This LifeSiteNews.com article discusses “The final confrontation: Examining the end times through the lens of Fatima and Benedict XVI.”
In it is a reference to an early church theologian named Tyconius. Most people have never heard of Tyconius, but in researching the sayings of Pope Benedict XVI during his pontificate, one can see Tyconius had an impact on Pope Benedict XVI to the point where the Holy Pope makes reference to Tyconius as a great theologian. But, Tyconius was separated from church.
https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-18-2023-mon-jan-16-tyconius/Ticonius, an African who lived a generation before St Augustine…was not a Catholic; he belonged to the schismatic Donatist Church, yet he was a great theologian. In his commentary he sees the Apocalypse above all as a reflection of the mystery of the Church. Ticonius had reached the conviction that the Church was a bipartite body: on the one hand, he says, she belongs to Christ, but there is another part of the Church that belongs to the devil. Augustine read this commentary and profited from it but strongly emphasized that the Church is in Christ’s hands, that she remains His Body, forming one with Him, sharing in the mediation of grace. He therefore stresses that the Church can never be separated from Jesus Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI, on April 22, 2009, at his Wednesday General Audience devoted to the theology of Giovanni Ambrose Autpert, who lived in the 700s. Autpert cited Tyconius (link) in his writing. Just one week after this audience, Benedict went to Aquila in central Italy, about a 2-hour drive from Rome, and left his pallium, the wool stole he wore as a symbol of his authority as the Bishop of Rome, on the tomb of Pope Celestine V, who had resigned the papacy in 1294 after only five months as Pope. A little less than four years later, Benedict also would resign the papacy…
Attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church.
Pope Benedict XVI, May 2010, on his trip to Fatima, in response to a journalist’s question
Tyconius assertions:
- The Great Apostacy – The True Believers Will Leave The Church
- Satan’s Chosen Instrument: The Bishops “The bishops do, under the guise of a gift of the church, what advances the will of the devil.”[48] The bishops offer to the beast the veneer of a lamb, while he uses them as mouthpieces for his agenda.
- The Passion of the Church