Cornwell: why the Pope REALLY quit?

John Cornwell, author of "Hitler;s Pope" offers one possible reason for the pope's resignation. Excerpts belwo (click title for full report) }

Gay sex rings, 'The Filth' corrupting the Vatican...and why the Pope REALLY quit:

• Sickened by moral corrosion in his own shadowy cabal, Benedict can only rid Rome of its malign influence by resigning... a leading Catholic writer's explosive analysis

By JOHN CORNWELL

We’ve heard about the so-called papal ‘resignation’ almost 600 years ago. But there wasn’t one. There were three rival Popes back then, and one of them was a psychopath. They were sacked by a council of all the bishops and cardinals to get back to one Pope at a time. Since then, every Pope has died in office.Resignation isn’t in Benedict’s vocabulary. The real reason he has quit is far more spectacular.It is to save the Catholic Church from ignominy: he has voluntarily delivered himself up as a sacrificial lamb to purge the Church of what he calls ‘The Filth’. And it must have taken courage.Here is the remarkable thing you are seldom told about a papal death or resignation: every one of the senior office-holders in the Vatican  – those at the highest level of its internal bureaucracy, called the Curia – loses his job..
He resigned in early February. That report was a final straw. The Filth has been corroding the soul of the Catholic Church for years, and the reason is the power-grabbing ineptitude and secrecy of the Curia – which failed to deal with the perpetrators. Now the Curia itself stands accused of being part of The Filth.     Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task.He is too old, and too implicated, to clean it up himself. He has resigned to make way for a younger, more dynamic successor, untainted by scandal – and a similarly recast Curia.Benedict was not prepared to wait for his own death to sweep out the gang who run the place.In one extraordinary gesture, by resigning, he gets rid of the lot of them. But what then?...


Benedict’s stunning self-sacrifice constitutes, in my view, the greatest gamble in the papacy’s 2,000-year history. If it works, the Church will begin to restore its besmirched reputation. If it fails, we Catholics are headed for calamitous conflict and fragmentation.  link