Benedict’s 2013 resignation shook a routine Vatican ceremony

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Veteran reporter Giovanna Chirri was starting to doze off in the Vatican press room on a slow holiday when all of a sudden the Latin she learned in high school made her perk up — and gave her the scoop of a lifetime.

It was Tuesday, February 11, 2013, and Chirri was observing closed-circuit television coverage. Pope Benedict XVI Preside over a pro-forma cardinal meeting to determine dates for three upcoming canonizations.

Benedict chose to remain seated during the ceremony and instead of standing up and leaving the Consistory Hall in the Apostolic Palace, but he took out a single sheet and began reading.

“I have convoked you to this consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church,” Benedict said quietly in his German-clipped Latin.

Chirri followed along but only began to realize the import of what was unfolding when she heard Benedict then utter the words “ingravescente aetate.” The term is Latin for “advanced age,” and is the title of a 1970 Vatican regulation requiring bishops to retire when they turn 75.

Chirri began to understand that Benedict had just spoken and announced his retirement at the end of the month. He believed he was becoming too old for the job.

It was the first papal resignation for 600 years. Chirri, the Vatican correspondent of the authoritative ANSA news agency was about to relay the news to the rest of the world.

“Hearing this ‘ingravescente aetate’ I started to feel sick physically, a really, really violent reaction,” Chirri recalled years later.

Her head felt like it was inflating. As her left leg started to shake uncontrollably, she had to hold it with one hand while she made phone calls to the Vatican to confirm that Benedict had been heard correctly.

After receiving confirmation from Vatican spokesman, Chirri sent flash headline on ANSA at 11 :46 a.m.

“The pope is leaving the pontificate beginning 2/28,” it read.

Fast a decade ago, Benedict died Saturday.

Chirri continues to search for the words to describe the emotional, intellectual, professional, and physical combustion that the headline caused, many years later.

“I was terrified by news that was unthinkable to me,” she said.

Aside from the fact that she truly liked Benedict as a pope, Chirri couldn’t comprehend that the conservative German theologian who spent his life upholding church rules and doctrine would take the revolutionary step of resigning.

“Now eight years have passed and we’re used to it,” she said in an interview in 2021. “But eight years ago, it was impossible to imagine that the pope might resign. It was a theoretical hypothesis” that was technically possible but had been rejected repeatedly by popes over the centuries.

Chirri won accolades for having had both the intellectual capacity to understand what had transpired, and the steely nerves to report it first and accurately among mainstream news organizations — no small feat considering the near-official authority that an ANSA headline carries in reporting Vatican news.

It was a holiday in the Vatican that day — the anniversary of the Lateran Accords between Italy and the Vatican — and only a handful of other reporters were even in the press room to hear the in-house broadcast of the ceremony.

Chirri was there, just the right person at exactly the right time.

“Certainly, if I hadn’t been an Italian who studied Latin in the 1970s in Italy, I never would have understood a thing,” Chirri said of Italy’s classics-heavy public high school curriculum.

“Also, because the pope was reading so calmly, it was like he was telling us what he had had for breakfast that morning,” she added.

It was only later that it became clear that Benedict had planned to retire for many months. He was struck by a nighttime fall on a 2012 Mexican trip and realized that he wasn’t up to the task of carrying out the globe-trotting duties of the 21st Century papacy.

Benedict knew well what was required to make the announcement legitimate: Though only a handful of popes had done it before, canon law allows for a papal resignation as long as it is “freely made and properly manifested.”

Traditionalists and conspiracy theorists disagreed later with Benedict’s grammatical formula, claiming that it rendered the announcement null and that Benedict was still the pope.

Both requirements were met by Benedict. He said that he made the decision free of charge, made it public at a Vatican ceremony in the Holy See’s official language, and repeated it over the years to clear any doubt.

“As far as canon law is concerned, it’s impeccable,” Chirri said.

For anyone who was paying attention, Benedict had been hinting about his intentions for many years.

In 2009, during a visit to the earthquake-ravaged city of L’Aquila, Benedict prayed at the tomb of Pope Celestine V, the hermit pope who stepped down in 1294 after just five months in office. Benedict left on Celestine’s tomb a pallium — the simple white woolen stole that is a symbol of the papacy.

It was not something that anyone thought about at the time. In retrospect, however, it was clear that a pope left behind a powerful symbol of the papal papacy on the tomb a pope who had resigned.

In a 2010 interview that was over a book length, Benedict stated that the popes could and should resign in certain circumstances. However, he said that retirement was not an option to relieve a particular burden.

“If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign,” Benedict said in “Light of the World.”

That was the same reasoning he presented to his cardinals that cold February morning.

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine (St. Peter) ministry,” he said.

He said that in modern world, “strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

Benedict closed his remarks by thanking the cardinals and asking for forgiveness for his mistakes.

And in a promise he kept to the very end, he vowed to continue serving the church “through a life dedicated to prayer.”

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Follow AP’s coverage of the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI at https://apnews.com/hub/pope-benedict-xvi