Exclusive Report and First Hand testimony by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

Msgr. Nicola Bux has for some years claimed to have received a letter from Pope Benedict XVI, dated, August 21, 2014. He has made this claim only years after 2014.

At first he claimed to have the letter, and then he claimed it clearly indicated that Pope Benedict XVI had validly and completely abdicated. But he refused to show it to anyone.

Mgsr. Nicola Bux is the theologian, who worked in the Roman Curia, who in October of 2018, said, “It would be easier to demonstrate the renunciation of Pope Benedict XVI was invalid, than to prove that Pope Francis is a heretic.” (Source PJMedia, which erased the page but kept the url, in an attempt to whitewash history) — Thus, his claim to have this letter is truly problematic.

Finally, he shared an image of what he claimed was the letter, in its totality to Andrea Cionci.

And when that happened, Cionci asked my expert opinion about the matter, under agreement that I would speak to no one about it. That was like 4-5 years ago.

Now, in his recently published boox, “Reality and Utopia in the Church”, Msgr. Bux has published a photograph of the alleged letter. And so I am no longer bound to keep quiet about it.

Last fall I reported the problem with Msgr. Bux’s claims and interpretation, in this article, “Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to Msgr. Bux is signed, “Benedict”.

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The import of how Pope Benedict XVI signed is essential to how to read the letter.

First of all because we have no evidence that Pope Benedict XVI wrote the letter as it stands, for it is printed on several sheets by a printer and was evidently composed on a computer. And, even if he dictated it, we have no evidence that what he said was faithfully recorded. The signature on the letter seems forced, if I remember it well.

Thus, the claimed text, cited in the Gloria TV article, does not mean what it appears:

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Because, ostensibly it appears to be a total denial that he failed to renounce completely the Papacy. But if you actually read the entire letter, it is an exercise in the most studied ambiguity, as so many other statements made by Pope Benedict XVI from the morning of Feb. 11, 2013, til his death on Dec. 31, 2022.

For if you sign a letter with the statement quoted above, “Joseph Ratzinger”, then the statement, means, “Yes, I renounced completely, and thus there are not two popes, one in schism with another, me and Pope Francis.”

But if you sign the letter, “Benedict”, that is with your regnal name, then the phrase takes on the opposite meaning, “Since it would be contrary to the Catholic Faith that I renounce only part of the Papal office and not the other, since they are inseparable, the truth is I have not renounced the office at all, since if you do not renounce the munus, you also keep the ministerium”.

This is why I call what Msgr. Bux is doing ,”fraud”, because he never speaks about HOW the letter is signed, which is the clearest textual fact in the letter, and certainly cannot be ignored as the key to understanding what it means to say.

There are those who think Pope Benedict XVI was confused, but the precision and consistency of his studied ambiguity, is clear in its continually consistent signification: “I remain the one and only true Pope”, as Andrea Cionci has so brilliantly demonstrated in his book, “The Ratzinger Code”, a book which I, myself, have always thought so highly of, that Cionci even asked me to translate it into English. The book took its inspiration from my reports at FromRome.Info, especially my conjecture that there was a hidden meaning in the very text of the Renunciation, a thesis I developed fully in my Third Translation of the Renuciation.

For this reason, I believe there are only two sane hypothesis regarding why Pope Benedict XVI acted this way, and they are not exclusive: that he purposely did not resign so as to make the papacy of Pope Francis null and void. And this is in fact juridically what happened. Or he did not fully resign to retain sovereign immunity, and to avoid the duty to investigate the endemic corruption in the Vatican, which includes Pope John Paul II’s involvement in the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, in a pedo-trafficking ring at the Vatican. Still, I do think it is credible, though in a lesser sense, that he simply did not realize that in renouncing only the ministerium, he did not make it juridically possible, as he thought, that the Cardinals elect another as Pope.

Being a serious scholar of history, and not partisan, I have shown how each approach can be sustained. God alone is Benedict’s judge; but the canonical result is one: he was the true Pope until death, regardless of what anyone else might think, even himself.

For my complete coverage of the controversy, see my Index to the Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, which, remains the only online archive of news reports, analyses, testimonies, controversies, debates, writings etc.. about the controversy, that without a doubt, it will one day be archived in the Vatican Library.

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The Book on the Trinity, every faithful Catholic priest would love as his next present

This is Br. Bugnolo's English Translation, of Saint Bonaventure's encylopedic book of theology on the Trinity: With this book, your priest will always have something intelligent and awesomely inspiring to preach to you about God the Father, God the Son & God the Holy Spirit!

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