Have read many articles today and some speculating who will be the new Pope. The Cardinals will take into consideration where the majority of their church financing comes from if they elect white, latino or a black pope.
I presume the Pope is doing this in the fullness of his reason, and no doubt with a good deal of personal regret. But it is not like he was being FORCED out of office, he has merely recognized the limitations of the flesh, and is laying down the mantle.
The worst sort of speculation, would be on who the new Pope might be, and how that would impact the path the Roman Catholic Church, and subsequently just about all of Christianity, would follow in the future.
The Catholic oligarchy is by nature conservative, and it is highly unlikely they are easily panicked by the adversity that seems to be surging around the world. But they still do have some sort of reconciliation with the external situation, and like a great ship at sea, all changes of course are at the most quite minute and slowly undertaken.
If the college of cardinals is looking at the world today, in the manner that they looked at Poland in the late 70s, then I can see them sticking with Europe because of the increasing Muslim presence there. I can also see the growth of the Church in Africa leading to picking someone fron there.
I'm in Brooklyn, where we've felt the shortage of clergy, and have seen parishes close or consolidate. Over the past decade, we've had a number of visiting priests. At least three of them from Kenya.
God Bless him!! Notwithstanding the slams in the article, Pope Benedict has been just what the Church needed the past few years. I respect him for admitting that the job is getting to be too much for him. He knows how important it is for the Church to have a strong, healthy leader, here on Earth, to serve our Lord among His people. I know the Holy Spirit will guide the College of Cardinals when they meet to choose a successor.
The malice marbled in this text, and in similar attempts in the next weeks to understand a man and a faith so alien to the writers as to render them as schoolyard children attempting to describe quantum physics, will be evidence of just how counter-cultural is this holy man and his holy faith.
Liberals have never liked this pontiff, citing that he is too conservaive
For that reason they have tried to tie the sex abuse scandals to PBXVI. Actually, such scandalous behavior is tied to immorality among a certain segment of the priesthood, and the fears of many bishops that scandalous exposure would be worse that covering it up.
The cover up ended up being much worse since it implied and in fact, proved, that some of the clericals in the church thought more about their own pride and prestige, than about the good of the victims and stopping the behavior in its tracks.
Pope Benedict had nothing to do with thi scandal except that he inherited the remnants of the scandal which had been publicly exposed for about the past 10-15 years, and has for the most part, been remedied by most dioceses.