After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry,” the pope said in a message to cardinals. He said that in the modern world “both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
No pope has abdicated from office in modern times and the news will come as a huge shock to the world’s more than 1bn Catholics. The last pope to step down was Pope Gregory XII in 1415, but he was forced out of office to end the great Western Schism that had split the church.
The last pontiff voluntarily to leave office was Celestine V, whose pontificate lasted only five months.
Benedict XVI became pope in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II.
In 2011, the Vatican was forced to deny a report in an Italian newspaper that Pope Benedict would step down for health reasons after his 85th birthday in April 2012. That story was unsourced.
“The pope’s health is excellent,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said at the time. “We don’t know anything about it. Ask the person who wrote it.”
In a book last year, the pope said he would not hesitate to become the first pontiff to resign willingly in more than 700 years if he felt himself no longer able, “physically, psychologically and spiritually” to run the Catholic Church.
Several popes in recent history, including the late Pope John Paul, considered resigning for health reasons instead of ruling for life.
Pope Benedict is currently the sixth-oldest holder of the See of Rome. The oldest, Leo VIII, was 93 when he died in 1903.
Last October, the pope needed a mobile platform to help him down the aisle of St Peter’s and was filmed leaning heavily on a stick as he boarded an aircraft.
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