Resignation triggers acknowledgement of importance of religion ...

In a society where religion is often dismissed by the elites as irrelevant to public debate, the news that the Pope had resigned was not ignored by the hoi polloi, writes Angela Shanahan in The Australian.

People have been talking about the papal abdication all week. Even the ABC thought the resignation of the spiritual leader of more than a billion people a newsworthy topic. Generally, people are very supportive, seeing it, as Cardinal George Pell put it, as "the decision of a serious Christian".

Benedict's resignation could indeed be a welcome precedent; but although the Pope made the point in an interview earlier in his pontificate that it could happen, there was no hint of it. As one wit remarked, it was the only secret the butler didn't know.

However, the papacy of Benedict was fraught with problems. A reliable Vatican source says there is a lot of criticism about the way Rome "does business": "At a curial and diplomatic level it is very bad.

The handling of a series of issues has not been appropriate or good; indeed the whole question of governance was affecting the reputation of the Pope himself." Even Benedict seems somewhat disillusioned. On Ash Wednesday he cited "divisions and rivalry among the clergy".

While we are thinking about the Pope's resignation we should remember the other saintly pope who resigned, Celestine V. He was made pope against his will after being more or less kidnapped from his hermit's cave and sent into Rome on a white donkey. He was so appalled by the situation in Rome that after drawing up the rules for abdication he left after a few months and became a hermit again in the Apennines.

Celestine wrote 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 tranquillity of his former life."

It's not hard to hear echoes of this in Benedict's own statement of resignation. Significantly, it was on the tomb of Celestine, in L'Aquila, that Benedict laid his pallium, the symbol of his episcopal authority as bishop of Rome, in 2009. He might have been thinking about resignation even then.

So has Benedict simply given up? He made it very clear in a 2010 interview with Peter Seewald that the pope does not resign because things seem tough. On the contrary, he said that is precisely when a pope should stay. A pope resigns only if he realises the papacy is beyond his physical and mental capacity, and consequently beyond his governing expertise.

FULL STORY Papacy of Benedict was fraught with problems (Australian)

Source: http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=35080

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