Exchanging one Modernist for another…
Patrick Coffin dumps Francis, reverts to Benedict XVI
Patrick Coffin is the latest big-name individual in the Novus Ordo Church to publicly announce his belief that Benedict XVI’s resignation from the “Papacy” in 2013 was invalid, and therefore Francis is an Antipope (=false pope). This position has received various monikers over the years, such as “Benevacantism”, “Beneplenism”, the “BiP theory” (BiP = Benedict is Pope), and “Resignationism” (our preferred term).
Coffin came to prominence in the conservative “Catholic” world as host of the radio program Catholic Answers Live put out by the high-profile Novus Ordo apologetics org Catholic Answers, founded by Karl Keating and currently run by Christopher Check. In 2013, Coffin moderated a two-hour episode with Tim Staples on “radical traditionalism”.
By adopting the position that Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) is “still” Pope, Coffin joins other well-known individuals such as Vatican journalists Messrs. Marco Tosatti and Antonio Socci, Fr. René Gracida (retired Novus Ordo bishop of Corpus Christi, Texas), the Rev. Jan Paweł Lenga (retired Novus Ordo archbishop of Karaganda, Kazakhstan), the Rev. Paul Kramer, the late Rev. Nicholas Gruner, the ecclesiastical historian Dr. Edmund Mazza, the late Colombian academic Dr. José Galat, and bloggers Br. Alexis Bugnolo and Miss Ann Barnhardt (formerly also Mr. Louie Verrecchio).
Coffin made a 30-minute video explaining his reasons for concluding that Benedict’s resignation was invalid and that Francis is an Antipope (amusingly, several times during his presentation Coffin refers to John Paul II (r. 1978-2005) as a “Saint”, forgetting that it was Antipope Francis who canonized him in 2014):
In the video description, Coffin spells out the seven “evidence items” he presents in the clip, as follows:
1) The term “pope emeritus” has no precedent and is confusing
2) Pope Benedict XVI seems to have resigned only part of the papacy, the active ministerium, not the office or munus of the papacy
3) Pope Benedict’s longtime personal secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein has made statements that appear to affirm Benedict’s continued papal identity
4) Pope Benedict’s correct form of address is still “Your Holiness”
5) There are at least three errors in the official Latin “declaratio” read by Pope Benedict on February 11th 2013
6) “Universal peaceful acceptance” by the Church of Francis has never really occurred
7) The canonically illegal behavior of the St. Gallen Mafia cardinals in conspiring to vote in their man from Buenos Aires in 2013 invalidates the Conclave
If one believes that Ratzinger was a valid Pope when he issued his resignation in February of 2013, the arguments given by Coffin are, on the surface, quite reasonable. Of course, adding fuel to the fire is the downright idiotic and even contradictory things the “Pope Emeritus” has reportedly said about his resignation and his current status, including the idea that he retains the “spiritual dimension” of the Papacy, that he is still wearing white because “there were no other clothes available”, that he created the office of the “Pope Emeritus” in order to make “completely clear that there is only one Pope”, and that he accepts the heretic “Abp.” Georg Gänswein‘s explanation that “he did not renounce this ministry [service]” but “augmented the personal office [of the Papacy] with a collegial and synodal dimension, as a shared ministry so to speak” and that therefore there is now “de facto an expanded ministry — with an active and a contemplative member” (source).
From his video, it is clear that Patrick Coffin is looking for an explanation as to how it is possible for Francis to be an Antipope, and he believes he’s found his explanation in the unconventional resignation of Joseph Ratzinger. At the end of his presentation Coffin asserts: “Pope Benedict XVI is a wise and holy man who, in the end, really didn’t want to be Pope” and concludes: “Maybe he didn’t flee the wolves. Maybe he outfoxed them.”
Let’s play this game for a minute and assume the Vatican II Church were the true Church and Benedict the real Pope: What would the Catholic Church gain by Benedict allowing the apostate Bergoglio to take over as apparent pope and destroy the Church and mislead countless souls while the real Pope is spending the remainder of his days being secretly valid in his little dorm on the Vatican grounds? How would that “outfox” the enemies of Christ? In fact, had Benedict resigned validly, that would have opened up the way to a valid successor, thus guaranteeing that God’s protections for the Papacy would descend upon the new Pope. How, then, would there be anything humble or holy about such a “clever” non-resignation as Coffin believes Ratzinger to have pulled off? If Benedict “really didn’t want to be Pope”, there would have been an easy way to make that wish a reality: by resigning validly.
No, this thesis of Benedict “outfoxing” the wolves really doesn’t add up. What his bizarre resignation and the ongoing “Pope Emeritus” circus does accomplish, however, is give an alternate way out to those Novus Ordos who can tell that there’s no way Francis could be Pope and therefore would have become sedevacantists by now had Ratzinger not provided them with this much more palatable alternative to the dreaded and hated sedevacantism:
- Anything but Sedevacantism! Analysis of a curious Phenomenon
- Why do so many fear Sedevacantism? Analyzing a Mental Block
- Eclipse of the Church: The Case for Sedevacantism
Years ago we created a meme to bring home the illusion the Resignationists are falling for. While believing themselves to have escaped the Francis Deception, they have simply bought into another one, one which still keeps them attached to the Modernist counter-church of the Second Vatican Council:
Whether you accept Francis as Pope or Benedict XVI, either way you are guaranteed to get only one thing: more Vatican II.
Some time back, we pointed out in an in-depth article that far from concluding that Ratzinger’s resignation from the Supreme Pontificate wasn’t valid on account of his strange beliefs about the Papacy, people ought to conclude that his ascendancy to it was never valid in the first place; because then-“Cardinal” Ratzinger had published a book in 1982 in which he explicitly calls into doubt the dogma of Papal Primacy as defined by the First Vatican Council, thus making him a public heretic and therefore inherently unable to be Pope:
Now that, as well as Ratzinger’s other heretical beliefs, is something Patrick Coffin should spend some time investigating — instead of exchanging one Modernist Antipope for another.
Image source: composite with elements from rumble.com (screenshot) and Associated Press (Andrew Medichini)
License: fair use and rights-managed
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