Popes Who Quit
Celestine V and my tiny intersection with Benedict XVI's resignation
On February 10th, 2013, I was scheduled to fly from Boston to Tampa for an interview at Saint Leo University. I was excited because, after two years on the academic job market and a decent number of conference interviews, I had finally landed a campus interview. However there was also terrible snow that weekend in Boston and my original flight was canceled, so I began checking in with Prof. Woodard (my contact at Saint Leo) about the situation and what we might do. Ultimately, I was able to get a flight much later that Sunday, made it to a much warmer Tampa, and eventually collapsed in my hotel room, a mix of stress from travel and excitement about the possibilities before me.
The next morning, safe from the near blizzard and prepared to interview for a tenure-track job, I awoke to the news that Benedict XVI had announced he would resign from the papacy at the end of the month.
Like many others, I didn’t really know what to make of this. It was unexpected, historic, et cetera et cetera. The first pope to resign in almost 600 years! And that had been part of resolving the fourteenth century’s western schism! Why was Benedict doing this? Who would succeed him?
Admittedly, my own early reactions were…focused on me. At the time, I was one of the editors for Daily Theology, and this was exactly the sort of thing my fellow contributors were primed to write about (Brian Flanagan put up an excellent piece on the office vs. the person of the pope within hours of the announcement, Kat Greiner had a fantastic reflection on Lent and finitude in light of his resignation a couple days later, and after my return I wrote a short piece looking at Benedict XVI’s use of Twitter). But more immediately, I was thinking mostly about how this would affect my interview.
When I arrived on campus, Prof. Woodard was being interviewed by CNN about the resignation. And it did dominate discussion that day, even as I made my pitch for why I would be a good teacher, scholar, and colleague.
Ultimately I was offered the job, and I have been very happy to be at Saint Leo these nearly ten years. It was this realization of my own upcoming tenth anniversary that got me thinking about Benedict’s resignation, as the two are inextricably tied in my memory. It’s entirely possible that I was offered the job, not because I myself am terribly interesting, but because the day I interviewed was itself very interesting. And if that’s so, that’s fine by me.
That chain of thoughts (my upcoming tenth anniversary, my interviewing on the day Benedict announced his resignation) led me over Christmas break, prior to any news of Benedict XVI’s illness, to read Jon Sweeney’s very interesting book The Pope Who Quit. It tells the story of Celestine V, who was Pope for about four months in 1294. He was the first, and until Benedict XVI, the only Pope to have freely renounced the office of the papacy (Sweeney 3). He was subsequently both canonized by Pope Clement V in 1313 and vilified by Dante in 1320.
It’s important to note that Sweeney’s book was published in 2012, prior to Benedict XVI’s renunciation. There had been occasional rumors that Benedict might resign, partly inspired by his 2009 visit to Celestine V’s tomb, during which the Pope “removed the pallium from around his shoulders, and laid it gently on Celestine’s glass-encased tomb” (Sweeney 6). Yet Sweeney, like nearly every other writer and commentator at the time, thought such a resignation unlikely (Sweeney 244).
Celestine V is obviously a strange case. Born Pietro Angelerio and known more generally as Peter of Morrone, he was not a cardinal prior to his selection as Pope, but was rather a hermit and the founder and leader of a religious order (the Hermits of St. Damian, who were later called the Celestines). There had been a two year sede vacante, which led the elderly hermit (he was around 80 years old) to write a letter to the dithering and bickering cardinals who had thus far failed to decide on a new vicar of Christ. His letter called forth God’s judgment: “The inaction you have shown will surely bring the wrath of Jesus Christ down upon you, upon your families, and upon all of us who call ourselves by his name” (Sweeney 25-26).
His intervention led one of the cardinals, a friend of Peter’s named Latino Malabranca Orsini, to announce his vote for Peter. According to Sweeney, Celestine’s election was one of the rare examples of the pope being selected quasi ex inspiratione: “popular consensus that begins’ with one man’s inspired vocal acclamation” (Sweeney 44). Essentially, the cardinals were moved to select this man, this hermit, this non-cardinal as the next pontiff. This method of papal selection, which I admittedly was unfamiliar with, remained on the books until John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Universi Dominici gregis in 1996. They did so despite, or perhaps because of, his advanced age, his reputation for holiness, or his lack of political savvy.
Sweeney describes Celestine as a weak pope, disinterested in the office, and largely prey to the whims of Charles II, the king of Naples. When informed of his election to the papacy, Peter initially rejected the job, allegedly even hiding away from those who had come to bring him back for his coronation (Sweeney 66). As Pope he was the bishop of Rome, but never actually went to Rome as Pope (Sweeney 162-163). And rather than live in the finely appointed apartments of Castle Nuovo that Charles II set aside for him, Celestine V had a wooden shack, similar to the one on his mountain hermitage, built for him to live in (Sweeney 171).
These and other examples of how Celestine V did not quite fit the expectations of a Pope at the time lead Sweeney to posit an interesting theory behind Celestine’s disengagement and eventual renunciation of the office: an unexpected protest.
“Was Celestine essentially an obscurantist? Perhaps he wasn’t inept so much as he was ruling from a stance of passive protest. Shocked to discover what it meant to be holy father, he may have quietly resolved at some point simply not to do it. Perhaps he believed himself to be the head of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy that he didn’t acknowledge as entirely legitimate as it was structured. This theory would explain many of his actions in office and would also fit the pattern of where he had come from.” (Sweeney 242)
The theory is interesting because it matches up also with how many read the resignation of Benedict XVI. Yes, the man who had been Cardinal Ratzinger — prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and close ally of Saint Pope John Paul II — surely went into the position aware of expectations. He would almost certainly have understood what it meant to be pope, and he had headed one of the most powerful parts of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy for years. He couldn’t claim Celestine’s naivety or simple-mindedness.
However, it is also known that the then Cardinal Ratzinger had tried to retire from his position as head of the CDF, asking John Paul II to let him instead become the Vatican librarian in 1997. The Pope rebuffed him, retaining him in his CDF role until John Paul II’s death in 2005. Following that death, Cardinal Ratzinger did not think he was a candidate due to his advanced age of 78 - nearly the same age that Peter of Morrone was when he was elected more than 700 years earlier. And when it became clear that he would be elected, he said that he “prayed to God, ‘Please don’t do this to me.’”
But I think the comparison is even more apt when one considers where Benedict XVI was by the end of his papacy. In late 2012 and early 2013, he had come to see himself as too old, too weak, too incapable to shepherd the church effectively. While the Spotlight investigations out of Boston in 2002 began the reckoning process in the United States, the global dimension exploded during Benedict’s papacy with the 2009 report from Ireland and further accusations in many other countries in 2010. These ongoing explosions, the “Vatileaks” scandal involving his former butler and his private papers, and the entrenched and unruly bureaucracy of the curia all contributed to his sense that he was no longer the right person to lead the church.
I have heard many say that Benedict XVI’s renunciation of the papal office may be one of his most significant contributions to the church, even beyond his significant theological output, his work in the CDF of investigating theologians, and his eight years as Pope. It’s a compelling claim, one that can only be borne out over time, but one that points to the humility and freedom it must have taken for him to do so.
Now Pope Benedict XVI has passed, and new questions arise. There has been occasional talk over the last year about the possibility that Pope Francis might resign. I was always confident he would not do so while Benedict was alive: the optics of having a pope and pope emeritus were complicated enough that it seemed unlikely we would then have a pope and two pope emiriti. Now Francis’ resignation seems imaginable, especially in light of his own physical infirmities.
There is also the question of the “position” of pope emeritus, and what that might look like going forward. It seems likely that, at some point, Francis might stipulate some more formal guidelines for what that office will be in the future: the manner of dress and address, the provisions the Vatican will make for future former popes, and what public or private roles they might have. Even as Benedict was the first two resign in centuries, and the first ever to be styled “pope emeritus,” I suspect there will be more who do so in my lifetime. As there were many questions following on Benedict’s renunciation, it would be wise to preempt those in a formal way before the next one comes.
I confess that, despite Benedict’s reputation as a significant theologian, I have not actually read that much by him. I read (and have taught) his three papal encyclicals (Deus Caritas Est, Spe Salvi, Caritas in Veritate), The Spirit of the Liturgy, and most of the first Jesus of Nazareth book.
I think some of this comes out of the reputation he has among many US theologians, at least of the more center-left or liberal variety that I have worked with the most in my career. That reputation is shaped especially by his time as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and his role in investigating and (in some cases) restricting the work of theologians like Charles Curran, Jacques Dupuis, Roger Haight, and Jon Sobrino.
Nonetheless, I am inclined this year to correct some of this lacunae. I have begun reading the first volume of Seewald’s biography (I genuinely love papal biographies - if you do too, I especially recommend John Pollard’s Benedict XV: The Unknown Pope and the Pursuit of Peace). If I make it to volume 2, which picks up after Vatican II, I’ll plan to read some of his major works chronologically as the biography refers to them. If you’re interested in joining me, let me know.