Pope Benedict’s Great Leap Backward Predicted

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Friends,
Is the Latin “mess” back? Pope Benedict XVI has issued Summorum Pontificum, which grants priests the right to celebrate Mass in Latin using the 1962 Roman Missal. The prayers contained in the Easter Triduum, in particular those for the Good Friday mass, dropped the hateful qualifier “perfidious” to those in the cross hairs of conversion, the Jews. However, the more indirectly derogatory Latin words remain. I have colored these in the following English translation of the prayer. I struck through the word “perfidious” as it has been removed:

For the conversion of the perfidious Jews. Let us pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, You do not refuse Your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of Your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord…

Hmm! God is great! Even the Jews might receive His mercy. Even them. Jesus Christ! What a divine stretch of the Father. Even those closed-hearted, blind, unenlightened Jews.

At least the restored prayer didn’t call them perfidious, did it? Not directly at least.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “perfidy” as a “deliberate breach of faith; calculated violation of trust; treachery.” You break down the word from the Latin perfidia, from perfidus, treacherous (per– [destruction] plus fides – [faith]).

So Pope Benedict now encourages a version of the Latin prayer be used, with its anti-Semitic edges softened by his predecessor John XXIII, shortly after he became pope in 1959 and sanctified the change as canon law in Vatican II in 1962. This version doesn’t say a Jew is openly perfidious but it kept in all the follow-up explanations why a Jew is perfidious.

It seems to me that it is another theological trick of semantics. The pope in this Latin mass re-qualifies in its language that the Roman Catholic Church is holier than thou, be your faith Protestant, Islamic, Pagan, Atheist and especially if you are Jewish.

What then defines the Jew who openly resists and undermines the spread of what Pope Benedict’s restored Latin mass declares is the greatest of faiths?

Is a Jew rejecting Christianity in open breach of the holiest of holies? If a Jew seeks to prevent conversion to that faith of family or community members, is that Jew actively involved in a calculated campaign to destroy trust in the greatest of faiths? Is this deliberate breach of faith not treachery of the worst kind if a potential convert loses and rejects faith in Christ and thereby is doomed to eternal damnation?

The threads of perfidy remain in the prayer even if the pope got rid of the  “p” word.

Those Jews who are unenlightened, closed-hearted, blind to the good news of Christ are not just against the “anointed one,” the Christos. Unless this prayer lifts their darkness from their hearts, they are a people serving that, which is “anti-Christ.”

History ever repeats itself even though the crimes and hatreds resurface in more subtle and sophisticated language and attitudes.

The following passages from my eBook The Last Pope Revisited seem to have anticipated the anti-Liberal revolution of the current Pope Benedict. The restoration of the Latin mass is but a first step in redefining the Roman Catholic Church in as sneaky and as politically correct a fashion possible. Benedict’s Church will no longer be the Church of your grandparents and Vatican II. Lines defining the faith will be drawn. A will to triumphalist power waxes in Benedict. His reign, as short as I believe it could be, is an answer, some say a reaction, to the reign and liberal revolution of Vatican II he once supported as a young priest.

This is what I wrote about the prophecy of St. Malachy concerning this pope, in my eBook The Last Pope. The brackets are added for clarification:

***

Every new pontiff adopts a name that is a message — often a challenge. From the first day as Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger made his aim clear. He would succeed as a global peacemaker where his most recent predecessor bearing the name Benedict had sadly failed.

Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, Pope Benedict XV, was on Ratzinger’s mind when the fourth ballot of the Conclave made him pope. This previous Benedict, a staunch conservative in his short reign (1914–1922), strove to suppress the so-called “progress” and liberalism of modern times. Like Cardinal Ratzinger nearly a century later, he took the name and the resolve of the great St. Benedict, the uniter and reformer who reconciled Western Christendom in Europe.

St. Benedict (c. 480 — 550) founder of the most ancient and influential monastic order and codes of law had a significant impact on the Western world. St. Benedict (meaning “the Blessed”) brought together diverse European Christian factions mainly through his passionate yet uncompromising adherence to preserving the true faith, as he saw it. To him, it was better to weed out backsliders and reduce the number of Christian believers than weaken the faith. St. Benedict’s symbols are the broken cup (which contained poison), the raven (who removed the cup at his bidding) and the rod for corporal punishment.

The last and “fifteenth” pope who tried to live up to the name Benedict was crowned a few weeks after the eruption of the First World War. He prayed he might undertake a negotiated peace between God’s warring Christian children arrayed across Europe with gun and bayonet in bloody stalemate along hundreds of miles of opposing lines of barbed wired trenches … Pope Benedict’s neutrality only made both sides suspicious of his intentions. The war meat grinded on while Benedict, far away on his throne in the Vatican, preached peace on the sidelines, little regarded and his seven-point peace plan, ignored …

The new and “sixteenth” Pope Benedict chose to be upbeat when explaining to a gathered multitude of well-wishers crowding St. Peter’s Square on 27 April 2005 why he had taken the name of the last failed Christian uniter for his own. He said he would emulate Benedict XV as “that courageous prophet of peace, who guided the Church through turbulent times of war.”

He added, “In his footsteps I place my ministry in the service of reconciliation and harmony between peoples.”

… I predict that if Benedict XVI has his symbolic way, he will be the raven clutching and taking away St. Benedict’s broken cup brimming with the poison of what he has often described in his copious writings on Church doctrine to be the liberalism and relativism undermining the European Church. He will not spare the rod and spoil the children of Christ. Doctrinal, dogmatic, he will be a single pointed gardener of Christ ready to save the few flowers by pulling out all the weeds. If in the end that leads to a further exodus decimating congregations in Europe, so be it. Leave the churches to those strong in a foundation of faith in Christ to rebuild the faith anew.

Anyway, we are speaking about “God’s rottweiler” or “Cardinal Panzer” here. These are the names Ratzinger earned as former Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith during John Paul’s reign because of his tough — some say ruthless — expunging and excommunicating of progressive theological thinkers. Initial signs, however, show the sharp edged Ratzinger’s transformation into Pope Benedict being a more centrist and even-handed pontiff than he was in his old job. It must be remembered that Ratzinger’s job description in earlier eras was less politically correct. Call him “Grand Inquisitor.” If moderation proves unsuccessful in saving the European Church, this pope might revert back to being God’s rottweiler and get a new nickname: “Pope Panzer.”

The last Pope Benedict had played feeble peacemaker saddled with the First World War. Many prophecy watchers believe the new Benedict will shepherd the Catholic Church through the early days of a Third World War. Proponents of Christian and Islamic apocalyptic fundamentalism across the board from evangelical fire breathers like Hal Lindsey to Wahabi mujahadeen bombers like Usama bin Laden believe with almost unveiled glee that the current escalation of conflicts in the Middle East, spreading beyond the US quagmire in Iraq, herald the first stages of Judeo-Christian and Islamic visions of Armageddon …

[The medieval St. Malachy’s prophetic motto in Latin for Benedict XVI is De gloria olivae {from the Glory of the Olive}. It] hides a theological twist of entrail. There are darker portents than peace as a hallmark of Benedict XVI’s reign. The Olivetans were a reform branch of white robed monks of the Benedictine Order, established in the 14th century [ergo the prophecy indirectly names the present day pope as “Benedict”]. The olive branch may be their symbol but the Sermon on the Mount of Olives from the New Testament is their creed. The Olivetans believe they are destined to prepare the world for the Apocalypse foretold in Christ’s Mount of Olives sermon.

The Benedictines in general — and the Olivetan Benedictines in particular — prophesied a Benedictine pope arriving near the end of days before the Apocalypse and God’s judgment on the world. They expected him to live and tend his Christian flock at the onset of strange dire days fulfilling what Jesus Christ had imparted in Jerusalem to his disciples nearly 2,000 years ago …

The time is coming when you will hear the noise of battle near at hand and the news of battles far away; see that you are not alarmed. Such things are bound to happen; but the end is still to come. For nation will make war upon nation, kingdom upon kingdom; there will be famines and earthquakes in many places. With all these things the birth-pangs of the new age begin. (Matthew. 24:6-8)

…St. Benedict rescued the Christian faith in Europe from the Dark Ages. I believe Pope Benedict sees his pontificacy standing on the brink of a new dark age, requiring he girdle all his will to power peace and Catholic conformity and save European Christians from apostasy and perhaps an apocalypse too. This Benedict’s reign, like the last, will be overshadowed by a world war — not so much as a clash of Christians but a clash of civilizations programmed and divided by faith [the Christian and Islamic]…

The Last Pope
Pages  55 – 57, 58 – 58

***

I predict Pope Benedict in his brief pontificacy will prepare for the coming dark age by affecting an invisible Vatican “III ” He will reinterpret the rulings of Vatican II making changes as sweeping in a reign as short if not shorter than that of John XXIII (1959 – 1963). Prophetically speaking, Benedict stands at the end of the eleventh hour before the apocalypse. If his view of the Holy Church can triumph against the approaching darkness, Pope Benedict will try to turn the clock back to a conservative, pre-Vatican II papal triumphalism.

John Hogue
(11 August 2007)

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