MAINE
Seacoast Online
By Laura Dolce
ldolce@seacoastonline.com
February 11, 2013
KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine — When Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would be retiring at the end of the month, he may have caught the world by surprise, but for Maine’s Monsignor Charles Murphy, there were signs more than a year ago that the pope was struggling.
“I saw him last in December 2011 and his walk was very impaired,” said Murphy, director of deacons for the Archdiocese of Portland and the author of several books, including The Spirituality of Fasting and Eucharistic Adoration. “He had to be wheeled around. But mentally, he was very sharp.”
Murphy, who spent more than a decade of his life in Vatican City, first as a student from 1958 to 1962, and then as rector of the North American College for seminarians from 1978 to 1985, visits each year and said Benedict’s stepping down was “unprecedented.”
“John Paul II wouldn’t, even with advanced Parkinson’s,” he said. “He’d say, ‘Do you ask the father of the family to retire?’”
Benedict, Murphy said, was “more realistic.” Chosen to serve as an “interim” pope following the long term of John Paul II, he understood that his role was to give the cardinals a chance to “regroup and rethink.”
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