These are my closing thoughts on this issue.
At any rate the pope says it’s because of his age and the fatigue, though fundamentally he abdicates before modernity. He’s simply not capable of taking control of this world, to make the word of God sufficiently heard to Christianity and to his Church for those who believe such a voice exists. Naturally this has caused much internal division within the Church hierarchy, which has made the Vatican an increasingly hostile place to work. The Roman Church is divided and the abdication of Ratzinger must be read as a personal admission of failure, in not having succeeded in governing the struggle within the Curia (College of Cardinals) – a struggle which will be punctually reassumed in the Sistine Chapel during the imminent conclave.
Another thing to consider is that when speaking of the Pope, one has to recall that the man holding the office is both high priest of a religion, though also absolute sovereign of a state, Vatican City, which until 1861 included most of central Italy. The title Ponitfex Maximus (a title inherited from the ancient Roman emperors and not Peter) thus covers both roles, each requiring an enormous commitment. Joseph Ratzinger, who has lived practically his entire life within the Church and Vatican State, was clearly unsuitable to carry out the political aspect of his office. His many gaffes were a symptom of this: from the highly publicized speech at Ratisbon to the disagreeable comment on condoms. Another indication was the initial uncertainty with which he addressed the pedophilia scandal. He later addressed it vigorously, but only after an embarrassing silence. Another deficiency was in not being able to unravel the internal knots, with which his Church has been kept bound from reform and modernization. Not only have there been at stake issues such as priesthood celibacy, female ordination, but also other affairs of exceptional gravity like the Vatican bank scandal: for the past eight months it has been without a leader, following the “firing” of Gotti Tedeschi who wanted to impose complete transparency upon that troubled institution. Today the pontifical government (Curia – another ancient Roman borrowing meaning the hall where the Senate met) is bitterly divided, the role of the Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, awkward and cumbersome and, in so far as it seems, paralyzing for this pope.
In the meantime the seminaries are empty, the churches are ever less frequented, above all by the young (i.e. most parishioners are old), such that for the first time the Catholic Church stands present before an implacable secularization on this scale against which it is incapable of reacting. Before these immense problems and given his infirmness, Ratzinger has decided to step down.
The history of the papacy has always been one fraught with political controversy. For hundreds and thousands of years the Church-institution suffocated its pastoral mission and promoted wars, inquisitions, corruption, simony. Here one isn’t merely talking about episodes, but a historical continuum the linchpin of which has always been a quest for further temporal power. Remember the Crusades? The Investiture wars? The suppression of so called heretics? The Avignon exile? The alliances with despots, the nepotism, the dynasties founded by popes of the Colonna, Orsini, Caetani, Piccolomini, Farnese, della Rovere, Borgia and Borghese families? With the official end of the Roman Church’s temporal power in 1861, these problems should have gotten better, though it didn’t work out that way. Pius IX at the time invented the dogma of papal infallibility. Subsequently Pius XI made an accord with Mussolini, his successor Pius XII got embroiled in the Nazi-Fascist dilemma, the Church during the Cold War tolerated socialist tragedies at the hands of bloody dictators just to look after its own interests and in the name of ideology, and so forth.
These problems hence have moved through time, going back through the centuries and forward to the present with seamless fluidity; which, under the current circumstances of modernity, are proving formidable and potentially lethal for the Roman Church. A Roman Church, furthermore, that has opted to cling to old dogmas and rigid doctrinal concerns, instead of promoting the simple teachings of community wellbeing and peace among nations, divorced of untoward ideology and power.
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