Mary Ellen boiled down the irony of the pope’s retirement very neatly on Monday, but unfortunately in the rush of various flying missiles I didn’t get to it until today.
Guest post by Mary Ellen Foley
Somebody gets into a situation in which their health begins to fail, and if they stay in that situation, it might kill them. They believe that God himself put them into that situation, but they just don’t feel that they can see it through — the strain is just physically too much. And anyway, they’d prefer a quiet life, and they want to spend their time studying.
So if this person is a pregnant woman whose pregnancy is life-threatening, the Pope says she has to go through with it even if it kills her.
If this person is the Pope himself, however, he gets to retire.