It was great to meet up once more with my good friend Michael Voris of the ChurchMilitant.TV who came to Cebu to speak before a Cebu Archdiocese Human Life International-Pilipinas Council of Laity sponsored event on a Pro-Life Nation with the theme “Catholics and Politics: The Future is in our Hands.†The forum was held at the Cebu Business Hotel along Colon St. and it was full of people. Call it a pleasant surprise because as it turned out, many people have come to know Michael Voris because his talk show, which appears only in the Internet about Catholicism, appears as a show on MyTV entitled My Catholic Perspective on Sundays at 1:00PM and 9:00pm.
I met Michael Voris last year as we had a joint talk at the Carmelite Church where I talked about Modernism and he talked about Liberalism. Then I did a one-on-one interview with him on my talkshow Straight from the Sky about the dangers of contraception and the evils that surrounds the Catholic Church. His trip was sponsored by the Pro-Life Philippines Foundation of Eric Manalac and the Kapatiran Party-List group.
If there is anything that would never make Michael Voris forgets about Cebu… it was that just a few minutes before he was to speak, we got word from CNN that Pope Benedict XVI was resigning at the end of the month. Indeed, this was certainly shocking news to the billion Catholics all over the word. So the first question in everyone’s lips was why was he resigning? After the brutally frank talk of Michael Voris on Catholicism and Politics, we already got the full text of his resignation message.
Since you can read the full text in this newspaper, let me just quote the most relevant parts. The first part was already dramatic when he said, “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advance age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.
Pope Benedict continued, “However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength and mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.
For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.â€
History has been made once more in Rome. The last pontiff who quit on the job was Pope Gregory XII in the year 1417. But his case was a different one. It was then that there were two popes, Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope John XIII of Avignon. Somehow the Council of Constance got the two popes to resign so that a new election could take place, but that’s a long story.
Last May 19, 2012, I wrote in my Philippine Star column an article entitled, “Is Pope Benedict the Second to the Last Pope? In that article I mentioned about the dream of St. Pope Piux X who dreamed of a pope being murdered. Much later in his life, when he was dying, he remembered that dream and that the murdered pope had a same name as him. St. Pope Piux X’s first name was Giuseppe or Joseph in English and there is no other pope by that name until the election of Josef Ratzinger in April of 2005.
On that same article, I also mentioned the prophesies of St. Malachy who predicted that the second to the last pope would be shot and murdered. St. Malachy was able to predict the names of all the popes after the 12th Century up to the last one by linking something to the name of the pope. For Pope Benedict XVI, his sign was the Glory of the Olive. The link to Pope Benedict is that the Benedictine Order uses an olive branch as its symbol.
So do we take Pope Benedict’s word that he is physically tired and unable to continue with his duties due to his advancing age? Or could it be that he is preempting the prophesy of St. Malachy… that by resigning, he won’t be the pope who was murdered in the dream of Pope Pius X? Perhaps we shall know the real score in the days to come.
For sure, Catholics all over the world will be losing their “German shepherd†who for a quarter of a century was the chief enforcer of Catholic Doctrine in the Vatican. To the billion Catholics out there… it is time again for a Vatican conclave… where the cardinals from all over the world would go to Rome to elect the new Supreme Pontiff. With the “smoke of Satan†entering Church… we can only hope and pray that we’ll get an even better pope, more so in this Year of Faith as declared by Pope Benedict.
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