Benedictus - gratias

Rev dear Rev: Is there something finally that you would like to say to a dying pope?

Gratias ago vobis kai en tibi gratias personaliter, Benedicte Decimus-Sextus. Just for old time’s sake, it seems appropriate to say thanks in the old mother tongue of the westerners and the easterners at Constantinople to an old veteran of the discussion wars and the theology guru tomes. So it is gratias or thanks to Benedictus XVI. And furthermore, if I were a brilliant musician, instead of being just a charismatic popularisor of old tunes and new lyrics, I would compose a Missa Solemnis for Benedictus and include a Benedictus like that of the Mass for the Armed Man by Dr Carl Jenkins. A fitting tribute to a powerful voice for reason in moderne theologie. And to the general hoi poloi reading this, his secretaries would say not to listen unduly to the usual headlines about clergy below him in his dioceses in the past, since between 1977 and 1982 there was no new code of canon law to empower him as a bishop to kick any of them out of his diocese. He had to suffer and pray and wring his hands like every other bishop in that timeframe and pray that all the trendy theologians of the far left would give up their campaign to kick in tribunals, rubbish lawyers, dismantle canon law from the top, depose bishops that tried, and so there was no coex to enable those poor benighted bishops to punish errant wayward and criminal young clergy whose popularities had gone to their heads. Simple, a far left problem at the time. Bishops, all bishops, thuswise exonerated, period. 1977-1982.