Since necromancy is forbidden me as a new Catholic convert, I can't try to contact Theresa Caputo, the Long Island medium, to get Fr Tony's side of the story. All I can say is that I'm not making this up. However, I did check Wikipedia to discover that Georg Ratzinger, who is older than the Pope Emeritus, was nearly blind and had serious cardiac problems during this period and would almost certainly not have been making the rounds of the TAC bishops. A knowledgeable party also told me that Pope Benedict's sister never married, so that there was no possibility of a brother-in-law.
I was told, however, that a sometime Catholic canonist had been making similar approaches to ACA bishops with the same sort of message, although he'd turned out to be a con artist who wound up asking for major money. Whether this was related to the putative visit from Georg Ratzinger, I can't say, although my informant tells me that John Hepworth was telling people the same things as well -- that, basically, whatever people may have thought about whether parishes could retain control of their property, whether Masons could become Catholic, whether those divorced and remarried with a living ex could do the same, would all be finessed.
All I can say is that as stories like this keep coming up, it's plain that a great deal of wishful thinking accompanied the runup to the Ordinariate, and Catholic authorities did little to prevent it. The answers to some questions were pretty clear: nobody was going to make exceptions for Masons. On the other hand, would parishes need to revise their bylaws and articles of incorporation before they went into the Ordinariate? The Ordinariate itself was giving inconsistent answers on these sorts of issues.
In a meeting in January 2012, for instance, a parishioner with legal background posed just this question to Msgr Stetson, who himself has a degree from Harvard Law. Msgr Stetson gave a simple, definite "no" -- the parish would be received, and the legal issues would be resolved down the road. Yet not long after this, the Ordinariate had reversed itself and had become quite impatient that Fr Kelley had not yet revised the parish bylaws and articles of incorporation, which delay was cited as a reason for not receiving the parish.
Responding to my own complaints, the Ordinariate's Chancellor excused herself by saying, "We're making things up as we go along". I spent part of my career writing policies and procedures for corporations -- such things do in fact need to be worked out; they need to be worked out in advance; they need to be published where people know where to look. On one hand, the assortment of crazies and con artists that infest "continuing Anglicanism" have taken advantage of the vacuum the Ordinariate has allowed to continue, but on the other, the Ordinariate has been placing blame on people, such as Fr Kelley, whose faults lie in the direction of conscientiousness, when actual responsibility for confusion and delay lies much closer to home.
