Popes Can Resign

Richard Sipe
February 13, 2013

http://www.richardsipe.com/Comments/2010-07-10.htm

Nine of the 265 Roman Catholic popes have allegedly resigned their office, most for the good of the Church. The first according to the historian Epiphanius was Clement I around the year 100 C.E. The most recent was Gregory XII who abdicated the papal throne during the Council of Constance in 1417 to help settle the claims of three competitors for the papacy.

Benedict is a conflicted papal name. Two Pope Benedicts have resigned. In 964, after one month in office, Benedict V abdicated the papacy at the insistence of Emperor Otto I. Pope Benedict IX served three different terms between 1032 and 1048 when he resigned and was charged with simony and excommunicated by his successor Leo IX who instituted a concerted drive to purify the church of simony and concubinage.

There is no legitimate Benedict X in the line of papal succession. A “Benedict X” who acted as pope for nine months in 1058 was declared an anti-pope and excommunicated. The actual number of Pope Benedicts therefore is technically incorrect. Joseph Ratzinger now Pope Benedict XVI is actually only the fifteenth Pope Benedict.

Pope Benedict XVI is a descent man and a lifelong servant of his church.  It takes nothing away from the good he has done to suggest that he should resign his office for the good of the Church.

The Implications of the clerical sex abuse crisis that now exposes a corrupt pattern and practice of a system has escaped and confused many good, brilliant people and left generations paralyzed. There is no need to point fingers. Words, promises and even apologies are vacuous. Action, radical change similar to every previous effective church reformation begs for implementation. 

The Roman Catholic Church is in a period of Reformation as profound (and breathtaking) as any its history has ever recorded. The voluntary resignation of Pope Benedict XVI would be a gesture that would match the epic challenge that faces Catholicism today. Such leadership would break the pattern and practice that holds the church hostage to a past that no longer serves the Christian message.

The monarchy that rules the church has outlived its service in the evangelization of peoples, an evangelization that Paul the apostle taught and that Pope John Paul II championed. The People of God—hierarchy included—are shackled by a secret system designed to control rather than free them.