Pope Benedict XVI to resign, citing age and waning energy
Pope Benedict XVI to resign, citing age and waning energy
Pope Benedict XVI said Monday that he will resign at the end of February because he no longer has the strength to fulfill the duties of his office, news services reported.
Benedict, 85, is the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years. His decision means that for the first time in centuries, there will be a living former pope looking on as his successor leads the Catholic church.
“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,” Benedict said in a statement issued by the Vatican at midday in Rome (6 a.m. Washington time).
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Permalink Reply by Dawn Marie on
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Pope will have security, immunity by remaining in the Vatican
15/02/13 15:37
(Reuters) - Pope Benedict's decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will provide him with security and privacy. It will also offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say.
"His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless. He wouldn't have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else," said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"It is absolutely necessary" that he stays in the Vatican, said the source, adding that Benedict should have a "dignified existence" in his remaining years.
Vatican sources said officials had three main considerations in deciding that Benedict should live in a convent in the Vatican after he resigns on February 28.
Vatican police, who already know the pope and his habits, will be able to guarantee his privacy and security and not have to entrust it to a foreign police force, which would be necessary if he moved to another country.
"I see a big problem if he would go anywhere else. I'm thinking in terms of his personal security, his safety. We don't have a secret service that can devote huge resources (like they do) to ex-presidents," the official said.
Another consideration was that if the pope did move permanently to another country, living in seclusion in a monastery in his native Germany, for example, the location might become a place of pilgrimage.
POTENTIAL EXPOSURE
This could be complicated for the Church, particularly in the unlikely event that the next pope makes decisions that may displease conservatives, who could then go to Benedict's place of residence to pay tribute to him.
"That would be very problematic," another Vatican official said.
The final key consideration is the pope's potential exposure to legal claims over the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals.
In 2010, for example, Benedict was named as a defendant in a law suit alleging that he failed to take action as a cardinal in 1995 when he was allegedly told about a priest who had abused boys at a U.S. school for the deaf decades earlier. The lawyers withdrew the case last year and the Vatican said it was a major victory that proved the pope could not be held liable for the actions of abusive priests.
Benedict is currently not named specifically in any other case. The Vatican does not expect any more but is not ruling out the possibility.
"(If he lived anywhere else) then we might have those crazies who are filing lawsuits, or some magistrate might arrest him like other (former) heads of state have been for alleged acts while he was head of state," one source said.
Another official said: "While this was not the main consideration, it certainly is a corollary, a natural result."
After he resigns, Benedict will no longer be the sovereign monarch of the State of Vatican City, which is surrounded by Rome, but will retain Vatican citizenship and residency.
LATERAN PACTS
That would continue to provide him immunity under the provisions of the Lateran Pacts while he is in the Vatican and even if he makes jaunts into Italy as a Vatican citizen.
The 1929 Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Holy See, which established Vatican City as a sovereign state, said Vatican City would be "invariably and in every event considered as neutral and inviolable territory".
There have been repeated calls for Benedict's arrest over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
When Benedict went to Britain in 2010, British author and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins asked authorities to arrest the pope to face questions over the Church's child abuse scandal.
Dawkins and the late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens commissioned lawyers to explore ways of taking legal action against the pope. Their efforts came to nothing because the pope was a head of state and so enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
In 2011, victims of sexual abuse by the clergy asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the pope and three Vatican officials over sexual abuse.
The New York-based rights group Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and another group, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), filed a complaint with the ICC alleging that Vatican officials committed crimes against humanity because they tolerated and enabled sex crimes.
The ICC has not taken up the case but has never said why. It generally does not comment on why it does not take up cases.
NOT LIKE A CEO
The Vatican has consistently said that a pope cannot be held accountable for cases of abuse committed by others because priests are employees of individual dioceses around the world and not direct employees of the Vatican. It says the head of the church cannot be compared to the CEO of a company.
Victims groups have said Benedict, particularly in his previous job at the head of the Vatican's doctrinal department, turned a blind eye to the overall policies of local Churches, which moved abusers from parish to parish instead of defrocking them and handing them over to authorities.
The Vatican has denied this. The pope has apologized for abuse in the Church, has met with abuse victims on many of his trips, and ordered a major investigation into abuse in Ireland.
But groups representing some of the victims say the Pope will leave office with a stain on his legacy because he was in positions of power in the Vatican for more than three decades, first as a cardinal and then as pope, and should have done more.
The scandals began years before the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in 2005 but the issue has overshadowed his papacy from the beginning, as more and more cases came to light in dioceses across the world.
As recently as last month, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, was stripped by his successor of all public and administrative duties after a thousands of pages of files detailing abuse in the 1980s were made public.
Mahony, who was archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 until 2011, has apologized for "mistakes" he made as archbishop, saying he had not been equipped to deal with the problem of sexual misconduct involving children. The pope was not named in that case.
In 2007, the Los Angeles archdiocese, which serves 4 million Catholics, reached a $660 million civil settlement with more than 500 victims of child molestation, the biggest agreement of its kind in the United States.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope "gave the fight against sexual abuse a new impulse, ensuring that new rules were put in place to prevent future abuse and to listen to victims. That was a great merit of his papacy and for that we will be grateful".
(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Additional reporting by Robin Pomeroy; Edited by Simon Robinson and Giles Elgood)
On line at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/15/us-pope-resignation-immun...
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VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican raised the possibility Saturday that the conclave to elect the next pope might start sooner than March 15, the earliest date possible under current rules that require a 15-20 day waiting period after the papacy becomes vacant.
Vatican spokesman The Rev. Federico Lombardi said that the Vatican rules on papal succession are open to interpretation and that "this is a question that people are discussing."
"It is possible that church authorities can prepare a proposal to be taken up by the cardinals on the first day after the papal vacancy" to move up the start of conclave, Lombardi said.
He explained that the 15-20 day rule is in place to allow time for the arrival of "all those (cardinals) who are absent" to take part in the conclave in the usual circumstances of convening after a pope dies. But in this case, the cardinals already know that this pontificate will end on Feb. 28 with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, and therefore can get to Rome in plenty of time to take part in the conclave, Lombardi said.
The date of the conclave's start is important because Holy Week begins March 24, with Palm Sunday Mass followed by Easter Sunday on March 31. In order to have a new pope in place in time for the most solemn liturgical period on the church calendar, he would need to be installed as pope by Sunday, March 17. Given the tight time-frame, speculation has mounted that some sort of arrangement would be made to start the conclave earlier than a strict reading of the law would allow.
Questions about the start of the conclave have swirled ever since Benedict announced on Feb. 11 that he would retire, the first pontiff in 600 years to abdicate rather than stay in office until death. As a result, his decision has created a host of questions about how the Vatican will proceed, given that its procedures for the so-called "sede vacante" - or vacant seat - period between papacies won't begin with a pope's death.
Lombardi also gave more details about Benedict's final audiences and plans for retirement, saying already 35,000 people have requested tickets for his final general audience to be held in St. Peter's Square on Feb. 27. He said Benedict would spend about two months in the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo south of Rome immediately after his abdication, to allow enough time for renovations to be completed on his retirement home - a converted monastery inside the Vatican walls.
That means Benedict would be expected to return to the Vatican, no longer as pope, around the end of April or beginning of May, Lombardi said.
He was asked if and when the pope would meet with his successor and whether he would participate in his installation Mass; like many open questions about the end of Benedict's papacy, both issues simply haven't yet been resolved, Lombardi said.
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June 25, 2007
Pope alters voting for successor
Pope Benedict XVI has changed the rules that will decide his successor after his death, returning to a traditional method requiring a two-thirds majority.
Pope John Paul II had altered the voting process to allow a candidate to be elected with only a slight majority.
His reforms were intended to speed up the voting process and to avoid a deadlock when electing a new pope.
But spokesman said a return to the old system "would guarantee the widest possible consensus" for a new pope.
From now on, a candidate will need two-thirds of the votes of cardinals taking part in the conclave regardless of how many times the ballot needs to be repeated.
Pope John Paul had introduced the reforms to avoid deadlocks like that which occurred during a 13th Century conclave when negotiations dragged on for three years.
Pope Benedict, 80, has made an attempt to address this issue by calling for a run-off vote between the top two candidates if the voting goes as far as 33 rounds.
Critics of Pope John Paul's system said that instead of simply avoiding a deadlock, the changes he made in 1996 could in theory empower any majority willing to hold out until the two-thirds requirement expired.
Pope Benedict - the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - was elected to lead the Roman Catholic Church in one of the fastest conclaves in history.
Cardinals who take part in the process take a vow of "absolute and perpetual secrecy".
The voting took just two days in April 2005 and he was reported to have received 84 of the 115 votes after four rounds of voting.
from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6242466.stm
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Permalink Reply by Birgitta on
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The video reminds me of the ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times".
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Gloria.tv: The English-speaking editorial staff of Gloria.TV distances itself from the German Bishops
The English-speaking editorial staff of Gloria.TV asserts: Gloria.TV runs a German-speaking section. Nevertheless, we want to assure our worried, international public that we are in no way whatsoever connected with the German Bishops who have distanced themselves from Catholic moral doctrine by introducing the abortive morning-after pill in their Catholic hospitals.
Gloria.TV distances itself publicly from those bishops and from their approval of the morning-after pill. We will continue fighting internationally that this unspeakable scandal that darkens the witness of the Church and undermines her credibility will be removed. We hope that the Cardinals, assembling soon for the Conclave, will recognize the gravity of this situation.
We ask the German Bishops to distance themselves from the morning-after pill rather than from Gloria.TV.
Chicago and Kansas City, February 20th, 2013
The English-speaking editorial staff of www.gloria.tv
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lol, we do live in such times!
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Interesting: He explains his embrace of Communism here but gives no condemnation of it in his quote. Only saying how he "rediscovered" Christ. Total Rome talk. And this is the gentleman most trads are hoping will take Pope Benedicts place?! Heaven help us if he is the best there is amongst the cardinals.
February 20, 2013. (Romereports.com) The archbishop of Milan, Angelo Scola, was born 71 years ago in Malgrate, in northern Italy. He is the smallest of two brothers, his father was a trucker and his mother, a housewife. He met Benedict XVI more than 40 years ago. Between 1986 and 1991, Scola was an adviser on the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Joseph Ratzinger.
They share a passion for theology. Cardinal Angelo Scola was the editor of Communio, a theological magazine founded by Ratzinger and other theologians in 1972.
Cardinal Scola has also been a member of Communion and Liberation. He admitted that the group's founder helped him rediscover Jesus during his teenage years.
CARD. ANGELO SCOLA
Archbishop of Milan (Italy)
“Between 14 and 18 the greatest influence I had as a high school student was as the son of a convinced socialist worker. So then I began to progressively move away from a Christian commitment to a more sociopolitical, oriented more towards the Communist Party. So by meeting Father Luigi Giussani, he made me rediscover the beauty of Christ's teachings.”
His life thereafter revolved around his studies and his investigative work. He served as a professor at Fribourg in Switzerland, and the rector for Rome's Lateran University. He also uses Twitter actively, where he commonly cites phrases from sources different as the Gospel of St. Luke or poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
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