Pope Benedict XVI To Resign On Feb. 28 Due To Health Concerns
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/11/pope-benedict-xvi-to-resi_n_2660670.html
AP | Posted: 02/11/2013 6:10 am EST | Updated: 02/11/2013 7:08 am ESTThe Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI will resign on Feb. 28, The Associated Press reported. The 85-year-old pope announced the decision on Monday, and cited health concerns as the reason for his departure.
Here's more from The Associated Press:
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign on Feb. 28 because he was simply too infirm to carry on — the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years. The decision sets the stage for a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March.
The 85-year-old pope announced his decision in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals on Monday morning.
He emphasized that carrying out the duties of being pope — the leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide — requires "both strength of mind and body."
"After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry," he told the cardinals. "I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only by words and deeds but no less with prayer and suffering.
"However, in today's world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary — strengths which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me."
The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants.
Benedict called his choice "a decision of great importance for the life of the church."
The move sets the stage for the Vatican to hold a conclave to elect a new pope by mid-March, since the traditional mourning time that would follow the death of a pope doesn't have to be observed.
There are several papal contenders in the wings, but no obvious front-runner — the same situation when Benedict was elected pontiff in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II.
When Benedict was elected pope at age 78 — already the oldest pope elected in nearly 300 years — he had been already planning to retire as the Vatican's chief orthodoxy watchdog to spend his final years writing in the "peace and quiet" of his native Bavaria.
Contenders to be his successor include Cardinal Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, the archbishop of Vienna, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Canadian head of the Vatican's office for bishops.
Longshots include Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. Although Dolan is popular and backs the pope's conservative line, the general thinking is that the Catholic Church doesn't need a pope from a "superpower."
All cardinals under age 80 are allowed to vote in the conclave, the secret meeting held in the Sistine Chapel where cardinals cast ballots to elect a new pope. As per tradition, the ballots are burned after each voting round; black smoke that snakes out of the chimney means no pope has been chosen, while white smoke means a pope has been elected.
Popes are allowed to resign; church law specifies only that the resignation be "freely made and properly manifested."
Only a handful have done so, however and there's good reason why it hasn't become commonplace: Might the existence of two popes — even when one has stepped down — lead to divisions and instability in the church? Might a new resignation precedent lead to pressures on future popes to quit at the slightest hint of infirmity?
Benedict himself raised the possibility of resigning if he were simply too old or sick to continue on in 2010, when he was interviewed for the book "Light of the World."
"If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign," Benedict said.
The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had an intimate view as Pope John Paul II, with whom he had worked closely for nearly a quarter-century, suffered through the debilitating end of his papacy.
Pope Benedict's resignation brings end to paradoxical papacy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-beneditc-resignation-paradoxical-papacy
Messages the former Joseph Ratzinger hoped to convey
were all but drowned out by string of controversies
John Hooper
in Rome
The former Joseph Ratzinger came to the highest office in the Roman Catholic church with a reputation as a challenging, conservative intellectual. But the messages that he sought to convey were all but drowned out, first by a string of controversies that were largely of his own making, and subsequently by the outcry – particularly in Europe – over sexual abuse of young people by Catholic clerics.
Ratzinger had spent almost a quarter of a century in the Vatican, so it was reasonable for the cardinals who elected him to assume he understood it inside out, and would be keen to improve its workings. But, although he had been an influential and trusted lieutenant of John Paul II, the new German pope was a paradox.
On the one hand, he was intellectually remorseless. Not for nothing had he attracted the nickname of "God's Rotweiler". Yet, like many scholars, Benedict was personally timid – wholly lacking in that desk-thumping vigour needed to foist reforms on clerics whose resistance to change is the stuff of legend.
The abuse scandals dominated his seven years as leader of the world's Catholics. Before his accession, there had been scandals in the United States and Ireland. But in 2010, evidence of clerical sex abuse was made public in a succession of countries in continental Europe, notably Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Benedict's native Germany.
The pope was himself affected by one of these scandals. It emerged that, while he was archbishop of Munich, a known molester was quietly re-assigned to duties that, in time, allowed him to return to pastoral duties and make contact with young people.
The flood of allegations represented a vast setback for the project at the heart of Benedict's papacy. The goal he had set for himself, and for which he was elected, was to launch the re-evangelisation of Europe, Catholicism's heartland: it was why he adopted as his papal name that of the continent's patron saint, Benedict of Nursia. But if the numbers of the faithful in Europe as Benedict leaves officeare fewer than when he was elected, then – surveys repeatedly indicated - it is in large part because of anger and despair in the Catholic laity over the sex abuse scandals.
For his supporters, this was richly ironic – and monstrously unfair. In 2001, Benedict's predecessor, pope John Paul II, transferred the responsibility for dealing with it to sex abuse cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican department headed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger. Nothing if not diligent, the future Pope Benedict personally read much of the testimony and, say his apologists, he was deeply shocked and moved by what he learned.
From that point on, they argue, he was determined, in a way his predecessor had never been, to do all in his power to prevent the sexual abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic priests. And it is this that he appears to have been referring to when, in 2005, as John Paul lay dying, he decried the "filth there is in the church".
Before he was elected to be pope, Benedict undoubtedly tightened up the procedures for dealing with paedophile and ephebophile clerics. But critics have argued that a letter he issued in 2001 to dioceses around the world did not make sufficiently clear the responsibility of bishops to inform the civil authorities. Their frequent reluctance to do so was a key reason why evidence of sexual abuse did not surface earlier.
Insufficient vigour in the pursuit of his aims was a charge also levelled at Benedict after he became pope. He showed no interest, for example, in introducing specific reforms to filter out potential abusers before they were appointed to pastoral care. As he made clear in his 2010 letter to Irish Catholics, he believed that the sins of the clergy were an expression of insufficient sanctity rather than a product of defective procedures.
It was not until the same year, moreover, that he created a Vatican department charged with the mission that was originally central to his pontificate. Even then, the so-called Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation was viewed by Vatican insiders as lacking real clout.
A subsidiary aim of – or hope for – Benedict's papacy had been that he would use it to shake up the Roman Curia, the central administration of the Catholic church. The charismatic John Paul was not the sort of man to occupy his time with the reorganisation of a bureaucracy, and by the end of his 26-year pontificate, the Curia was sorely in need of modernisation.
Twice Benedict tried to merge departments and twice he was foiled. The creation of the new department for re-evangelisation meant that the Vatican bureaucracy is actually larger and more complex at the end of Benedict's tenure than it was at the start.
His retiring personality also meant he came to the job with a limited range of contacts in the Curia. And it showed in his appointments. He gave the top post of secretary of state to his former deputy at the CDF, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, an affable cleric but with no experience of the department on which he was imposed.
Benedict's failure to establish a grip on the Curia was to cost him dear, all the more because he showed a marked reluctance to consult others, especially on the impact that his words and decisions might have in the world beyond the Vatican.
The result was a series of gaffes in the early years of his pontificate. In 2006, he outraged Muslims when, in a scholarly lecture at his old university in Regensburg, he used a quotation to the effect that the contributions made by Muhammad were "only evil and inhuman".
That, at least, had the effect of stimulating an exchange with a group of Muslim scholars. But little that was positive emerged from other controversies.
Benedict offended indigenous Latin Americans by claiming that the colonisation of their continent had not involved "the imposition of a foreign culture". And he angered Jews by allowing wider use of the old, Tridentine liturgy, which includes a Good Friday plea that they be "delivered from their darkness".
That decision stemmed from Benedict's keenness to heal the breach with the ultra-traditionalists of the Society of Saint Pius X. In 2009, another raging controversy erupted when he lifted the excommunication of four of the society's bishops.
One was a Holocaust-denying Briton, Richard Williamson. The Vatican said Benedict had been unaware of Williamson's views when he acted. But its disclaimer only raised the question of why that should have been so, particularly given the vulnerability in this area of a pope who, as a boy, had belonged to the Hitler Youth.
The cardinals who elected Benedict had clearly hoped for a short papacy after the lengthy reign of his predecessor. Joseph Ratzinger was the oldest man to be given the job since 1730, his advancing years increasingly apparent during his most recent international forays and his much-vaunted attempt to keep up with the modern world by opening a twitter account.
By choosing someone who had advised John Paul on some of his most important decisions and teachings, they also showed they were voting for continuity. But if the aim of the 2005 conclave was to cue up a tranquil, stopgap, tread-water pontificate then the cardinals who composed it were comprehensively thwarted.
Yet another row blew up in 2009 when Benedict argued that the distribution of condoms in Africa, far from alleviating the problem, was actually making it worse. His claim brought widespread international condemnation, not only from campaigners but also from governments and international bodies.
So it was ironic that the same pope should have been responsible for a profoundly ambiguous reference on the same, critically important subject. In an interview published in 2010, he said that the use of a condom by a prostitute who was attempting to protect his or her client from the HIV virus could be justified on the grounds that it could represent an assumption of moral responsibility.
Vatican officials stressed that Benedict was not condoning artificial methods of birth control. But his remark nevertheless called into question his church's refusal to sanction the use of condoms, even for purposes of disease prevention. It could yet turn out to have been the most significant initiative of Benedict's papacy.
