Did Benedict XVI Validly Resign? The Anatomy of a Renunciation, Part I

The Question Before Us

On the morning of February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI read a short Latin text to a room of cardinals, and within the hour the whole world was saying the same four words: the Pope has resigned. Thirteen years later, nearly everyone still takes those words at face value. This essay questions whether they still should.

Let us be clear about what is and is not in dispute. A pope can validly resign. The Code of Canon Law provides for it, and there is historical precedent in the resignations of St. Celestine V in 1294 and Gregory XII who also resigned in 1415 to end the Great Western Schism¹. The question is not whether a pope may validly resign, but whether this pope, on that day, actually did.

Our answer is that he indeed did not. And the reason has nothing to do with any secret plans, coded Latin, or a “kill switch” left behind for the faithful to discover. It does not even depend on proving that Benedict was pressured or threatened, which no one outside his conscience can prove. The reason is actually far simpler, and it is written in his own words: Benedict XVI misunderstood the very thing he was giving up. The Code of Canon Law calls this substantial error, and it says plainly that a resignation made in substantial error is “invalid by the law itself².”

This is a heavy conclusion for readers to draw, especially those who may be new to this, which is why we’re taking a slow, methodical approach. So this first part lays out the case and nothing else:

• What Benedict said
• What the law requires
• What the papacy is
• What Benedict believed it to be
• Why the gap between those last two is fatal to the act

Part II will take up, one by one, the strongest objections to everything argued here. Nothing will be hidden from the reader, least of all the evidence against us.

One word about tone before we begin. To say that a man erred is not to call him a liar or a schemer. Joseph Ratzinger gave the Church Summorum Pontificum, the Regensburg lecture, and a lifetime of defending the faith against the “dictatorship of relativism.” We write about him as sons write about a father, yet we’re not excusing a father’s actions, as he is certainly not indefectible as a man. However, it is precisely because the papacy matters so much that we cannot afford to be sentimental about how it was handled.

I. The Documents, in Benedict’s Own Words

Before we argue anything, we should simply listen. What follows are four witnesses from a span of three years: three in Benedict's own words, and one from Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his personal secretary, who knew his mind as well as anyone. Read together, they give a single, consistent picture of what Benedict believed he was doing when he renounced the papacy. Whether that belief was mistaken is the question the rest of this essay must answer.

1. The Declaratio (February 11, 2013)

Benedict read his renunciation in Latin, and the Latin is the authoritative text³. It is worth walking through slowly, because the official English translation renders two different Latin words with the same English word, “ministry,” and in doing so hides a distinction that is plainly visible in the original.

Benedict begins by saying that, after examining his conscience before God, he has come to the certainty that his strength is no longer suited ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum, to administering the Petrine munus adequately. He then says something remarkable about that munus: that “according to its spiritual essence” it must be carried out not only by acting and speaking (agendo et loquendo) but “no less by suffering and praying” (non minus patiendo et orando).

Only then does he turn to his weakness, which leaves him unable to administer well the ministerium entrusted to him. And when he comes to the act itself, the word he uses is ministerium, not munus: declaro me ministerio Episcopi Romae, Successoris Sancti Petri... renuntiare, “I declare that I renounce the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter.” He adds that the See of Rome will be vacant from 8:00 p.m. on February 28, and that a conclave must be convoked.

Notice the munus is described as something whose essence includes prayer and suffering, which Benedict can still offer. The ministerium is the thing his strength can no longer bear, and the ministerium is what he renounces. We will not build our case on this vocabulary alone; Part II explains why. But a careful reader should note it, because everything Benedict said afterward fits it exactly.

2. The Last General Audience (February 27, 2013)

Two weeks later, on the eve of the vacancy he had announced, Benedict explained his act to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square⁴. He went back to the day of his election, April 19, 2005, and said that from that moment he had been engaged by the Lord “always and forever.” Then he said that this “always” is also a “forever,” and that his decision to renounce “the active exercise of the ministry” does not revoke it. He would not return to private life. He no longer bore the power of office for the governance of the Church, he said, but in the service of prayer he would remain, in his words, “in the enclosure of Saint Peter.”

Here, allow me to go back once again to 19 April 2005. The real gravity of the decision was also due to the fact that from that moment on I was engaged always and forever by the Lord. Always – anyone who accepts the Petrine ministry no longer has any privacy. He belongs always and completely to everyone, to the whole Church. In a manner of speaking, the private dimension of his life is completely eliminated. I was able to experience, and I experience it even now, that one receives one’s life precisely when one gives it away. Earlier I said that many people who love the Lord also love the Successor of Saint Peter and feel great affection for him; that the Pope truly has brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, throughout the world, and that he feels secure in the embrace of your communion; because he no longer belongs to himself, he belongs to all and all belong to him.

The "always" is also a "for ever" – there can no longer be a return to the private sphere. My decision to resign the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this. I do not return to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences, and so on. I am not abandoning the cross, but remaining in a new way at the side of the crucified Lord. I no longer bear the power of office for the governance of the Church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, in the enclosure of Saint Peter.

– General Audience of February 27, 2013

Notice this is not a man describing a clean departure. It is a man describing a change in how he holds something he insists he still holds.

3. Benedict to Peter Seewald (2016)

In Last Testament, his book-length interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald, Benedict was asked whether a decline in one’s ability to perform is reason enough to step down from the Chair of Peter. His answer is quite telling. He called that reading of his act a “functional misunderstanding,” because, he said, the successor of Peter is not merely bound to a function: the office “enters into your very being⁵.”

Seewald had essentially repeated the reasoning of the Declaratio back to its author, and the author rejected it as too narrow. For Benedict, the papacy was not only something one does. It was something one becomes.

4. Archbishop Georg Gänswein (2016)

For nearly two decades Archbishop Gänswein was Benedict’s personal secretary and closest companion. On May 20, 2016, at the Pontifical Gregorian University, he described Benedict’s understanding of his own act in terms that leave little room for doubt⁶.

Since the election of Francis, Gänswein said, there are not two popes but “de facto an expanded ministry,” with “an active member and a contemplative member.” That, he explained, is why Benedict kept his papal name and the white cassock, why he is still properly addressed as “Holiness,” and why he remained inside the Vatican rather than withdrawing to a monastery. Benedict, he said, had not abandoned the Petrine ministry at all, something “quite impossible after his irrevocable acceptance of the office in April 2005.” He added that Benedict had long thought through, theologically, the possibility of a pope emeritus, and that he took this step even against the opinion of well-meaning and competent advisers⁷.

A few weeks later, the journalist Paul Badde summarized Gänswein’s meaning back to him: Benedict remained in the office, but in its contemplative part, so that an active part and a contemplative part together form an enlargement of the Munus Petrinum. Gänswein agreed that this was what he had said⁸.

Four witnesses, then, and one picture: Benedict believed he was giving up the governing work of the papacy while keeping something of the papacy itself. The rest of this essay asks whether that is possible, and what follows if it is not.

II. The Law

Three specific canons govern the question, and the reader does not need a degree in canon law to follow them or understand their meaning.

Canon 332 §2 treats papal resignation directly: Si contingat ut Romanus Pontifex muneri suo renuntiet, ad validitatem requiritur ut renuntiatio libere fiat et rite manifestetur, non vero ut a quopiam acceptetur. “If it happens that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested but not that it is accepted by anyone⁹.” Two things are worth noticing. First, the Latin speaks of renouncing the pope’s munus, the very word Benedict used for the office whose essence includes prayer and suffering. Second, no one can accept or reject a papal resignation. There is no superior to approve it. Either the act is valid in itself or it is nothing.

Canon 188 applies to every resignation of every ecclesiastical office, the papacy included: Renuntiatio ex metu gravi, iniuste incusso, aut dolo vel errore substantiali aut simoniace facta, ipso iure irrita est. “A resignation made out of grave fear that is inflicted unjustly or out of malice, substantial error, or simony is invalid by the law itself¹⁰.” The phrase ipso iure, “by the law itself,” matters a great deal, because it means no tribunal needs to declare the resignation void. If the defect is present, the act never took effect.

Canon 126 stands beneath canon 188 as the general rule for every juridic act in the Church: an act placed out of error “concerning something which constitutes its substance or which amounts to a condition sine qua non is invalid¹¹.” Hold on to that last phrase. A condition sine qua non, “without which not,” is a condition so essential to a person’s choice that, without it, he would not have chosen at all. We will return to it in Section V, because it is the hinge on which this whole question turns.

What canonists mean by “substantial error”

What we must make clear is that not every mistake undoes an act. A man who resigns believing his successor will be a saint, and gets a scoundrel instead, has made an error, but not one that touches the substance of what he did. Substantial error is different: it is a mistake about what the act itself is.

The great Jesuit canonists Wernz and Vidal gave the classic illustration. An error is substantial when it concerns the nature or object of the act, or a quality so essential that without it the object would belong to a different category altogether, “as it would be if a gilded chain were sold for a gold chain¹².” The buyer who pays for gold and receives gilt has not merely made a bad bargain. He has not made the bargain he thought he was making.

Let us be clear that this is not a traditionalist reading of the law. The New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, the standard American reference published by the Canon Law Society of America, explains that substantial error in a resignation is a mistaken judgment affecting its essential elements, and it names among those elements “the nature of resignation and its consequences¹³.” The American canonist William F. Cahill, writing on error in marriage law, put the underlying principle well: in consenting, the will chooses an object the mind presents to it, so when the mind is in error, the choice that follows “is not always the same choice” that would have been made had the object been rightly known¹⁴.

Who bears the burden

Honesty requires one more point here. The law presumes that a juridic act placed with the proper external formalities is valid¹⁵. In other words, Benedict read a properly worded text, freely, in public. On its face, his act carries the presumption of validity, and those who challenge it bear the burden of proof, and we accept that burden. Hence, why we have undertaken the writing of this series of essays. The question for the rest of this essay is whether the evidence of Section I is enough to overturn the presumption. We believe it is, and we will show why.

III. What the Papacy Is

To know whether Benedict erred about the papacy, we first have to know what the papacy is. Here the Church’s teaching is not ambiguous.

One man, one set of keys

Our Lord did not hand the keys of the kingdom to a committee. He said to one man, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church,” and to that same man, “I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 16:18–19). After the Resurrection, it was again to Peter alone that He said three times, “Feed my sheep” (Jn 21:15–17). The First Vatican Council solemnly taught that this primacy of jurisdiction was conferred immediately and directly upon Peter, and that it continues in his successors in the Roman See¹⁶. Canon 331 echoes the same truth: in the Bishop of Rome continues the munus “given by the Lord uniquely to Peter¹⁷.”

The Dominican theologian Domenico Gravina summed it up in a single line in 1610: to the Pontiff, as one person and alone, it was given to be the head¹⁸. The Church has never known a shared papacy, a rotating papacy, or a papacy held in two parts by two men. When rival claimants have appeared, as during the Great Western Schism, the Church’s whole effort has been to determine which one man was truly pope, never to accommodate both.

An office, not a sacrament

And here’s is the point on which everything else in this series depends. The papacy is not a fourth grade of Holy Orders. There are three: deacon, priest, and bishop. Each is conferred by a sacrament that leaves an indelible mark on the soul. Even a priest who is suspended, or even laicized, remains a priest forever; that is why he can still absolve a dying man in an emergency.

The pope, however, is different. Sacramentally, he is a bishop like any other. What makes him pope is not an additional ordination but his acceptance of a legitimate election, by which he receives supreme jurisdiction over the universal Church¹⁹. Roberto de Mattei, the distinguished Catholic historian, puts it precisely: what places the pope above all other bishops is not his power of orders, which he shares with every bishop in the world, but his juridical office of governing²⁰.

The great canonists say the same. Wernz and Vidal, whose manual was a standard text of the Gregorian University, set the two powers side by side. Orders rest on an indelible character; jurisdiction does not, and its very essence, together with its valid use, can be taken away²¹. They follow that principle to a startling conclusion: a layman elected pope would truly become the supreme prelate of the Church, in jurisdiction, the moment he accepted, before receiving any ordination at all²². John of St. Thomas, the great Dominican commentator on Aquinas, put the whole matter in a single line: pontificatus non consistit in charactere… sed in iurisdictione, “the pontificate does not consist in a character, but in jurisdiction²³.”

This is exactly why a pope can resign, when a bishop cannot cease to be a bishop. A sacramental character cannot be laid down, but a juridical office can. And when it is laid down, nothing of it remains. A retired bishop is still a bishop, and so he is fittingly called “bishop emeritus.” A pope who truly resigns is no longer pope in any sense. He goes back simply to being a bishop again.

How, then, is such an office laid down? Papal jurisdiction, Wernz writes, does not rest, as the bishop’s power of orders does, “on a physical and indelible character impressed on the soul.” It is “a moral relation between superior and subject, which depends on a human will that is easily changed.” And so, “just as the Roman Pontiff obtained the primacy of jurisdiction by free acceptance of his election, so by free and publicly declared dismissal of his dignity he loses papal jurisdiction²⁴.” Cardinal Louis Billot reasons the same way. What joins the papacy to a particular man is his election, and the effect of that election depends on his free consent “no less in the second, third, and fourth instant than in the first.” He ceases to be pope, therefore, the moment he “destroys in himself the effect of the election” by renouncing it²⁵. One act of the will takes up the office whole; one act of the will lays it down whole. There is no third act by which part of it is kept.

Why there is no such thing as a “pope emeritus”

It follows that the title “pope emeritus” names something that cannot exist. Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, one of the Church’s most respected historians of the papacy, said so bluntly: a two-headed pope would be a monstrosity; canon law does not recognize a pope emeritus; and a pope who resigns is no longer Bishop of Rome, nor even a cardinal²⁶.

This is not a matter of taste or custom. It is a matter of logic. The principle of non-contradiction, the first principle of all sound reasoning, holds that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. A man either holds the supreme jurisdiction of the Roman See or he does not. He cannot hold it “contemplatively” while another holds it “actively,” because there is only one such jurisdiction, and it was given to one man.

The Church’s own canonists confirm this by the way they list the ways a papacy ends. Writing in La Civiltà Cattolica in March 2013, during the very interregnum we are examining, Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda named four: death; certain and perpetual insanity; notorious apostasy, heresy, or schism; and resignation²⁷. There is no fifth category for a partial departure. A pope either stops being pope, or he remains pope.

IV. What Benedict Believed He Was Doing

We now have two pictures side by side where we see the papacy as the Church has always understood it, and the papacy as Benedict described it in 2013 and afterward. The question is whether they match. In fact, they do not, and the mismatch was not the result of an accidental phrasing. It was the fruit of a theology Benedict had held for decades.

A considered theological position

Benedict did not stumble into the idea of a “pope emeritus.” Gänswein said Benedict had long thought it through “from a theological point of view,” and he traced the idea back to a homily the then-Cardinal Ratzinger preached in Munich on August 10, 1978, after the death of Paul VI²⁸. Whatever else one says about the renunciation, it was not improvised.

In his last interview with Seewald, published in 2020, Benedict explained where the model came from: the figure of the retired diocesan bishop, which took on a new legal meaning after the Second Vatican Council. A bishop emeritus, he said, has fully given up the legal authority of his see, yet his spiritual bond to it is now recognized as real, and it is a bond “that cannot be taken away under any circumstances²⁹.” Benedict applied that model to the See of Rome. In fairness, the same passage insists that this arrangement avoids any thought of two popes coexisting, since a see can have only one holder. We will take that statement seriously in Part II. For now, notice what it concedes: Benedict believed that, having given up the governance of Rome, he retained an inviolable spiritual bond to the Apostolic See, the papal see itself.

That belief rests on a theme that runs through Ratzinger’s theology: that sacrament and jurisdiction are not two separable things but interpenetrate one another, and that the Latin West went wrong when it divided them too sharply³⁰. De Mattei identifies the result precisely. Benedict, he writes, seems convinced that he is still pope, though a pope who has renounced the exercise of the Petrine ministry, and this conviction springs from a “profoundly erroneous ecclesiology” that treats the papacy as sacramental rather than juridical³¹.

An illustration may help illuminate what we’re getting at. We rightly understand the priesthood this way: a priest who loses his faculties can no longer hear confessions or offer public Mass, yet he remains a priest forever, because ordination places an indelible mark on the soul of the ordained man. Benedict appears to have understood the papacy the same way. Stripped of governance, he would remain a pope in the passive, prayerful sense, the way a suspended priest remains a priest. But as Section III showed, the papacy does not work like the priesthood. There is no papal character on the soul. There is only an office, and it is either held or not held.

The words of the Declaratio, read in this light

Now the vocabulary of the Declaratio makes sense. Benedict described the munus as something whose essence is carried out by praying and suffering as much as by acting and speaking. He then renounced the ministerium of the Bishop of Rome, and two weeks later explained that what he renounced was “the active exercise of the ministry.” Read alone, the shift from munus to ministerium could be dismissed as stylistic variation. Read alongside everything Benedict and Gänswein said afterward, it matches their account point for point: give up the governance, but keep the bond.

The outward signs

Benedict’s choices after February 28, 2013, tell the same story. He kept his papal name rather than returning to Joseph Ratzinger. He kept the white cassock. He kept the salutation “His Holiness.” He continued to impart the Apostolic Blessing. He chose to live inside Vatican City rather than in a distant monastery. And he took the title “Pope Emeritus,” not “Bishop Emeritus of Rome.”

Compare St. Celestine V, the last pope before Benedict to resign of his own will. Celestine’s act of renunciation laid down “the pontificate, the place, the dignity, occupation, and honors,” and he went back to being the monk Pietro da Morrone³². Gänswein drew the contrast himself: Benedict, he said, did not give up his name as Celestine had, nor the white cassock, precisely because he understood his act differently.

We need not overstate these signs. Benedict himself said in 2014 that he kept the white cassock for practical reasons, because no other clothing was available at the time of his resignation, and Gänswein repeated that explanation in 2023³³. Readers can weigh that explanation for themselves. Our argument does not depend on it, or on any of the outward signs. It depends on Benedict’s words. The signs matter only because they are consistent with the words, and because Benedict’s own secretary told us, in public, that they were meant to be.

V. The Hinge: A Condition Sine Qua Non

A fair-minded critic might grant everything so far and still reply: “Very well, Benedict held an unusual theory about his own status. But men resign offices all the time while holding mistaken views about what comes next. Why should his theory undo his act?”

It is a good question, and the law answers it. Canon 126 does not invalidate an act because of any error. It invalidates an act placed out of error about its substance, or about something that amounts to a condition sine qua non. Benedict’s error meets both tests.

First test: an error about the substance of the act

What is the substance of a papal resignation? Canon 332 §2 tells us: the pope renounces his munus, his office. Since that office is a single juridical reality held by one man, to renounce it is to give up the whole of it and retain nothing.

Benedict did not understand his act that way. By his own account and his secretary’s, he understood it as giving up the active, governing part of an office while keeping a contemplative, Petrine part that “cannot be taken away under any circumstances.” That is not a mistake about some side effect. It is a mistake about what a papal resignation is. In the language of Wernz and Vidal, he thought he was handing over a gilded chain while keeping the gold. In the language of the New Commentary, his error concerned “the nature of resignation and its consequences.” The thing he intended to do is a thing that cannot be done.

Second test: a condition without which he would not have acted

The second test is even more decisive, because here the evidence comes directly from the people closest to the act.

A condition sine qua non is a term so essential to a decision that, without it, the person would not have made the decision at all. To establish it, we do not need to read Benedict’s mind. We need only to listen to what he and his secretary said publicly about the terms on which he acted.

Consider what they told us:

1. Gänswein said that abandoning the Petrine ministry would have been “quite impossible” for Benedict after his irrevocable acceptance of the office in 2005³⁴.
2. Gänswein said Benedict took this step against the opinion of competent advisers, having long thought out the theology of a pope emeritus³⁵.
3. Benedict told the faithful that renouncing the active exercise of the ministry “does not revoke” his engagement to the Petrine office “always and forever³⁶.”
4. Benedict told Seewald that reading his act as merely functional was a “misunderstanding,” because the office “enters into your very being³⁷.”
5. Benedict described the bond he retained as one that “cannot be taken away under any circumstances³⁸.”

Put these together and the conclusion is hard to escape. Retaining the Petrine bond was not an afterthought Benedict attached to his resignation. It was the condition on which he resigned at all. Without it, by his own secretary’s testimony, the step would have been “impossible” for him. A man who says, in effect, “I can do this only because this other thing remains,” has made that other thing a condition of his act.

And the condition he set is one that cannot be fulfilled. There is no Petrine bond that survives the renunciation of the Petrine office, because the papacy is an office and not a sacrament. When the condition of an act is impossible, the act fails on its own terms. The law does not need to strike it down. Canon 188 says it is irrita ipso iure, void by the law itself, and canon 126 says the same of every act so placed.

We are reading his words, not his heart

This argument does not claim to know Benedict’s private motives: whether he was tired, discouraged, pressured, or at peace. Those belong to his conscience and to God. However, theologians distinguish between the finis operantis, the personal purpose for which someone acts, and the finis operis, the intrinsic meaning of the act itself as it is externally manifested. The Church judges the second, not the first. When Leo XIII declared Anglican orders invalid in Apostolicae Curae, he did exactly this: the Church does not judge the mind as something internal, he wrote, but insofar as it is manifested externally she is bound to judge it³⁹. We are doing the same. Every piece of evidence above is a public statement, made by Benedict or by his secretary on his behalf⁴⁰.

What follows

If Benedict’s renunciation was invalid by the law itself, then nothing changed at 8:00 p.m. on February 28, 2013. The See of Peter was never vacant. Benedict XVI remained the one Vicar of Christ on earth, whatever he believed about his own status, until his death on December 31, 2022. And a conclave convened to fill a See that was not empty could elect no one, no matter how many cardinals attended or how sincerely they voted. That consequence, and what it means for the years that followed, is the subject of a later essay in this series.

Invalid by the Law Itself

The argument of Part I can ultimately be stated in just four sentences:

We do not pretend this settles the matter for every reader. The presumption of validity is real, and most canonists who have written on the question, including serious scholars such as Geraldina Boni, have concluded that the resignation was valid⁴¹. Those arguments deserve a hearing on their merits alone. So Part II will take up the strongest of them:

• that Benedict explicitly declared the See vacant and called for a conclave;
• that Benedict himself said his resignation was valid, and that a see can have only one holder;
• that the error, if there was one, concerned a consequence and not the substance of the act;
• that canon 333 §2 lets a pope choose a collegial manner of exercising his office;
• that the same reasoning would have invalidated his acceptance of the papacy in 2005;
• that munus and ministerium are simply synonyms;
• that the resignation was really about fear and pressure, and should be judged on those terms;
• and that if Benedict held so erroneous a view of the papacy, he was a heretic and no pope at all.

The weightiest objection of all, that the universal acceptance of Benedict’s successor proves the matter beyond dispute, belongs to later essays in this series, and we will meet it there.

Until then, we leave the reader with the words Our Lord spoke to one man at Caesarea Philippi: Tu es Petrus. Not “you are the active Peter,” nor “you and your successor together are Peter.” One rock, one set of keys, one Vicar of Christ. Whatever Benedict believed about his own act, he could not change that. No pope can.