Friday, January 24, 2020

papal sabotage?

Does anyone  remember  the strange things  that  kept happening  to  Benedict  before his  abdication? Early  in  his papacy he enjoyed  putting  on a black  cassock  and  going for a  walk  around the  Vatican  at night. He'd only take his assistant  Ganswein  with him. Somebody leaked it to the press and he stopped. Who leaked it and why with the hint that something  untoward  must be going on?

One year Benedict  decided to wear one John XXIII'ds old red caps.  Well John was a big ole man and the cap did not fit Benedict. It was way too big, he looked foolish and was mocked in both Catholic and secular media. Did Ganswein or anyone else in the papal household not see that the cap was too big and if they did why did they not point it out?

Does anybody  recall his valet who was spying  on Benedict and stealing  from him, Who  hired the  valet? Who interviewed him and who besides the pope did he report to? 

The really embarrassing sight of the homoerotic acrobats performing for Benedict  could have been avoided. The Pellegrini Brothers had just performed at the Barcelona gay circus. Didn't anybody at the Vatican know that? Did nobody check out their act with all the strutting, pouting and stripper moves before booking them? The pope was polite--- too polite for his own good, he smiled and clapped. It looked like the  Holy Father enjoyed  a strip tease show and people all over the world snickered. 

The rainbow flag was displayed right below the Vatican flag when the pope visited a town in Italy back in 2008, and the as the pope processed by he was of course photographed with it. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith was in charge of the staging of the visit so somebody official knew about the flag and approved it. Did it not occur to this person that the pope would be seen with a rainbow flag or was that the point of the exercise?


Even security seemed to fail him. A crazy woman tackled him twice in different years and the reaction from the Vatican press office seemed to be nonchalant. 



As Ian Flemming wrote, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”  Was everyone around Benedict, including Archbishop Ganswein, truly incompetent or was he sabotaged, in subtle as well as gross ways until he decided to leave the battlefield?