Never a Pope does not resign! He died just at the line of the task, if Vatican comfirmst that they are hiding an shameful incident by people Someone or ruffled  in the history of the Cardinal Ratzinger’ with Nazis.

He will be the first head of the Catholic Church to resign in almost 600 years and the Vatican said his departure would leave the post temporarily vacant.

The 85-year-old’s resignation letter said: “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 bark 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 recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.”

He will step down after almost eight years in the post, having been elected in April 2005.

The Associated Press is reporting that the pope’s brother has said he had been advised by his doctor not to take transatlantic trips for health reasons.

A Vatican spokesman said the pontiff’s decision had been “a surprise”, adding that the pope’s vigour had “sadly diminished in recent times”.

The final post on Pope Benedict XVI’s Twitter page, sent on Sunday, said: “We must trust in the mighty power of God’s mercy. We are all sinners, but His grace transforms us and makes us new.”

The decision is expected to mean a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March.

“Seven years as pope is not very long.

“Last time, there was a lot of speculation that it was time for the first black pope. What Pope Benedict has done in recent years is to pack the ranks of the Vatican with lots of Europeans.”

Edward Pentin, from the Catholic Herald, told  “It really is too early to say what his greatest achievement has been.”

The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants.

While there are several papal contenders, there is no obvious front-runner to take over – which was also the case when Benedict was elected pontiff in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II.

Pope Benedict XVI Nazi Claims

Ratzinger gravitated gradually towards the priesthood, entering a seminary in 1939, the same year he was required to join the Hitler Youth movement.

During much of the Nazi era, Joseph Ratzinger lived with his family in Traunstein, Germany, a small and staunchly Catholic town between Munich and Salzburg. During World War I there was a prisoner-of-war camp located here where, ironically, Adolf Hitler worked between December 1918 and March 1919. The town is located near the region of Austria which Hitler came from.

Resistance to the Nazis was dangerous and difficult, but not impossible. Elizabeth Lohner, a Traunstein resident whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, has been quoted as saying, “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

A few hundred yards away from the Ratzingers’ house, a family hid Hans Braxenthaler, a local resistance fighter who shot himself rather than be captured again. The SS regularly searched local homes for resistance members, so the Ratzingers couldn’t have not known about resistance efforts.

Traunstein also saw more than its share of local violence. In his biography of Joseph Ratzinger, John L. Allen, Jr. says that anti-Semitic violence, displacement, deportation, death, and even resistance turned the town into “an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants.”

It’s curious that one of the lessons which Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, draws from the experiences of German Catholics under the Nazis is that Catholics should become even more obedient to their ecclesiastical leaders rather than more free to adopt independent courses of action. Ratzinger believes that greater fidelity to Catholic doctrine, as defined by the Vatican, is necessary to counter movements like Nazism.

If the first question that comes to mind Nazi Pope’s been my past there was a case to be ashamed of ?

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