BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I apologize I was unable to post anything more yesterday, 2/15/13, besides what I did at the bottom of the preceding page.





I do not know why I did not see this item two days ago, when general references were being made to the incident in other news reports, and I truly apologize, but I am posting it for the record and because it presents a number of considerations that must be kept in mind about the Pope's decision.

That incident in Mexico that may
have helped ripen Benedict XVI's
decision to renounce the Papacy
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from

February 14, 2013

In his editorial on February 12 about Benedict XVI's decision to renounce the Papacy, L'Osservatore Romano editor Giovanni Maria Vian said in passing that the decision came after the Pope's trip to Mexico and Cuba in March last year.

It had to do with an episode that was never disclosed until now. It turns out that in Leon, where the Pope stayed in Mexico, he hurt himself on the head resulting in a superficial wound that apparently bled much but was minor enough not to affect his participation in the rest of the program for the trip, one of the priests in the papal entourage told La Stampa. [In fact, the event that followed the nighttime incident was the Mass held in Leon's Bicentennial Park which was attended by some 600,000 faithful.]

According to the priest [apparently one of the papal acolytes on the staff of Mons. Guido Marini], "On the morning of March 25, on the last full day we spent in Leon, at the house of a religious order where he was staying, Benedict XVI got up in the morning with his hair soaked in blood. His aides asked him what happened, and he said he did not fall but hit his head on the bathroom sink sometime in the night. He had gone to the bathroom but as it sometimes happens when one is in an unfamiliar room, he could not find the switch right away, and hit his head while moving in the dark. He said he had not fallen down." [I cringe to recall that the first person to have seen him when he got up that day would have been Paolo Gabriele, his valet, who at that time, March 2012, had already consigned all the documents he had pilfered from the Pope's study to Gianluigi Nuzzi.]

Something similar, which had more serious and visible consequences, happened in Introd, Val D'Aosta, in July 2009 when he actually fell down during the night and fractured his right wrist.

"His pillowcase was blood-stained and there were a few drops on the carpet," the priest said. "Everything was quickly tidied up, But the cut itself was only superficial and not concerning. It was located on the part of his head that is normally covered by his zucchetto, and also not visible through his thick hair."

In the subsequent hours on the schedule, surrounded by massive crowds at all times, the cut did not appear to bother the Pope any further. "He had no problems even when we put his miter on and took it off as we had to do several times during the Mass," the priest said. "In fact, it was only later at night, back at the convent, that his doctor looked at the wound again".

The priest now looks at that episode, considered at the time even by the papal entourage to be minor, in a different light. He recalls that over dinner that night, they were told that his personal physician, Dr. Patrizio Polisca, joked while he was dressing the cut, "Now you see, Holy Father, why I have been very critical of trips like these...", and the Pope replied, with that self-irony that those around him know so well, "Even I am critical..."

The priest hastened to say that the Pope was very moved by the overwhelming reception he received from the Mexicans who had been the very first to welcome John Paul II on his first trip as Pope back in 1979. [Not to mention that in the days before Benedict XVI's trips, MSM kept 'reporting' uncharitably that the Mexicans so love John Paul II, who had visited Mexico three times, that they were mostly unenthusiastic about Benedict XVI's visit.]

"But he was also aware that he was no longer physically up to these long-range travels, with the time changes and the number of public events necessarily programmed within just a few days." [NB: Drastic time changes affect a person's normal biorhythm, which readjusts to the actual time of day, and in persons of advanced age, the time change can result in physical consequences that take longer to readjust]

He adds that "At the start of the trip, the Pope had told us that he was undertaking it as a 'penitential trip'."

How much did the episode weigh in on the decision that the Pope made on a matter that he obviously has thought about a lot? It is difficult to say. His brother, Mons Georg Ratzinger, said last Monday, "His personal physician has expressly told him to avoid making any trans-oceanic trips or any such long-range transfers, because his general physical condition no longer allows it".

[He did travel to Lebanon in November, but although the flight took him over the Mediterranean, the actual trip from Rome to Beirut and vice-versa only lasts 3 hours. He must have thought, after Mexico, that if he could not go to Rio de Janeiro for WYD in July 2013, the youth of the world who would be gathered there nonetheless expect and deserve the presence of the Pope, not him necessarily.

One gleans this from an anecdote recalled on Tuesday by the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro when he said that the new Pope elected in the Conclave would be coming to Rio for WYD. According to CNA: "During Mass at a parish in Rio, Archbishop Orani Joao Tempesta said that when he last spoke with Benedict XVI about the event, the Holy Father told him, 'The Pope will go to World Youth Day. Me or my successor.'"]

When Fr. Lombardi was asked about the line in Vian's editorial on Tuesday, he said, "At that point the Pope had been successfully complying with all his scheduled activities, but he realized, because of steadily deteriorating physical strength, that he would no longer be able to make such long trips." [At that point, his only other travel commitment was the trip to Lebanon, but it is a fairly short trip, and obviously, an almost compulsory trip, in view of the aborted 'Arab spring' and its consequences for the peoples of the Middle East, especially its Christian communities.]

But perhaps that nighttime incident in a foreign place, with the possibility that it could have had more serious consequences, including having to be hospitalized in a foreign country, did contribute to ripen a decision that would lead to the historic renunciation announced on Monday.