VATICAN CITY
International Business Times
By Eric Linton | March 03 2013
Roman Catholic cardinals, fearing that Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation has weakened his office, will ask the next pope to pledge in his inaugural address that he will serve until his death, European media report.
According to the Sunday Times of London, an unnamed cardinal told the Corriere della Sera newspaper of Milan that the rule that a pope has the right to resign of his own free will can’t be changed, “but for the future we need to safeguard the freedom of the church from external influences.” The fear is that a future pope could be pressured into stepping down.
On Friday, Benedict said he was “not abandoning the Cross, I am staying in a new way,” the Times reported. This was seen as a response to Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, a former personal secretary to his predecessor John Paul II, who said of his resignation: “One doesn’t step down from the Cross.”
Benedict has agreed that three cardinals who investigated the “Vatileaks” scandal would give their peers details of their secret report, which he received in December. Some have speculated that the report is so damaging it precipitated his resignation. The Vatican has denied allegations that it reveals a gay sex scandal in the Vatican that has left top clerics open to blackmail.
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