Italian Priest: Francis is not the Pope

[fide]

Lifesite: The well-known Father Giorgio Maria Faré said in an October 13 sermon that he does not believe Francis is pope, arguing the resignation of Benedict XVI was invalid and thus Francis' election was illegitimate.
Article covers some of the canonical issues involved.
Read here.

 

[JEBofChristTheLord]

Interesting. Nth-order consequences will be more so.

 

[mourningdove~]

Italian Priest: Francis is not the Pope

I guess we'll never know but what we can know is that God is allowing this.

Just like ... God is currently allowing the U.S. to have a president who is genuinely cognitively impaired.

And just like God may allow the US. to have a Marxist as the next president.

These are tough times we are living in.

 

[Servus]

It's a bit late for this. He's been in office since 2013 and he's 88 years old. And if he's defrocked and replaced, zillions will claim that was invalid and illegitimate.

 

[RileyG]

He is Pope. Period. To say otherwise would be in schism.

 

[JSRG]

Having glanced over his arguments, they seem very results-based; that is, it doesn't feel like these arguments came about naturally, but rather that he wanted to find some reason to reject Francis, and then ended up coming up with this as a result.

One of the claims he makes is that Benedict didn't really resign, but actually only pretended to resign as part of a convoluted plan to make his enemies think he had resigned but prevent a conclave from being held because he thought he left enough hints to show to the other cardinals that he hadn't really resigned... but those cardinals ignored or missed his clues and held an invalid conclave. Setting aside how speculative this whole idea is, it seems ruined by the fact that Benedict clearly and publicly accepted Francis as pope.

But really, most of the arguments he raises have already been responded to years ago, like here (see particularly the "Objections and Answers" section about 2/3 through).