The spiritual leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, Pope Benedict
XVI, surprised the world Monday by saying he will resign at the end of
the month "because of advanced age."
It's the first time a pope has stepped down in nearly 600 years.
"Strength of mind and
body are necessary, strength 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," said
Benedict, 85, according to the Vatican.
The news startled and shocked the Catholic world and led to frenzied speculation about who would replace him.
Analysts and experts
immediately began debating the merits of naming a pontiff from the
developing world, where the church continues to grow, versus one from
Europe, where it has deep historical roots.
Cardinals will meet to
choose Benedict's successor sometime after his official resignation on
February 28, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said at a
news conference.
"Before Easter, we will have the new pope," he said.
Benedict won't be
involved in the decision, Lombardi said. But his influence will
undoubtedly be felt. Benedict appointed 67 of the 118 cardinals who will
make the decision.
CNN Senior Vatican
Analyst John Allen said that means the next pope, no matter where he is
from, will probably continue in Benedict's conservative tradition, which
has seen the church take a firm line on issues such as abortion, birth
control and divorce.
The pope, born Joseph
Ratzinger, is likely to retire to a monastery and devote himself to a
life of reflection and prayer, Lombardi said. He won't be involved in
managing the church after his resignation.
In a sign of just how
rare an event this is, church officials aren't sure what the pope will
be called after he leaves the office.
One possibility, Allen said, is "bishop emeritus of Rome."
Resignation
Benedict will become the
first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415. In that case, Gregory
quit to end a civil war within the church in which more than one man
claimed to be pope.
In this case, it wasn't
external forces but the ravages of time that forced Benedict's hand.
After months of consideration, he concluded he just wasn't up to the job
anymore, Lombardi said.
"It's not a decision he has just improvised," Lombardi said. "It's a decision he has pondered over."
Benedict had been
thinking about resigning for some time because of his age, a family
friend in Regensburg, Germany, told CNN on Monday. He has discussed the
resignation with his older brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, according
to the friend, who asked not to be named because he does not speak for
Georg Ratzinger.
Several years ago,
Benedict had suggested he would be open to resigning should his health
fail, Allen said. But no one expected him to do so this soon, he said.
According to Lombardi,
Benedict will step down as pope at 8 p.m. on February 28 in Rome, then
head for the pope's summer residence. He will probably move to a
monastery in the Vatican after that, Lombardi said.
After the resignation
takes effect, cardinals will gather in Rome to select a successor. It
takes at least two-thirds plus one of the 118 voting cardinals to elect a
new leader for the church.
Benedict announced his resignation just before the start of the church's Lenten season, which begins with Ash Wednesday.
"We must trust in the
mighty power of God's mercy. We are all sinners, but His grace
transforms us and makes us new," Benedict said Sunday on Twitter, which
the pope's office joined only in December.
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Benedict's legacy
Benedict took over as
pope in 2005 as the church was facing a number of issues, including
declining popularity in parts of the world and a growing crisis over the
church's role in handling molestation accusations against priests
around the world.
Given his age at the
time -- 78 -- he was widely seen as a caretaker pope, a bridge to the
next generation following the long reign of John Paul II, a popular,
globe-trotting pontiff whose early youth and vigor gave way to such
frailty in later years that he required assistance walking and was often
hard to hear during public addresses.
As an aide to John Paul,
Benedict served as a strict enforcer of his conservative social
doctrine. To no one's surprise, he continued to espouse a conservative
doctrine after taking the office himself. He frequently warned of a
"dictatorship of relativism."
"In a world which he
considered relativist and secular and so on, his main thrust was to
re-establish a sense of Catholic identity for Catholics themselves,"
said Delia Gallagher, contributing editor for Inside the Vatican
magazine.
Where John Paul wowed
crowds around the world with his mastery of numerous languages, Benedict
took his training as a college professor to the Vatican and will be
seen at his most influential in years to come with his writings,
Gallagher said.
Allen called Benedict a "great teaching pope."
Benedict also worked to
advance religious freedom and reduce friction among adherents of various
faiths, said Bill Donohue of the U.S. Catholic League.
"The pope made it clear that religious freedom was not only a God-given right, it was 'the path to peace,' " Donohue said.
But Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, said Benedict's legacy will be mixed.
"His Papacy will be
sadly remembered from the Muslim world by his distortion and attack on
Islam as he came to the Papacy," Shafiq said in a statement. "This sadly
meant the hard work of his predecessor Pope John Paul II was tarnished
and required extensive work to rebuild ties between Christianity and
Islam. That is something he has tried to do over the past eight years
and we do wish it could have started better than it did."
Sex abuse scandal
Benedict became pope at
the height of the molestation scandal involving Catholic priests, with
complaints of sexual abuse and lawsuits over the issue tearing at the
church.
Abusive priests had
"disfigured their ministry" and brought "profound shame and regret" on
the church, Benedict said in 2010, the same year he issued new rules
aimed at stopping abuse.
The rules included
allowing church prosecution of suspected molesters for 20 years after
the incidents occurred, up from 10 years previously. The rules also made
it a church crime to download child pornography and allowed the pope to
remove a priest without a formal Vatican trial.
"No one did more to successfully address the problem of priestly sexual abuse than Joseph Ratzinger," Donohue said.
But Barbara Blaine,
president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Benedict
has not had any significant impact on the issue.
"I would hate for him to
be remembered as someone who did the right thing because from our
perspective, Pope Benedict's record has been abysmal," she said.
In 2010, The New York
Times reported that church officials, including Ratzinger, had failed to
act in the case of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting up to 200
boys. The Times reported that church officials stopped proceedings
against the priest after he wrote Ratzinger, who was at the time the
cardinal in charge of the group that oversees Catholic Church doctrine.
Ratzinger never answered
the letter, according to the Times, and church officials have said he
had no knowledge of the situation. But a lawyer who obtained internal
church paperwork said at the time that it "shows a direct line from the
victims through the bishops and directly to the man who is now pope."
Also in 2010, the Times
reported that the future pope -- while serving as the archbishop in
Munich -- had been copied on a memo informing him that a priest accused
of molesting children was being returned to pastoral work. At the time, a
spokesman for the archdiocese said Ratzinger received hundreds of memos
a year and it was highly unlikely that he had read it.
In a statement issued Monday, Blaine said the church should choose a new pope dedicated to preventing sexual abuse by priests.
"For the Church to truly
embody the spiritual teachings of Jesus Christ, it must be led by a
pontiff who demands transparency, exposes child-molesting clerics,
punishes wrongdoers and enablers, cooperates with law enforcement, and
makes true amends to those who were hurt so greatly by Catholic priests,
employees and volunteers," Blaine wrote.
Victims' groups are
pressing the International Criminal Court to prosecute Benedict in the
sex abuse scandal, and say the resignation won't change that, according
to Pam Spees, of the public policy law firm Center for Constitutional
Rights, which is helping SNAP pursue the case.
World reaction
Benedict's decision surprised world leaders and everyday Catholics.
Archbishop Vincent
Nichols, the president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England
and Wales, said the decision "shocked and surprised everyone."
"Yet, on reflection, I
am sure that many will recognise it to be a decision of great courage
and characteristic clarity of mind and action," he said in a written
statement.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, said he was startled, and sad, to see Benedict resign.
"The Holy Father brought
the tender heart of a pastor, the incisive mind of a scholar and the
confidence of a soul united with His God in all he did," he said in a
written statement. "His resignation is but another sign of his great
care for the Church."
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Benedict "will be missed as a spiritual leader to millions."
Cameron's Irish counterpart, Enda Kenny, praised Benedict for decades
of leadership and service, as well as his decision to resign.
"It reflects his
profound sense of duty to the Church, and also his deep appreciation of
the unique pressures of spiritual leadership in the modern world," Kenny
said in a prepared statement.
U.S. President Barack
Obama said he and his wife "warmly remember" their 2009 meeting with
Benedict, and wished cardinals well as they prepared to choose a
successor.
Life before the papacy
Benedict was born Joseph Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl Am Inn, Bavaria, a heavily Catholic region of Germany.
He spent his adolescent years in Traunstein, near the Austrian border, during the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
Ratzinger wrote in his
memoirs that school officials enrolled him in the Hitler Youth movement
against his will in 1941, when he was 14.
He said he was allowed
to leave the organization because he was studying for the priesthood,
but was drafted into the army in 1943. He served with an anti-aircraft
unit until he deserted in the waning days of WW II.
After the war, he
resumed his theological studies and was ordained in 1951. He received
his doctorate in theology two years later and taught dogma and theology
at German universities for several years.
In 1962, he served as a
consultant during the pivotal Vatican II council to Cardinal Frings, a
reformer who was the archbishop of Cologne, Germany.
As a young priest,
Ratzinger was on the progressive side of theological debates, but began
to shift right after the student revolutions of 1968, CNN Vatican
analyst Allen said.
In his book "Cardinal
Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith," Allen says Ratzinger is
a shy and gentle person whose former students spoke of him as a
well-prepared and caring professor.
Pope Paul VI named him
archbishop of Munich in 1977 and promoted him to cardinal the next
month. Ratzinger served as archbishop of Munich until 1981, when he was
nominated by John Paul II to be the head of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, a position he held until his election as pope.
He became dean of the
College of Cardinals in November 2002 and in that role called the
cardinals to Rome for the conclave that elected him the 265th pope.
In his initial
appearance as pope, he told the crowd in St. Peter's Square that he
would serve as "a simple and humble worker in the vineyards of the
Lord."
He was the sixth German to serve as pope, but the first since the 11th century.
