Pope Benedict XVI has had pacemaker for years, and ordered work on his retirement pad in August
ROME Declining health appears to be the major factor in Pope Benedict XVI's decision to step down.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi disclosed Tuesday that Benedict has worn a pacemaker for several years, and only three months ago he had an operation to replace the battery inside the implanted device.
It's also come out that the Pope ordered work to begin last August on renovating an old convent building inside Vatican city, where he will live after his resignation at the end of February. That seems to indicate he had some inclination toward, or at least thoughts of, stepping down some time ago.
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Lombardi also said Benedict would "surely say absolutely nothing about the process" to replace him -- a secretive ritual which ends in a vote by more than 100 cardinals, expected to kick off sometime in early or mid-March.
Click the player above for a full report on the Pope's health and the process to elect his successor, from CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.
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Being pope is not a particularly strenuous job. Even when they get unsteady on their feet, they either ride in the pope-mobile, are carried in a chair, or at the very least have two people on either side of them, holding their arms.
In addition, every "modern" pope (for the last 500 years or so) has understood from the very beginning that it is a job for life. Just as kings and queens used to believe that they ruled by "divine right", the Catholic church believes that the pope is chosen by god (via, of course, the prayers of the cardinals). So it's not a job you just "resign" from for health reasons.
The Catholic church loves to pretend that it's all about religion and faith, and not at all about politics, but only a very few are blind enough to truly believe that. The politics and pay-offs that go on in Vatican City make Washington D.C. look like a Girl Scout camp.
However, when embroiled in one of the biggest scandals the Catholic church has ever found itself in, and there is a real probability that it's soon to break wide open, revealing the full scale of corruption all of the way to the highest levels, then it only makes sense to resign quickly, have your successor give you a pardon as soon as he's in place, and go off to live the rest of your life in relative obscurity. (Think Richard Nixon.)
While we all know that no person lives entirely without "sin" (and even the pope has his own confessor), at a certain point, even a doddering old man realizes that he can't be seriously considered the moral head of his church (and, he assumes, the world) when he's taken such an active and long-term role in covering up such scurrilous abuses that even the local atheist can see are horribly wrong.