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The Catholic Church isn’t ready for another resignation – Pope Francis is right to stay on

Following Benedict XVI’s resignation in 2013, the Catholic Church might not have survived another premature exit, writes Peter Popham

Tuesday 14 January 2025 11:32 GMT
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Pope Francis prays for victims of Los Angeles wildfires

The autobiography of Pope Francis, published today, was intended for release after his death. His decision instead to bring it out at the start of 2025 – a “jubilee” or pilgrimage year for the Catholic church – excited speculation that the 88-year-old pontiff, who moves around in a wheelchair and has had two major operations, might use the opportunity to retire.

That’s one story we can file in the bin.

“I am well,” he writes in the new book, Hope, defying snorts of disbelief. “The reality is, quite simply, that I am old.”

His predecessor Benedict XVI stunned the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in 2013 when he announced, inevitably in Latin, that he was calling it quits. Popes don’t do that. Only one other pope in history, of the all 260+ who have sat on St Peter’s throne, had retired.

If Francis had also, in view of his evident infirmity, decided to go – insiders say he “has good days and bad days” – that could have changed the Catholic church profoundly. It could have become the new normal.

The reason popes are so strikingly ancient is simple. The conclave of cardinals which elects a pope, brought to life in the recent film, is always riven with ideological disagreement. Electing a pope, like putting a justice on the US Supreme Court and even more than that, means the church, and the cardinals, are stuck with him till he passes away.

A youngish pope – take one of Francis’ recently appointed cardinals, for example, the Ukrainian-Australian Mykola Bychok, who is a mere 44 – if elected, could be in place till all those who elected him were long dead. For any cardinal with an ounce of worldly ambition, the prospect is unthinkable.

If Francis had gone the way of Benedict, who finally died in 2022, it might overnight have become thinkable. The consequent rejuvenation – bringing in, perhaps, a pope comparable in age to the church’s founder, crucified at 32 – could have been transformational.

Instead, Francis scoffs at the notion. “Each time a pope takes ill, the winds of a conclave always feel as if they are blowing,” he writes. “The reality is that even during the days of surgery I never thought of resigning.”

In his common-sense fashion, he adds: “The Church is governed using the head and the heart, not the legs.”

Born Jose Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 2036 to immigrant Italian parents, Francis is the first Jesuit to be pope and the first avowedly liberal pope – Argentina’s President Javier Millei has called him “a filthy leftist” – since the death of the reforming Pope John XXIII in 1963.

Other “filthy leftists” in the church tend to see Francis as a disappointment: priests must still be celibate and male; gay marriage in church is as distant a prospect as ever; and on the core issues of contraception and abortion, the church remains intransigent.

Instead, he has taken baby steps down the liberal road: flirted with the idea of allowing women to be deacons – a halfway house to priesthood – before rejecting it; a few days ago permitted gays to enter the priesthood – where they are already present in large numbers – as long as they remain celibate.

But with his common touch he has been a breath of fresh air after the German, ultra-conservative Benedict, who is the apparent target of some waspish comments in Hope.

Benedict was as famous for his fancy wardrobe – notably his red Gucci loafers – as his theological orthodoxy. Francis has no time for either, and regards them as connected.

“This rigidity,” he says of conservative priests, “is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings… not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation. These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.’”

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