Quo Vadis

January 28, 2023

In this video we share Why did Pope Benedict XVI Really Resign?

The reason for the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI revealed!

Pope Benedict XVI reportedly resigned in 2013 due to the chronic insomnia he suffered from for much of his pontificate.

This is what the late pope claims in an unpublished letter signed just two months before his death, on October 28, 2022, and sent to his biographer Peter Seewald shortly before his death.

The German Catholic agency K N A revealed the existence of the text on January 27, 2022, which will be published in full in the German magazine Focus on Saturday, January 28.

"Managing Saint Peter's boat and proclaiming the Gospel requires strength of mind and body, a strength that has weakened in me in the last few months to the extent that I had to recognize my inability to adequately fulfill the service entrusted to me."

In his resignation statement, given in Latin, Benedict said that power is needed to manage the Church and that he no longer has enough of it, writes the Aleteia portal.

Thus, on February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI explained to the cardinals gathered in the Vatican for a consistory why he decided to renounce his ministry.

However, the pope never described the exact reasons for this loss of power.

In May 2020, in an interview with Peter Seewald published in his biography, the pope emeritus still only mentioned the health problems that had caused his doctor to prohibit him from traveling for any length of time after a trip to Mexico in 2012.

He also confided that at the time he was convinced that he would die shortly after his renunciation.

In an unpublished letter, the Pope Emeritus explains to the same Peter Seewald the "main reason" for his resignation: "the insomnia that has followed him without interruption since the World Youth Day in Cologne" - his first trip as Pope, in August 2005.

In order to cope with this problem, the doctor prescribed him "strong drugs" that worked for a while, but eventually "reached their limits".

In a recent book published by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who was the pope's secretary for almost 20 years, the archbishop recounts a conversation between Benedict XVI and Pope Francis about their sleep:

"Pope Francis told him one day that he slept only six hours, like a stone.

And Benedict answered with a sad smile: "It is a gift that his predecessor unfortunately did not have!"

The 265th pope confides in an unpublished letter that he had an accident during the first night – from March 23 to 24, 2012 – of his trip to Cuba and Mexico, an event that Archbishop Gänswein also recounted in his book.

The Pope writes that in the morning he found his handkerchief "completely soaked in blood".

With no memory of the incident, he believes he "must have hit something" in his bathroom and fell.

"It took several stitches to sew up the wound," his secretary testified in his book about the incident, saying the Pope had slipped on the bathroom rug.

His personal doctor later linked the incident to the sleeping pills he had prescribed and required him to have a morning off on every day he would spend abroad from then on, the Pope explained in his letter.

These restrictions, in the eyes of Pope Benedict XVI, "could only be applied for a short time."

As World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, approached in July 2013, the Pope felt that he would not be able to "manage" the event.

He explained that he then decided to step down so that the "new pope" could go to Rio in his stead.

For the recipient of the letter, Peter Seewald, these statements put an end to speculation about the reasons for the pope's resignation.

Mirrored from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XsVa4I8Qlc