Is He the Retiring Type?

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Personally, I think the Pope is capable of admitting courageously, 'I can no longer carry out my task in an adequate way.' I believe the Pope would be capable of that if he had the impression that he was no longer able to lead the Church with authority." After Bishop Karl Lehmann of Mainz offered that opinion on German radio, a small earthquake of headlines went through Rome. GERMAN BISHOPS: THE POPE IS SICK, HE SHOULD RESIGN, declared one paper. WOJTILA STEP ASIDE, A STRONG POPE IS NEEDED, said another, using John Paul II's family name.

A papal abdication? The commotion overshadowed the announcement that the Pope would travel to the Middle East in March as part of the Jubilee Year, a period for which he has been strenuously preparing. There has been some concern over the image of the Pontiff broadcast over the millennial weekend: one of a visibly weakened man. The vigorous 58-year-old elected in 1978 to challenge communism suffers from the onset of Parkinson's disease, limps and has terrible difficulty negotiating steps. His left arm shakes, at times uncontrollably. His face is rigid, and his speech is slurred. At the end of 1999, his aides moved him around St. Peter's Basilica with a pushcart.

But there has been no voluntary papal abdication since Celestine V in 1294. And while Celestine was later canonized, Dante placed him in the Inferno for il gran rifiuto (the great refusal), albeit only in the first circle of Hell: Limbo. Other pontiffs have been removed by murder, martyrdom, military intervention or rare coups by the College of Cardinals during pagan rule, the confusion of the Dark Ages, Byzantine meddling, populist revolutions or chronic political impotence. But what would happen if one of the most significant successors of St. Peter in the past 100 years were to give up his throne?

"If he resigns, he has to pack up and go," says the Jesuit scholar Thomas Reese. If he retires after 80 (an age he will reach in May), he would not be allowed to attend the conclave that will gather to elect his successor. But John Paul II in living retirement would also be an influence too powerful to ignore, even if he is not anywhere near the voting cardinals. He is probably aware that every new Pope in the past 300 years has been dramatically different from his predecessor. John Paul II may have forestalled that by naming some 90% of the cardinals now in the college. If he retired, he would be even more certain that the church stays his course. Could a new Pope change policies if the former Pope, with all his prestige, were still alive, looking over his shoulder? Japanese Emperors and Shoguns used to "retire" to achieve just that kind of uncrossable seniority.

But last week's kerfuffle may have more personal roots. There is no love lost between John Paul and Bishop Lehmann, who heads the German Catholic Bishops Conference. The German church runs 250 abortion-counseling centers, and after five years of wrangling, its bishops bowed to pressure from the Pope last June and agreed to stop issuing certificates that permit women to terminate a pregnancy within the first 12 weeks. (Without the certificate, abortion is illegal.) Says historian and novelist Father Andrew Greeley: "Lehmann won't be made a cardinal as long as John Paul is Pope."

After the loud Italian headlines, Lehmann insisted he had been misunderstood. "I didn't ask for the Pope's retirement," he said. He did reiterate, however, that John Paul was quite old and that it would be "opportune" for the church to have a strong Pope. But it seems unlikely that John Paul II will step down. Certainly not this year, which is important to him symbolically, with his planned pilgrimage to the Middle East.

Still, Lehmann has revealed a latent concern. Says Greeley: "The church has a real problem in that there is no provision in church legislation for a Pope who becomes incapable of acting as Pope." While the Vatican can operate with an incapacitated Pope, important decisions (the naming of bishops) and documents would have to wait until he was well enough to approve of them--or until a new Pope came around. A mentally compromised Pope kept alive artificially would present the church with a constitutional crisis. If a Pope can see that coming, says Greeley, he should choose--or be persuaded--to retire. In which case, canon law is simple. The Pope is one of the world's last absolute rulers and answers only to God. All he has to say is, "I resign."

--Reported by Greg Burke/Rome and Emily Mitchell/New York

With reporting by Greg Burke/Rome and Emily Mitchell/New York