When a pontiff calls it quits

Mobhare Matinyi, Washington DC. Thursday, 14 February 2013 22:48, The Citizen, Tanzania.

Unlike presidents who have to chair crucial meetings, meet executives, speak to the Press, argue, sign papers and travel endlessly to maintain the tempo of leading a sovereign state, traditions of the Roman Catholic Church require a pope to only be able to conduct a mass to keep his job.

When he announced on Monday that he is resigning, Pope Benedict XVI did not mention anything serious about his health as can be seen from the 360-word English translation of the shocking message he delivered to cardinals in Latin at the Vatican.

The second sentence of the written message read: “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.”

Although the Pope went on to state that his strength of mind and body has been deteriorating, certainly, the most important words here are these: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God”. Conscience! What is it? These words carry a lot of weight if the history of the papacy is anything to go by.

Health has never been a reason for a pope to resign; in fact, this pope is the first to resign due to the said reasons of old age and deteriorating health. Consider Pope Alexander VII; he became bedridden before his death in 1667 while Pope Leo XIII died in 1903 at age 93 and 140 days. Traditionally, popes die because of illness while still in office.

According to analyst Sydney Lupkin of ABC News, Pope Pius XII for example, died in 1958 at age 82 of complications from pneumonia, and that was after years of suffering from chronic hiccups and strokes. Before dying in 2005 at the age of 85, Pope John Paul II became so frail for years, and he once asked that if he resigned, to whom should he have tendered his resignation?

The word “conscience” that Pope Benedict XVI used is not an easy word, be it philosophically or linguistically. In the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a conclusion on the discussion about “consciousness”, that is the state of being conscious, starts as follows: “A comprehensive understanding of consciousness will likely require theories of many types.” It ends: “There is unlikely to be any single theoretical perspective that suffices for explaining all the features of consciousness that we wish to understand. Thus a synthetic and pluralistic approach may provide the best road to future progress.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary, conscience is a person’s moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one’s behaviour, while the Cambridge Dictionary defines conscience as the part of a person that judges how moral their actions are and makes them feel guilty about bad things that they have done or things they feel responsible for. Yes!

Undoubtedly, the Pope knew what he was saying and we may spend some time before understanding the whole story, however, one fact is, the papacy has never been short of scandals as Anura Guruge, the author of the book, The Next Pope, says: “The Catholic Church is no stranger to scandals and controversy.” Learned Catholic believers will attest to that.

Interestingly, after hearing the news on Monday, the New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan has hinted something to the press, that he admired this pope for being strong, contrary to what the Pope himself claimed about himself! Dolan was recently very impressed by the Pope’s ability to stay awake during a church leaders’ meeting. He told ABC: “I was amazed. He was there every day. Never fell asleep.”

In other words, the 85-year-old pontiff, the leader of 1.2 billion believers, was still mentally and physically fit. So what went wrong? Could one blame the child abuse scandals which victims claim he was complicit about? The Pope himself characterises his decision as of “great importance for the life of the Church.”

On Tuesday, the Pope’s spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, was quoted by the CNN saying that the Pope is not suffering from any specific disease that forced him to resign, adding that his was a “spiritual decision”. Clearly, the old man is not sick!

Pope Benedict XVI, the pontiff whose conservative religious stance pushed him to disrespect other religions in public, becomes the first pope in 600 years to leave office while still alive, the last one being Pope Gregory XII who resigned voluntarily in 1415.

This Pope will find his own place in those who left office in style as one more resigned voluntarily, two others abdicated the office under scandals, one retired peacefully, one sold the papacy to his godfather who was later deposed, and one’s resignation has been claimed as historically dubious. Our arms remain akimbo as we wait for another one.