UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
To understand just how surprising Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to surrender his post is, you can look to numbers. It has been nearly six centuries since a pope resigned.
Or you can just flash back to the final years of Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, whose different approach to his physical decline casts Benedict’s course in an interesting and possibly noble light.
John Paul, too, aged rapidly before our eyes. He, too, had nowhere near the energy for his job that he had once possessed. But he pressed on, a stooped, unsteady, crippled figure barely able to get through some of the Masses he celebrated. It was a spectacle so unsettling in instances—he was so severely compromised, and seemed so pained—that it verged on ghoulish.
I know because I watched it up close. From mid-2002 to mid-2004, I covered the Vatican for The Times and traveled wherever the pope did. There were a small number of us reporters in Rome who tried as best possible never to let John Paul too far out of our sights, and for one reason above all others: we were on a death watch. There’s no more delicate way to put it.
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