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Hopefully this isnt a dupe, search came up empty
Any other Catholics here the news about this? This is a pretty big deal.

Back on April 29, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI did something rather striking, but which went largely unnoticed.








He stopped off in Aquila, Italy, and visited the tomb of an obscure
medieval Pope named St. Celestine V (1215-1296). After a brief prayer,
he left his pallium, the symbol of his own episcopal authority as Bishop
of Rome, on top of Celestine's tomb!







Fifteen months later, on July 4, 2010, Benedict
went out of his way again, this time to visit and pray in the cathedral
of Sulmona, near Rome, before the relics of this same saint, Celestine
V.







Few people, however, noticed at the time.







Only
now, we may be gaining a better understanding of what it meant. These
actions were probably more than pious acts. More likely, they were
profound and symbolic gestures of a very personal nature, which conveyed
a message that a Pope can hardly deliver any other way.    







In
the year 1294, this man (Fr. Pietro Angelerio), known by all as a
devout and holy priest, was elected Pope, somewhat against his will,
shortly before his 80th birthday (Ratzinger was 78 when he was elected
Pope in 2005). Just five months later, after issuing a formal decree
allowing popes to resign (or abdicate, like other rulers), Pope
Celestine V exercised that right. And now Pope Benedict XVI has chosen
to follow in the footsteps of this venerable model.

anyone else wondering about that old prophecy?

Dear Brothers,
I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. 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. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, 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 recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me. For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.
Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.
From the Vatican, 10 February 2013

BENEDICTUS PP XVI

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Yes, it is a big deal.  I was somewhat surprised, but not completely.  One of my former professors at Franciscan University of Steubenville posted this on his FB page:

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what year did you graduate?

...the full ambit of sin, whose first effect is to introduce disorder into the relationship between God and man, cannot be restricted to "social sin." The truth is that only a correct doctrine of sin will permit us to insist on the gravity of its social effects…Nor can one localize evil principally or uniquely in bad social, political, or economic "structures" as though all other evils came from them so that the creation of the "new man" would depend on the establishment of different economic and socio- political structures. To be sure, there are structures which are evil and which cause evil and which we must have the courage to change. Structures, whether they are good or bad, are the result of man's actions and so are consequences more than causes. The root of evil, then, lies in free and responsible persons who have to be converted by the grace of Jesus Christ in order to live and act as new creatures in the love of neighbor and in the effective search for justice, self-control, and the exercise of virtue. [13] To demand first of all a radical revolution in social relations and then to criticize the search for personal perfection is to set out on a road which leads to the denial of the meaning of the person and his transcendence, and to destroy ethics and its foundation which is the absolute character of the distinction between good and evil. Moreover, since charity is the principle of authentic perfection, that perfection cannot be conceived without an openness to others and a spirit of service.

7. The warning of Paul VI remains fully valid today: Marxism as it is actually lived out poses many distinct aspects and questions for Christians to reflect upon and act on. However, it would be "illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them, and to accept elements of the Marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the ideology, or to enter into the practice of class-struggle and of its Marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads." [22]

8. It is true that Marxist thought ever since its origins, and even more so lately, has become divided and has given birth to various currents which diverge significantly from each other. To the extent that they remain fully Marxist, these currents continue to be based on certain fundamental tenets which are not compatible with the Christian conception of humanity and society. In this context, certain formulas are not neutral, but keep the meaning they had in the original Marxist doctrine. This is the case with the "class-struggle." This expression remains pregnant with the interpretation that Marx gave it, so it cannot be taken as the equivalent of "severe social conflict", in an empirical sense. Those who use similar formulas, while claiming to keep only certain elements of the Marxist analysis and yet to reject the analysis taken as a whole, maintain at the very least a serious confusion in the minds of their readers.

9. Let us recall the fact that atheism and the denial of the human person, his liberty and rights, are at the core of the Marxist theory. This theory, then, contains errors which directly threaten the truths of the faith regarding the eternal destiny of individual persons. Moreover, to attempt to integrate into theology an analysis whose criterion of interpretation depends on this atheistic conception is to involve oneself in terrible contradictions. What is more, this misunderstanding of the spiritual nature of the person leads to a total subordination of the person to the collectivity, and thus to the denial of the principles of a social and political life which is in keeping with human dignity.

Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. And insofar as people believe in an afterlife and a divine judgment at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. The question no longer troubles us. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbor – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful.

Pope Benedict XVI

“Evil is not some nameless, impersonal and deterministic force at work in the world. Evil, the devil, works in and through human freedom, through the use of our freedom. It seeks an ally in man. Evil needs man in order to act. Having broken the first commandment, love of God, it then goes on to distort the second, love of neighbor. Love of neighbor disappears, yielding to falsehood, envy, hatred and death."

The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil.  The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general.  If God and moral values, the difference between good and evil, remain in darkness, then all other 'lights,' that put such incredible technical feats within our reach, are not only progress but also dangers that put us and the world at risk.

2012 Easter Homily

Joy, cordiality and kindness only increase, however, if the skies above us are clear. The sun does not shine every day; at times we must pass through dark valleys. Yet we can do so remaining joyful and human — if the sky is clear for us, if we are touched by the certainty that He loves us in all things, that God is good and that this is why it is good to be a human being.

Pope Benedict XVI

“There can be collapses and repeated ruptures because redemption is always entrusted to the freedom of man, and God will never annul this freedom.”

Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth

Love is swallowed by hate for love is food for the soul. The longing of love's taste, to experience it, causes anger to rise because hate cannot accept what it longs to be, the opposite of what it is.

The avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life.

That the Church persists in naming believing Catholics to the chair of St. Peter is somehow “controversial” in the eyes of the media. “Benedict’s eight-year reign will be appraised intensively and, I expect, unkindly. He will be described as a diehard traditionalist, a reactionary in a time of revolutionary yearnings,” wrote Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times.  (Author Thomas Cahill, after John Paul II’s death, took a similar line in the pages of the Times, writing that historians may conclude that his conservatism “destroyed” the Church.)

Such judgments on Benedict’s pontificate are wholly predictable, given the hostility with which the media greeted his elevation and its equation of liberalism with “reform.”... Why should liberals care so much about the direction of a religion to which they don’t belong? The answer is that they envy its immense power and wish to harness that power for their own ideological purposes. Out of this envy they pose as “reformers” who know what is best for the Church... They think that if they could somehow cow the Church into naming a “progressive” to bless their various revolutions—from socialism to same-sex marriage—those revolutions would spread everywhere...Through the manipulation of  popular opinion and media pressure, they clamor for a liberal pope who will confirm the world in all its errors and surrender the Church’s institutions to the dictatorship of relativism.

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A good read:  Left Lobbies for a Liberal Successor.

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Good luck with that. They just don't get it, the Church will never accept same-sex marriage, woman priest, and all the other stuff, progressive Catholics dream of.  It would mean reversing dogma, and it can  not be done.  

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Good luck with that. They just don't get it, the Church will never accept same-sex marriage, woman priest, and all the other stuff, progressive Catholics dream of.  It would mean reversing dogma, and it can  not be done.  

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Why don't the libs give up on trying to make the CC progressive? Because they don't actually believe that the Church is of Divine origin and truly protected from teaching their "progressive" errors.  If it's just another human institution, then surely they'll give under enough pressure!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-chmP8DDPiFk/T4uLswGZhHI/AAAAAAAAAW8/Hz5EBvMrx1Q/s1600/dmodern.jpg

"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history."

Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making “laws” beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about “Holy Mother the State,” or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God.

   God sustains the world, in good times and in bad. Catholics, along with many others, believe that only one person has overcome and rescued history: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, savior of the world and head of his body, the church. Those who gather at his cross and by his empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about him and persecute or harass his followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression. There is nothing “progressive” about sin, even when it is promoted as “enlightened.”

   The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters. The Synod on the New Evangelization is taking place in Rome this month because entire societies, especially in the West, have placed themselves on the wrong side of history.

We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church. It is possible that we are on the verge of a new era in the history of the Church, under circumstances very different from those we have faced in the past, when Christianity will resemble the mustard seed [Matthew 13:31-32], that is, will continue only in the form of small and seemingly insignificant groups, which yet will oppose evil with all their strength and bring Good into this world.

Joseph Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth

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Glenn Beck had an interesting theory on this - hopefully he is right...



Why is The Pope retiring? Glenn has a theory

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"Because I think the speculation that this black pope from Africa, they keep holding him up and everybody’s like, "Hey, he’s going to be the next pope,” I think that that is a ruse.  I think that’s being done by those Catholics who are also in the Vatican who he’s at war with, holding him ‑‑ holding this guy up and trying to create momentum for him.  Because he’s a socialist.  He’s a real diehard socialist kind of Marxist guy. "

Wait, what?  Is he talking about Peter Cardinal Turkson?
 

Economic liberalism is a theoretical system of thought, a form of “economic apriorism” that purports to derive laws for how markets function from theory, these being laws of capitalistic development, while exaggerating certain aspects of markets. An economic system of thought that sets down a priori the laws of market functioning and economic development, without measuring them against reality, runs the risk of becoming an instrument subordinated to the interests of the countries that effectively enjoy a position of economic and financial advantage. Regulations and controls, imperfect though they may be, already often exist at the national and regional levels; whereas on the international level, it is hard to apply and consolidate such controls and rules. The inequalities and distortions of capitalist development are often an expression not only of economic liberalism but also of utilitarian thinking: that is, theoretical and practical approaches according to which what is useful for the individual leads to the good of the community. This saying has a core of truth, but it cannot be ignored that individual utility – even where it is legitimate – does not always favour the common good...

One devastating effect of these ideologies, especially in the last decades of the past century and the first years of the current one, has been the outbreak of the crisis in which the world is still immersed. In his social encyclical, Benedict XVI precisely identified the roots of a crisis that is not only economic and financial but above all moral in nature. In fact, as the Pontiff notes, to function correctly the economy needs ethics; and not just of any kind but one that is people-centred. He goes on to denounce the role played by utilitarianism and individualism and the responsibilities of those who have adopted and promoted them as the parameters for the optimal behaviour of all economic and political agents who operate and interact in the social context...

However, to interpret the current new social question lucidly, we must avoid the error – itself a product of neo-liberal thinking – that would consider all the problems that need tackling to be exclusively of a technical nature. In such a guise, they evade the needed discernment and ethical evaluation. In this context Benedict XVI's encyclical warns about the dangers of the technocracy ideology: that is, of making technology absolute, which “tends to prevent people from recognizing anything that cannot be explained in terms of matter alone” and minimizing the value of the choices made by the concrete human individual who works in the economic-financial system by reducing them to mere technical variables. Being closed to a “beyond” in the sense of something more than technology, not only makes it impossible to find adequate solutions to the problems, but it impoverishes the principal victims of the crisis more and more from the material standpoint.

Benedict's his papacy has been spent attempting to return to the level of Catholic orthodoxy that the somewhat misguided and largely misunderstood teachings of Vatican II have been used to assault. At some point in his career, the future pope recognized that Vatican II made the Church worse, not better, and that the Catholic teachings, traditions and liturgy that the world believed Vatican II had watered down needed to be restored. He knew that his public mission was to reverse the trivialization of the liturgy, the lax clerical discipline, and the weakened sacramental safeguards from which the Church has been suffering since Vatican II. And he knew that Vatican II divided, rather than united, Christendom.

The Holy Spirit must have recognized all of this, as well, as He sent us Pope John Paul II, the rock star, to blaze a path where no pope had gone before—touching millions of youths with language they understood—and then He sent us Pope Benedict XVI, the lion of orthodoxy, to lay down the intellectual mechanisms for travels along that path. The path is the bridge to heaven. The way to travel upon it is personal sanctity. The first traveler is the Holy Father.

"I hope we get a nice pope," a good Catholic woman told me soon after Benedict XVI announced his resignation.

"I don't care whether he's nice or not," I replied. "I just hope he's strong."

Actually, I'd be glad if the next pope were nice, with a winning smile and a friendly manner. But vastly more important than being nice is that he be a tough-minded realist, with a backbone of steel. That's what the Church needs now.

The problems that will face him are immense: the twin anti-Christian challenges of militant Islam in Africa and the Middle East and militant secularism in Europe and North America, very much including the United States; the apparent disarray within the Roman Curia that at times seemed to place it at odds with Benedict; and the continuing efforts of progressive Catholics, many operating from tenured positions of influence in Catholic academia, on behalf of their suicidal program of decentralization and decline.

"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by his revelation they might disclose new doctrine, but that by his help they might guard sacredly the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it forth."
First Vatican Council (1869-70)

An Asian tiger

If Burke has too much baggage — he is still an American, after all — there are other options for those looking for a “Dirty Harry” pope.

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Sri Lanka, for example. At 65, Ranjith is also in the right age bracket (not too old, not too young) and his home base in Asia would satisfy demands that the cardinals look beyond Europe to choose a pope from the Global South, where the church is booming.

But Ranjith worked for many years in the Roman Curia and developed a reputation as a conservative and a genuine restorationist when it comes to the old Latin Mass, which is the defining issue for many on the church’s right flank.

In fact, just four months after being appointed archbishop of Colombo, in 2009, he issued rules requiring that Communion be received old-school style, on the tongue and in a kneeling position, and he forbid lay people from preaching.

“Despite those drawbacks, Ranjith may still be the most plausible Asian candidate to pass muster among the 115 cardinals who will cast ballots in this election,” wrote John Allen, ace Vaticanista with the National Catholic Reporter.

Anything that makes the Mass more traditional (read: reverent) is good by me.  

Over the years, Bergoglio became close to the Comunione e Liberazione movement founded by Italian Fr. Luigi Giussani, sometimes speaking at its massive annual gathering in Rimini, Italy. He's also presented Giussani's books at literary fairs in Argentina. This occasionally generated consternation within the Jesuits, since the ciellini once upon a time were seen as the main opposition to Bergoglio's fellow Jesuit in Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini.

Bergoglio is seen an unwaveringly orthodox on matters of sexual morality, staunchly opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception. In 2010 he asserted that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children, earning a public rebuke from Argentina's President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Three days before the 2005 conclave, a human rights lawyer in Argentina filed a complaint charging Bergoglio with complicity in the 1976 kidnapping of two liberal Jesuit priests under the country's military regime, a charge Bergoglio flatly denied. There was also an e-mail campaign, claiming to originate with fellow Jesuits who knew Bergoglio when he was the provincial of the order in Argentina, asserting that "he never smiled."