Benedict’s resignation may have been foregone conclusion

Speculation about Pope Benedict's health is not new.

In 2011, at the age of 84 - the same his predecessor was at the time of his death - Benedict XVI was showing signs that he was starting to slow down. It was only six years since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been appointed.

Pope John Paul II died of septic shock and heart failure in April 2005. He had survived cancer, a gunshot, and was in the late stages of Parkinson's disease. His death was a prolonged affair kept going by TV media crews reporting his every hospitalisation.

A few weeks later, the former head of the Catholic inquisition - the office now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - was elected pope. At 78, Ratzinger was the oldest pope in some 300 years. His was believed to be a papacy of continuation, designed to keep the papal legacy of John Paul II alive in an interim period until a new pope, perhaps younger, could be elected.

Many observers felt Benedict's resignation was imminent.

In 2011, papal spokesperson Fr Federico Lombardo had to explain the purpose for Benedict using a rolling platform to navigate St Peter's Basilica. "The purpose is exclusively to alleviate the efforts of the Holy Father, as already happens with his use of the Popemobile during entrance processions in outdoor ceremonies and in St. Peter's Square," he had told Vatican journalists.

Benedict himself came to the papacy with his own particular medical history, as is expected of anybody of a certain age. In 1991 he suffered a haemorrhagic stroke that briefly affected his eyesight. In 1992, he suffered a blackout and fell in his bathroom, cutting his head and requiring stitches and a brief hospitalisation.

During his 2009 Easter Mass, he briefly stumbled, casing a mild panic among his aides to prevent a full frontal fall on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. During a summer vacation in the Italian Alps in July 2009, he fell and broke his wrist, and needed surgery to set it back in place. Again in 2009, during a Christmas Eve mass, a mentally deranged woman jumped the barrier inside St Peter's Basilica and tackled the pontiff to the ground. He was unharmed but visibly shaken by the event.

In his 11 February message to the consistory for the canonisation of the Otranto martyrs, clearly realising he was no longer physically capable of handling the duties of office, Benedict may have recognised his own obligation to resign.

Vatican journalist Antonio Socci had already presaged this imminent resignation, writing in Libero newspaper that Benedict would step down in April 2012. "This rumour is circulating high up in the Vatican and therefore deserves close attention. The pope has not rejected the possibility of his resignation when he turns 85 in April next year."

Others like the Catholic Herald's William Oddie took umbrage at suggestions that Benedict's use of a walking stick were the first signs of a retirement move. "It now seems inconceivable that a pope should just retire... The fact is that it is really only conceivable in the case of a total physical or mental collapse, a serious stroke perhaps, which could leave a pope speechless and paralysed."

As it turns out, it was the then Cardinal Ratzinger who himself suggested that if a pope saw that he absolutely couldn't do it anymore, "then of course he would resign" - and yet again in 2010, when he said that "If a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically, and spiritually capable of carrying out the duties of his office, then he has the right, and in some circumstances the obligation, to resign."