Although there is sadness at his
leaving, there are a number of reasons to appreciate the action that Pope
Benedict XVI has taken in resigning the papacy.
As I noted in the last post, Pope Benedict has broken a longstanding
custom that popes serve until death. In
so doing, he has provided one way for declining popes to avoid a situation
where the Church must attempt to cope with a pope who becomes unable to
function in his office. Further, as
Vincent J. Miller points out in this post on America’s “In All Things” blog, Pope Benedict’s resignation is
itself an act of teaching—a humble recognition that even the Pope functions
under constraints of history and of his own humanity. As Jack Hunt commented on Miller’s post, now
we can see the papacy more clearly as a ministry rather than as some kind of
monarchy.
This was a courageous move, and
not only because it was a break with custom.
For in resigning his office, Pope Benedict dared to brave the specter of
Dante Alighieri himself. In the third
canto of Inferno, the pilgrim Dante
and his guide Virgil pass through the fearsome gate of hell into a place of
darkness, noise and tumult. Here, Virgil
reveals, are “the wretched souls of those who lived/ without disgrace yet
without praise.” [Hollander trans.] No
one here is named—“the world does not permit report of them,” Virgil sneers—but
Dante notes that among them is “the shade of him/ who, through cowardice, made
the great refusal.”
Most of the early commentators on
the poem saw this as a reference to Pope Celestine V, a simple hermit who was
drafted into the papacy in 1294.
Overwhelmed by the office and the ecclesiastical and political intrigues
that surrounded it, he resigned after only a few months. His resignation paved the way for Benedetto
Caetani, a pope whom Dante detested, to begin his reign as Pope Boniface VIII.
It is easy to imagine that any
pope—and particularly an Italian pope!—who considered resignation would be
daunted by Dante’s imagined postmortem disdain. Perhaps it took a German pope—and one with
courage and a strong sense of himself—to take that step.
Although these thoughts came to me
almost as soon as I heard of Pope Benedict’s decision, I am grateful to my
wife, Maureen O’Brien, for pointing out another post on the America site in
which Fr. Drew Christiansen recounts that Pope Benedict had visited Celestine’s
tomb in Aquila, Italy, on more than one occasion. Perhaps, Fr. Christiansen wonders, these
pilgrimages can now be seen as occasions when Pope Benedict pursued the
prayerful discernment that led to his decision to resign.
