Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI The anger of people frustrated by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI is affecting him and devalues his pontificate, according to letters written by the Pope Emeritus and published today in a German newspaper.
“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate,” Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote in a letter to Germany’s Cardinal Walter Brandmüller on November 23 last year.
“In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today,” he continued, observing that “out of this conflation a new agitation is gradually being generated”.
Cardinal Brandmüller had been – with Cardinals Raymond Burke, Joachim Meisner and Carlo Caffara, one of four cardinals who signed a 2016 dubia (doubts) letter calling for Pope Francis to clarify to their satisfaction aspects of Amoris Laetita, his exhortation on marriage and the family.
Cardinals Meisner and Caffara died last year, and in October, a month after Cardinal Caffara’s death, Cardinal Brandmüller expressed his frustration with Benedict’s resignation.
“The figure of ‘Pope Emeritus’ does not exist in the entire history of the Church,” he told theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, continuing: “The fact that a Pope comes along and topples a 2,000-year-old tradition bowled over not just us cardinals.”
Responding to these comments on November 9, the Pope Emeritus wrote: “Eminence!” You said that with ‘pope emeritus,’ I had created a figure that had not existed in the whole history of the church. You know very well, of course, that popes have abdicated, albeit very rarely. What were they afterward? Pope emeritus? Or what else?”
He noted how Pius XII had feared capture by the Nazis and prepared a resignation in case that occurred, and said that while the wartime Pope had decided that he would become a cardinal again were he captured, this would not have been a practical option for him.
“In my case it would certainly not have been sensible to simply claim a return to being cardinal. I would then have been constantly as exposed to the media as a cardinal is — even more so because people would have seen in me the former Pope,” he wrote, adding: “Whether on purpose or not, this could have had difficult consequences, especially in the context of the current situation.”
He had instead opted to become Pope Emeritus, he said, so as to ensure his successor’s authority was not in dispute: “I tried to create a situation in which I am absolutely not accessible to the media and in which it is completely clear that there is only one pope. If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I chose, please tell me.”
Passages from the letters have been published in Germany’s Bild newspaper, with the letters being shared with The New York Times.