The Pope And The 'R' word

With doctors still undecided whether an infirm Pope John Paul II will have to scale back Easter Week activities, a leading Italian writer Monday reopened debate over whether the pope may one day retire.

The television images of a suffering pope sitting in a chair nursing an ailing knee while a stand-in said Palm Sunday mass for him were broadcast around the world.

But they hit home perhaps hardest in the 108-acre walled enclave of Vatican City, where the pope is absolute monarch and from where he leads 1 billion Roman Catholics.

Can a pope who may become even more physically infirm lead Catholics as well as he once did?

Should popes, who rule for life, retire if they become ill instead of dying in office?

Vittorio Messori, a leading Catholic writer with good contacts in the Vatican who has interviewed the pope several times, sparked off the debate again Monday, a day after the Palm Sunday mass.

Messori, writing in Italy's leading Corriere della Sera daily, said there were some inside the walled city who were again contemplating the R-word -- retirement.

"With all the faith in the Holy Spirit possible, can the Church live in a climate of uncertainty?" Messori asked.

The last pope to resign willingly was Celestine V, who stepped down in 1294. Gregory XII reluctantly abdicated in 1415 to resolve a dispute when there was more than one pope reigning at the same time.

The Vatican cuts short talk of papal retirement.

"As far as I remember, you run a Church with a mind and not with a leg," one Vatican-based archbishop said on condition that he not be identified.

"The pope's head is fine. He has problems moving around but that does not stop him from governing the Church," Cardinal Giovanni Chelli told Reuters.

"This talk about there being a lobby in the Vatican for him to retire is rubbish," he said.

For a man like John Paul II, who went skiing and hiking until only eight years ago, the loss of mobility is a heavy psychological burden.

But aides say that in recent years the pope has come to terms with his failing mobility and would see no stigma in using a wheelchair in public if it came to that.

The pope's health has been declining more or less steadily since the early 1990s, when symptoms of Parkinson's disease first surfaced. His left hand now trembles out of control.

A colon tumor was removed in 1992, he dislocated his shoulder in 1993 and broke his femur in 1994.

Doctors fear the pope may have ever more difficulty moving by himself. He already uses a cane and for the past two years has been using a wheeled platform which Vatican ushers push up the main aisle of St Peter's Basilica for services.

While there is a provision in Church law for the resignation of a pope, none exists to deal with the — possibility that a pope may be alive but incapacitated for a long time.

When talk of retirement has come up in the past, the pope has said he wants to stay on the job as long as God wants.

It was once unthinkable that a pope would retire early rather than rule until death.

But life-extending advances in modern medicine have led some to suggest that the rules should be changed and that popes should retire at 75 as bishops do, particularly if they have prolonged health problems.

In 2000, a leading German bishop, Karl Lehmann, created a storm by suggesting the pope himself would have the courage to retire if his health prevented him from doing his job.

Many thought Lehmann's career was over, but the next year the pope promoted him to cardinal.