signed by the congregation prefect, U.S. Cardinal William Levada, was approved by Benedict on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul — a major ecumenical feast day.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

When and if Benedict xvi gets to heaven, John xxiii is going to have strong words with him.

[Dardedar]

DAR
The guy looks like a character actor gifted for the role of an evil looking nazi.

[Doug]

DAR
The guy looks like a character actor gifted for the role of an evil looking nazi.

DOUG
He IS a character actor gifted for the role of an evil looking nazi.

He is a character actor because the stereotyped role as Pope has pretty much all his lines written for him before he takes office. He can throw in a few ad libs here and there, but his role is largely predetermined.

And he's evil. And he was a Nazi. Hopefully, he no longer is.

From here.

The question of Joseph Ratzinger’s involvement with Nazi Germany and the Hitler Youth is important: there is reason to think that Ratzinger has been less than fully candid about his past.

During much of the Nazi era, Joseph Ratzinger lived with his family in Traunstein, Germany, a small and staunchly Catholic town between Munich and Salzburg. During World War I there was a prisoner-of-war camp located here where, ironically, Adolf Hitler worked between December 1918 and March 1919. The town is located near the region of Austria which Hitler came from.

Resistance to the Nazis was dangerous and difficult, but not impossible. Elizabeth Lohner, a Traunstein resident whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, has been quoted as saying, “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

B16 was a member of the Nazi Youth and served in the German military in 1943, but deserting near the end of the war. The official party line of the Catholics is that Joseph Ratzinger (his real name) belonged to the Nazi Youth and to the military against his will.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

It's possible that he was in the Nazi Party against his will - Hitler's love of pre-christian mythology via Wagner was partly to unite a country divided by protestants in the north and catholics in the south, but most of the Nazi officers, etc. came from the protestant north and would have no problem whatsoever "making an example" of a recalcitrant catholic youth. However, he may not. The irony of Benedict xvi eroding vatican II plank by plank is that john xxiii, at the time Benedict was in the Nazi Party, was forging baptismal certificates for jewish kids to protect them from those same Nazis.