✣ Archbishop outlines 'expanded' Petrine ministry
What happened? The co-existence of a Pope Emeritus and a Pope does not represent two people in competition but an “expanded Petrine” ministry, Archbishop Georg Gänswein has claimed. During a presentation of a new book on Benedict’s pontificate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in May, the prefect of the papal household said: “The papal ministry is not the same as before ... and yet it is a foundation that Benedict XVI has profoundly and lastingly transformed.” What the Vatican-watchers are saying David Gibson of Religious News Service thought Archbishop Gänswein was contradicting the Pope Emeritus’s own words: “Benedict himself has always stressed that Francis is the one legitimate pope, but Gänswein’s remarkable argument for a ‘transformed’ papacy and an ‘expanded ministry’ with two popes working in tandem raises all manner of questions given the Catholic Church’s clear teaching on the supreme authority and central role of the pope, the successor of St Peter.” The blog Rorate Caeli said the idea that the papacy has been “transformed in its very depths, and that to effect this transformation Benedict XVI’s will and actions in February 2013 were enough, raises extremely sensitive, nay, disturbing questions about the very theology of the Church”. What British blogs are saying The priest-blogger Fr John Hunwicke argued that election to the papacy was a “purely administrative act”, unlike ordination as a priest. So “there can only be one pope, and that pope is Francis ... Being elected pope does not mean that through all eternity you will be, in some mystical mysterious sort of way, a pope. When you die or abdicate, you cease being a pope.” Fr Ray Blake suggested that the role of the papacy had changed due to mass communications, and consequently the pope was no longer a “prisoner of the Vatican” as he was recognised by both Catholics and non-Catholics as a “moral” and “world leader”. He concluded: “The ‘expanded papacy’ is presumably a reference to the fact that as long as Benedict is alive Pope Francis has to take his legacy into account.”
