Question asked by CS Monitor (and answered by WaPo) of how Catholic Church will handle Benedict's resignation

[Saddle Bronc 124]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/0211/How-will-the-Catholic-Church-handle-a-living-ex-pope-video

How will the Catholic Church handle a living ex-pope?

Nick Squires, Correspondent

2013/02/11.....Rome

The resignation of Benedict XVI raises a conundrum not faced by the Catholic Church for centuries: How do you handle a still living ex-pope?

For the entire 2,000 year history of the Church, the accepted orthodoxy has been for a pope to rule until he dies. A select group of cardinals then get together in a secretive conclave and a successor is chosen, in a clean break from the past.

All that has been turned on its head by Benedict’s surprise resignation, the first in the papacy since 1415. It raises a potential difficulty for the Vatican – that even after his retirement, he could become a lightning rod for dissatisfaction and dissent with his successor, whoever that might be.

In retirement, pope will publish

The Catholic Church has faced painful schisms throughout its history, in which rival claims to the Seat of St. Peter resulted in competing papacies. In 1415, Pope Gregory XII stepped down in an attempt to end just such a schism, when two rival claimants set themselves up in opposing cities – Pisa in Italy and Avignon in southern France – precipitating one of the Church’s gravest crises.

When Benedict formally resigns on the evening of Feb. 28, he will be taken probably by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo, the traditional summer retreat of popes, in the hills outside Rome. The 85-year-old is expected to remain there for 15 to 20 days, until the conclave of around 120 cardinals drawn from around the world gathers at the Vatican and elects a new pontiff. Benedict will then take up residence in a cloistered monastery within the Vatican City State. His title at that point? Unclear.

Inevitably he will run into his successor and will still be in daily touch with cardinals and other influential figures within the Holy See. Not only that but, according to the Vatican spokesman, Benedict will continue to write and publish treatises and essays – he is a noted theologian who recently completed a trilogy on the life of Christ.

That could produce a situation where the former pope says one thing on an important matter, while his successor says something different.

“Traditionally popes have not resigned because there is this question of what do you do with two popes,” says John Thavis, an American who has covered the Vatican for 30 years and recently wrote an insider’s account of the Holy See – “The Vatican Diaries.”

“What should be the role of a former pope – does he have to stay quiet for the rest of his life? What if he speaks up and disagrees with his successor? You then have the prospect of the Church effectively having two popes.” (a situation already handled in 1045/1046)

Benedict has never been regarded as a power-hungry political player and will probably embrace a return to a quiet life of study and prayer.

“I don’t think he will deliberately upstage or contradict his successor,” says Mr Thavis. “But he’s not going to be behind a wall of silence. If I was the new pope, I would be paying attention to whatever he writes about.”

Vatican: no confusion (this is true -- Vatican will handle it like UK handles king's abdication, see below WaPo)

The Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said there was no prospect of a schism in the Church and dismissed ideas that Benedict would attract a rival support base or interfere in papal affairs.

“We have no fears of this kind,” he told a packed press conference at the Vatican. “He will renounce the post, so there will be nothing to discuss. There will be no confusion, or division.”

In St. Peter’s Square, however, tourists and Catholic faithful were not so sure it would be quite so easy.

“To have an ex-pope who is still alive, even if they are in not very good health, is unprecedented as I understand it,” says Daniel Benedyk from London. “I don’t know how the Vatican will deal with that.”

There was collective disbelief about the news of the resignation among people strolling in front of St. Peter’s Basilica under gray winter skies.

"It was a huge surprise to me,” says Wolfgang Schnapel, a priest from Benedict's home region of Bavaria. “I only heard when my mother called me from Germany. I think it would be nice if the next pope came from Africa or Latin America. And he should definitely be younger than Benedict was.”

Flora Joseph, a nun from Tanzania, says: "It's very difficult to accept. I have been saying to myself 'why is he leaving, why doesn't he want to continue?' But he is an old man and he has so many appointments and meetings. I guess he just has no energy left anymore."

Nicola Signorile, a businessman from Bari in southern Italy, said he was deeply saddened by the announcement, speculating that the pope must be very ill –although the Vatican has given no indication he has health problems. "If he has made this choice, it must be for a very good reason."

Only a handful of Benedict’s closest confidantes knew that he had made the decision to resign, including Tarcisio Bertone, who as Vatican secretary of state is effectively prime minister of the tiny city state, Georg Ganswein, the pope’s private secretary, and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the head of the College of Cardinals.

The papacy had seemed to many Italians like the one remaining constant in their lives after having been buffeted in the last few years by earthquakes, floods, the fall of Silvio Berlusconi, and the imposition of tough austerity measures by his successor, Mario Monti. The economy is in a deep recession and politics in turmoil ahead of a general election on Feb. 24-25.

“I can’t believe it – first the government is about to end, now it’s the papacy that’s in trouble,” says Marco, a taxi driver. “Everything is falling apart. I’ll be sad to see Benedict go. He was a bit cold and German, but he was a decent man.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/11/the-bizarre-stories-of-the-four-other-popes-to-have-resigned-in-the-last-1000-years/

The bizarre stories of the four other popes to have resigned in the last 1,000 years

Max Fisher, 2013/02/11 08:56

On Feb. 28, Pope Benedict XVI will become the first pope to resign in almost 600 years. That’s not just tradition — it’s dogma. The Washington Post’s Debbi Wilgoren cited a theological expert in explaining, “Most modern popes have felt that resignation is unacceptable except in cases of an incurable or debilitating disease — that paternity, in the words of Paul IV, cannot be resigned.”

But Benedict XVI’s shocking resignation is even more curious when compared to the handful of others who have left the powerful office willingly. In the past 1000 years, only four other popes have resigned. Here are their unusual stories, which are also an indication of just how much the church has changed.

Pope Benedict IX, in 1045: At age 33 and about 10 years into his tumultuous term, the Rome-born pope resigned so that he could get married – and to collect some cash from his godfather, also Roman, who paid Benedict IX to step down so that he might replace him, according to British historian Reginald L. Poole’s definitive and much-cited history of the 11th century.

Pope Gregory VI, in 1046: The same man who had bribed and replaced his godson ended up leaving the office himself only a year later, according to Poole’s account. The trouble began when Benedict IX failed to secure the bride he’d resigned for, leading him to change his mind and return to the Vatican. Both popes remained in the city, both claiming to rule the Catholic church, for several months. That fall, the increasingly despondent clergy called on the German Emperor Henry III, of the Holy Roman Empire, to invade Rome and remove them both. When Henry III arrived, he treated Gregory VI as the rightful pope but urged him to stand before a council of fellow church leaders. The bishops urged Gregory VI to resign for bribing his way into office. Though the fresh new pope argued that he had done nothing wrong in buying the papacy, he stepped down anyway.

Pope Celestine V, in 1294: After only five months in office, the somber Sicilian pope formally decreed that popes now had the right to resign, which he immediately used. according to a report in the Guardian. He wrote, referring to himself in the third person, that he had resigned out of “the desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquility of his former life.” He became a hermit, but two years later was dragged out of solitude by his successor, who locked him up in an Italian castle. Celestine died 10 months later.

Pope Gregory XII, in 1415: The elderly Venetian had held the office for 10 years, but he was not the only pope. For decades, the Western Schism had left Europe with two popes, one in Rome and one in the French city of Avignon, according to Britannica. The schism’s causes were political rather than theological: the pope had tremendous power over European politics, which had led its kings to become gradually more aggressive in manipulating the church’s leaders. Gregory XII resigned so that a special council in Constance, which is today a German city, could excommunicate the Avignon-based pope and start fresh with a new, single leader of the Catholic church.

Pope Benedict XVI, in 2013: Citing health reasons from old age, he announced today that he will step down on Feb. 28.

(nice to see that WaPo preserved the "spirit" of its erstwhile columnist Jack Anderson and actually did some research, from which one can see that Catholic Church will handle this as UK did a king's abdication (which it did in 1936) -- unlike the CS Monitor, owned entirely by Mary Baker Eddy's cult!