Pope Francis Retirement Rumors Grow: Will He Follow In Benedict's Footsteps?

(ANALYSIS) Age is something the press is fixated on. Former President Donald Trump’s age when he occupied the White House became a major news story that went on for several years.

President Joe Biden has now been in office almost two years, and the speculation whether or not his age has become a fatal political flaw is slowly becoming a big news story. Every public appearance that includes a flub, limp or fall becomes a big deal, especially in conservative media.

Now we have the supposedly uncertain status of Pope Francis. The speculation over whether Francis’ age — he turns 86 on Dec. 17 — will cause him to resign has increasingly become a story, first in the Italian press and subsequently around the world.

READ: Why Pope Francis Could Make His First Papal Visit To Serbia

Italy’s many national dailies cover the Vatican akin to the way the American press reports on the White House. It’s those news reports out of Italy that started in late spring, raising the specter that the pope would follow in the footsteps of former Pope Benedict XVI and resign from his post. Add to this hubbub papal announcements that have been twisted in translation and (#DUH) waves of speculation in Catholic Twitter and other forms of social media.

Benedict resigned from the papacy in 2013 — and as a result took on the emeritus moniker — eight years after he was elected by the College of Cardinals. The unexpected resignation came after Benedict cited a “lack of strength of mind and body” due to his age. He was 86 at the time. In doing so, he became the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415 and the first to do so on his own initiative since Celestine V in 1294.

It's a symbolic series of events — including a canceled papal trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan scheduled for the first week of July, his recent use of a wheelchair to get around and events with connections to Celestine V and a central Italian city — that have led many Italian reporters to raise speculation about what Pope Francis might do next.

In a June 12 column in Crux, omnipresent Vatican watcher John L. Allen Jr. connected the dots, as he always does, for the the English-speaking press.

The resulting wave of speculation — fueled by no sources whatsoever, either anonymous or named — has created headlines in newspapers on websites around the world. Everything has been based on observation and reading of tea leaves. Day after day, GetReligion team members have bumped into stories online or have been sent URLs by readers.

At a time when news organizations increasingly aggregate reporting from other places in order to garner mouse clicks, this story has been reported everywhere. Also, smaller newsrooms, due to layoffs over the past two decades, have made it more difficult for reporters to confirm a story. In the case of Francis’ retirement, there never was anything there to confirm.

In other words, such a story would have never been reported on by so many news outlets in the pre-internet age, when sourcing and verification were quality requirements in daily journalism. These days, reporters attribute facts to vague sources and then move on. In this case, look for references to “Italian press reports” or “speculation on Twitter.”

Francis is headed to Canada later in the month. Should he cancel that trip as well, it would be a sign that his knee condition is worsening, which will fuel more retirement speculation.  

Let’s back up. This was the major takeaway from Allen’s post:

In between, he’s planning a day trip Aug. 28 to L’Aquila in central Italy, about 75 miles northeast of Rome, where he will visit the tomb of Pope Celestine V, the last pope to voluntarily resign the office prior to Benedict XVI. Famously, Benedict XVI visited L’Aquila in 2009 and laid his papal stole on Celestine’s tomb, which, with the benefit of hindsight, now seems a sort of foreshadowing of his decision to step down.

That background has set off considerable speculation that Francis may use his meeting with cardinals to announce his own resignation – and, of course, with a pope of surprises, anything is possible. Before getting carried away, however, three points should be made.

First, Francis is going to L’Aquila to open an annual jubilee of forgiveness known as the “Celestinian Pardon,” and for a pope whose motto literally is mercy, that’s no small thing.

Second, he’s also going to bring comfort to the victims of a devastating 2009 earthquake that claimed the lives of 309 people, and given Francis’s legendary concern for suffering, that’s reason enough for the trip, too.

Third, after Francis’s surgery last summer, he denied having considered resignation in an interview with Spanish radio.

“I don’t know where they got the idea last week that I was about to resign!” he said. “They say it caused a sensation, when it never even entered my mind.”

Pope Francis has said, on the record, that he’s not resigning — yet that hasn’t stemmed the speculation.

How high in the journalism food chain has this activity climbed? The New York Times, just last week, had a story — “For Francis, a Papacy Complicated by the Shadow of Resignation” — focusing on how all of this talk of resignation has cast a shadow on the Francis papacy. Here is how the piece opened:

ROME — Over the last few weeks, close watchers of the Roman Catholic Church have carefully studied shadows on the Vatican walls for proof that Pope Francis is about to retire.

They pointed at an unexpected move to create new cardinals in August as a sign that Francis, 85, was stacking the college that will pick his successor before an early exit. They read deep into his planned visit to an Italian town with a connection to a medieval pope who called it quits. They saw the pope’s use of a wheelchair and his cancellation of a trip to Africa as evidence of his papacy’s premature ending, despite Vatican explanations about a healing right knee.

But in an interview published on Monday, Francis dispelled the rumors, calling the supposed evidence mere “coincidences” and telling Reuters that the idea of resignation “never entered my mind. For the moment no. For the moment, no. Really.”

The only shadow that seemed real then was the one cast by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first pontiff to retire in nearly 600 years. In doing so, he changed the nature, and perception, of the papacy from a lifetime mission assigned by the Holy Spirit to a more earthly calling, subject to political pressures, health assessments and considerations about the church’s best interests.

For the Times team, the main thread remains popes Benedict and Celestine. Here’s the heart of what they reported:

In a 2009 visit to L’Aquila, which had been devastated by a recent earthquake, Benedict solemnly placed his pallium, the vestment symbolizing his papal authority, on the tomb of Celestine V. In 2010, he returned to nearby Sulmona, known for the sugar-covered almonds popular at Italian weddings and Vatican receptions, and again honored Celestine V as he prayed in front of his remains.

In 1294 Celestine issued a decree asserting the right of a pope to resign, and then acted on it. His successor imprisoned him, and he later died in jail. Dante then placed him in hell for “the great refusal.” Not surprisingly, no other pope took the Celestine name.

Benedict later told an interviewer that he wasn’t thinking at all about resigning when he visited the tomb, but it was front of mind in the church rumor mill when the Vatican announced Francis would celebrate Mass on Aug. 28 and open the “Holy Door” at the basilica hosting the tomb of Celestine, whose example Benedict ultimately followed.

The Times feature had piggybacked off a Reuters piece in which Francis, in an interview, said that he was not planning to resign. This is the key section of that news story:

Rumors have swirled in the media that a conjunction of events in late August, including meetings with the world's cardinals to discuss a new Vatican constitution, a ceremony to induct new cardinals, and a visit to the Italian city of L'Aquila, could foreshadow a resignation announcement.

L’Aquila is associated with Pope Celestine V, who resigned the papacy in 1294. Pope Benedict XVI visited the city four years before he resigned in 2013, the first pope to do so in about 600 years.

But Francis, alert and at ease throughout the interview as he discussed a wide range of international and Church issues, laughed the idea off.

"All of these coincidences made some think that the same 'liturgy' would happen," he said. "But it never entered my mind. For the moment no, for the moment, no. Really!"

Need more? This aggregation by news organizations and increased speculation triggered a June 7 Washington Post story under the headline “Is Pope Francis nearing the end of his pontificate?” This is what the Post team reported:

Francis is still hoping that rest can restore his mobility. But in the meantime, his day-to-day life has changed along with the very image of his pontificate: At 85, his frailty is impossible to miss.

That has brought to the foreground questions about Francis’s future — whether his pontificate is nearing its endpoint, and whether he might consider stepping down.

Those inside and familiar with the Catholic Church talk about the topic with more seriousness than they did even a year ago, after Francis underwent colon surgery aimed at addressing a painful bowel condition.

And while the pope’s dependence on a wheelchair is a fundamental factor in the speculation, it has been amplified by his decision to call a consistory for Aug. 27 and install 21 new cardinals, including 16 younger than 80 who would be eligible to vote in a conclave. That huge influx means that Francis will have selected more than 60 percent of the figures who will pick his replacement, increasing the odds of — though hardly guaranteeing — a like-minded successor.

These four paragraphs are loaded with speculation based on observations, papal schedules and future planned events, and very little in the way of actual reporting and sourcing. What is the journalistic content of a phrase such as “has brought to the foreground questions”?

The Jesuit magazine America — Pope Francis is, of course, a Jesuit — took a look at the news reports and came up with these key points that news stories ignored:

These three events — the August consistory, the visit to Aquila and the cardinals’ get-to-know-you meeting — combined with images of the pope wincing in pain as he walked to his chair for Pentecost Mass last Sunday, have led some to believe the pope could be planning an August resignation. He has completed the reform of the Roman Curia, the logic goes, so maybe it is time to hand the reins to someone else.

But there are also reasons to be skeptical of this narrative: One simple explanation for the unusual timing of the consistory, which was expected to take place in November, could simply be that traveling to Rome during the off-season for tourism is cheaper. Likewise, the pope could want the cardinals to save some money and limit their time away from their dioceses by combining the consistory and the meeting into one trip. He is, after all, a frugal man who expects the same of his advisors: He cut the cardinals’ salaries by 10 percent during the pandemic so he could continue paying the Vatican’s lay employees.

Then there is his travel schedule: Francis has a trip to Kazakhstan planned for September and a few rumored trips for 2023, although popes can pass trips on to their successors. Both Benedict XVI’s and Francis’ first international papal visits were to World Youth Day events that their predecessors had committed to.

The last, and perhaps most convincing, reason to believe the pope will not resign yet is the simple fact that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is still alive. Pope Francis will likely want to make some changes to the role of retired pope — like adopting the title “Emeritus Bishop of Rome” rather than “Pope Emeritus,” and not wearing white — in order to dispel the idea that there are two popes. It is difficult to imagine Francis taking such steps while Benedict remains emeritus.

That hasn’t stopped news sites such as Newsweek from publishing a story about the odds of who will be Francis’ successor. That’s something the Italian press likes to speculate on — even creating the term “papabile,” which means “pope-able” or “worthy of the papacy.”

The speculation over Pope Francis resignation isn’t going away, but readers should be wary of so many news stories that offer scant facts and instead rely on experts to talk generally about aggregated news built on speculation, as opposed to solid sources in, or within working distance, of the Vatican.

This post originally appeared at GetReligion.