Pope Set for Vatican Airlift as Cardinals Size Up Dossier

Bloomberg: Pope Benedict XVI will become the first pontiff in 600 years to abdicate when he’s airlifted out of the Vatican today, as cardinals set to elect his successor assess the impact of a secret dossier on church intrigue.

The pope bid farewell to cardinals at the Vatican today before they gather next month to pick a new leader. In his remarks to them, Benedict vowed “unconditional obedience” to the future pontiff.

The pope, 85, will cease being leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics at 8 p.m. Rome time after being flown by helicopter to the papal residence south of the Italian capital in Castel Gandolfo. Swiss guards who protect the pontiff will abandon their station at the doors of the 17th-century villa, leaving the task to Vatican gendarmes.

“After that hour, there will be no pope,” said Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, in an e-mailed comment to subscribers. “The see of Peter will be vacant.”

Benedict’s abdication, the first since Pope Gregory XII in 1415, comes as the Roman Catholic church grapples with a wave of controversy including clerical sex abuse and the leaking of papal documents. It also ends the career of Joseph Ratzinger, who rose to become Catholicism’s doctrinal watchdog and then Roman pontiff after growing up in Nazi Germany.

Farewell Meeting

The pope will be seen off just before 5 p.m. by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s second-in-command, before boarding the helicopter for a 15-minute flight, according to spokesman Federico Lombardi. In Castel Gandolfo, he’ll briefly salute pilgrims from a window in his last public act as pope.

During the interim period without a pontiff, known as “sede vacante” or vacant seat, Bertone will be acting head of the Vatican carrying the title “camerlengo,” or chamberlain.

As Benedict struggled to tame controversy during his last year in power, Bertone came under scrutiny. He was portrayed as undermining the pope in a swirl of palace intrigue in a book by an Italian journalist based on papal documents pilfered by the pontiff’s butler, Paolo Gabriele.

Gabriele indicated he’d leaked the documents to protect the pope and expose “evil and corruption” inside the Vatican. Benedict pardoned him last month after he’d been sentenced to 18 months in a Vatican jail for theft.

Dan Brown

Bertone, 78, has accused journalists covering the case of “imitating Dan Brown,” author of “The Da Vinci Code,” the best-seller that depicted the Vatican as a hotbed of deception. The media “invent fables,” he said in an interview last June with Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana.

This week, the pope met with Julian Herranz, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi, the cardinals he tasked to investigate the leaks and who in December handed him a secret dossier on the case known as “Vatileaks.”

While the pope said he lacked the strength to lead the church when he announced his intention to resign on Feb. 11, Italian magazine Panorama and La Repubblica newspaper reported last week that he had decided to step down after receiving the secret file. It detailed a Vatican network of sex and graft that made some prelates vulnerable to blackmail, the press reports said, citing unidentified people close to the probe.

Lombardi said the reports “don’t correspond to reality.” The Vatican accused media Feb. 23 of seeking “to exert pressure” on cardinals before the conclave.

Pre-Conclave Talks

Still, the probe was able to identify “those who work with uprightness and generosity in the Holy See,” the Vatican said in a statement after the pope met with the investigators on Feb. 25. While the dossier will remain secret before being handed to the future pope, its authors may discuss it with other cardinals during pre-conclave talks, Lombardi said.

Those talks, which will debate the timing of the conclave and other issues, will probably begin March 4, according to Lombardi. They will involve about 100 cardinals who exceed the voting-age limit of 80 as well as the 115 who are set to join the secret gathering in the Sistine Chapel later next month.

The three investigating cardinals “will know to what extent they may and must give useful information to those who ask for it in order to evaluate the situation and choose a new pope,” Lombardi told reporters at a Vatican briefing Feb. 25.

Speculation that the pope has struggled to tame intrigue has been fueled by his own words. He used a Feb. 13 sermon to speak out about the church’s “sometimes disfigured face” and a Feb. 23 message to the Curia to lament the “evil, suffering and corruption” that has defaced the millennia-old institution.

‘Cloud of Filth’

Benedict’s papacy, which began after he spent a quarter- century as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, has been marked by upheaval. At first, he struggled to respond to accusations that the church was doing too little to punish pedophile priests and covering up evidence from the U.S. and Ireland to Germany.

Benedict later oversaw the publishing of the first Vatican guidelines for dealing with clerics accused of abuse. He also began to speak out publicly against what he called the “cloud of filth” that had soiled the church.

A bookish scholar, Benedict spent years penning by hand a philosophical take on life of Jesus Christ in a three-volume book. He opposed “moral relativism,” the idea that truth is malleable and can be adjusted to lifestyles, and considered it his mission to resist changes sweeping modern society.

He’ll return to a Vatican convent in two months to live out his days in prayer with the title “pope emeritus.” In a farewell address to pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square, Benedict reminisced yesterday about moments of “joy and light” during his papacy as well as times when “it seemed like the Lord was sleeping.”

reporter on this story: Jeffrey Donovan in Prague