Overview
On the morning of February 11, 2013, the cardinals filed into the Consistory Hall for what looked like a short piece of housekeeping. The pope was to fix dates for three canonizations, and then everyone would go to lunch. Benedict XVI read a short passage from a sheet of paper, in Latin. Most of the men in the room, fluent as they were in the language, did not immediately register what he had said. One accredited reporter, Giovanna Chirri of the Italian news agency ANSA, followed the phrasing closely enough to grasp it: the pope had just announced that he would leave the office of Peter. It was the first renunciation of the papacy in roughly six hundred years, since Gregory XII stepped aside in 1415 to help end the Western Schism.
The renunciation took effect at eight o'clock in the evening on February 28. Benedict said his strength of mind and body had declined, and that the modern papacy demanded vigor he no longer possessed. A counter-story formed almost at once, and it has never fully dispersed. In its various forms it holds that Benedict was pushed: by the contents of a confidential report, by pressure applied to the Vatican's finances, by rival factions inside the walls, and, in a later and stranger version, by the argument that the resignation itself was never legally valid. The theory rests on unusually solid ground, which is part of what keeps it alive. The Vatican of 2012 really was a place of stolen papers, a convicted butler, and a bank being shut out of Europe's payment system.
The paper trail behind the throne
The substrate is the affair the press labeled Vatileaks. Over 2011 and 2012, confidential documents from the papal apartment reached the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who published a selection in his book Sua Santità in May 2012. The leaks exposed financial irregularities and bitter turf wars among senior clergy. Suspicion fell on the pope's own valet, Paolo Gabriele, who was arrested on May 23, 2012, after investigators found caches of papers in his Vatican apartment. He was convicted of aggravated theft that October, sentenced to eighteen months, and pardoned by Benedict just before Christmas, on December 22.
To find the source of the leaks, Benedict had appointed a commission of three elderly cardinals in the spring of 2012: the Spaniard Julián Herranz, the Slovak Jozef Tomko, and the Italian Salvatore De Giorgi. They delivered their findings, reportedly running to some three hundred pages, on December 17, 2012. In February 2013, days after the resignation was announced, the Rome daily La Repubblica described the report as mapping factions inside the Curia, among them officials it characterized as vulnerable to outside influence, including over their sexual conduct. The Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, declined to confirm or deny the specifics. The reading theorists attach to the sequence is that the dossier so alarmed Benedict that he resolved to leave the day after he read it.
The month the machines stopped
A second strand follows the money. On March 30, 2012, the Milan branch of JP Morgan Chase closed an account, numbered 1365, held by the Institute for the Works of Religion, the entity commonly called the Vatican bank. Some 1.5 billion euros had moved through it in about eighteen months as a nightly sweeping facility, and the bank said the Vatican had failed to answer questions about the transfers. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the bank's president, was pushed out in May of the same year.
The more dramatic detail came at the turn of the year. On January 1, 2013, card and ATM payments stopped working across Vatican City, because the Bank of Italy had refused Deutsche Bank Italy a permit to operate the service, citing gaps in the Vatican's anti-money-laundering controls. For six weeks, visitors to the museums and the Sistine Chapel could pay only in cash. Card payments came back on February 12, 2013, the day after Benedict announced his departure, through a Swiss firm, Aduno, that sat outside European jurisdiction. Theorists line the dates up and read them as leverage applied and then released: the plumbing was shut off, a resignation followed, and the plumbing was restored.
What Benedict said he did
Against all of this stands Benedict's own account, and the law he was operating under. Canon 332 §2 of the Code of Canon Law holds that a papal renunciation is valid only if it is made freely and properly manifested. Benedict addressed the point directly, in the Declaratio itself and afterward, insisting he had acted with full freedom of will. In Last Testament, the 2016 interview book conducted by the German writer Peter Seewald, he acknowledged that he had become aware of a small "gay lobby" inside the Vatican, which he put at four or five people trying to sway decisions, and said he had broken it up. In the same conversations, according to reports of the book, he again denied that blackmail or pressure had anything to do with his choice. His longtime private secretary, Georg Gänswein, would later say the lobby and the bank troubles played no part in the decision. Most historians who have written on the subject settle on the plainer explanation Benedict gave: age, exhaustion, and a sober judgment that the job had outrun his strength.
The Ratzinger code and where it stands
The most elaborate version arrived years after the fact. In 2022 the Italian journalist Andrea Cionci published Codice Ratzinger, arguing that Benedict had deliberately renounced only the ministerium, the active exercise of the office, while retaining the munus, the office itself, so that he remained the true pope in an "impeded see" and Francis was an antipope. In Cionci's thesis, Benedict signaled all this through a hidden code embedded in his public statements. Cionci pressed the case as far as a nullity application to a Vatican tribunal. Canon lawyers have rejected the reading, and Benedict recognized Francis as his successor until his death in December 2022.
What is not in dispute is the raw material. The leaks happened, the butler was convicted, the report was delivered, the accounts were closed, the card readers went dark, and the pope resigned, all within a span of months. Whether those events pushed Benedict out or merely surrounded a decision he made for the reasons he stated is the question the documents do not answer, and the one his critics and defenders continue to argue over.