From Patrick Coffin, the latest BiP convert:
An interview with attorney Estefanía Acosta (Part One)
Estefanía Acosta of Medellin, Colombia, is a practicing attorney with expertise in constitutional law, and was for years an official of the State Judicial Power and university professor in the area of commercial and civil law. In 2020, the fruit of diligent research and legal/canonical analysis of the Declaratio read by Benedict XVI on February 13, 2013, materialized in her bombshell book, Benedict XVI: Pope “Emeritus”? The ‘Always Is Also ‘Forever.’”
She felt it would be more effective to do a print interview since the details—the relevant canons, doctrines, and line of argumentation—are rather detailed and technical. Counselor Acosta writes in the lean, compressed style you would expect from a trained lawyer, and her replies carry so much important backstory and attention to detail that I decided it would be best to publish the interview in two parts.
The very topic can appear frankly unsettling for Catholics. At first. Take your time as you go through Part One. You might find yourself, as I did, slowing down to concentrate as you read.
Of the thousands of interviews I have done, this might be the most important. The stakes for the Catholic Church couldn’t be higher, the facts more verifiable, and the sense of hope more palpable, once you allow Estefanía Acosta to lay out—from one angle after another—the case that the sole sitting Roman Pontiff remains His Holiness Benedict XVI. Along the way, she clears aside the misperceptions of what happened on February 11, 2013, what it meant, and what it didn’t.
Read on…
There are times when I just have to get back to the basics … which I do with hymns like this – my favorite hymn of all time by a long shot. I could have this prayer on my lips all day long. No one can take this from me.
How great thou art!
https://gab.com/Xoxlova/posts/107905916258490149
It’s known that God allows evil at times to bring about a greater good. My thought is that if Benedict’s abdication was invalid, the first cause of it was the coercion and/or blackmail that happened beforehand. As I understand it, any abdication for these reasons is invalid. What if God used the possible error in Benedict’s mind, that there can be a plurality of men holding the Papal office, to give the world the concrete evidence (through Benedict’s written declaration) that the resignation was invalid? In other words, if Pope Benedict’s resignation declaration was written correctly according to canon law, but the reason he was resigning was because of these invalidating reasons, the world wouldn’t have any visible, canonical violating evidence, to use as evidence. Could God, in His awesome divine providence, have used an error in Benedict’s thinking to lead us to the truth in this matter? Maybe instead of supernatural protection being almost nonexistent in the Papacy, it is being shown as super abundant in Benedict. I don’t know, just trying to figure this out…