Anyone who accepts the Petrine ministry no longer has any private dimension. […] My decision to resign the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this. I do not return to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences, and so on. I am not abandoning the cross, but remaining in a new way at the side of the crucified Lord. I no longer bear the power of office for the governance of the Church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, in the enclosure of Saint Peter.”
There are those who remember that Pius XII, when he prepared his letter of resignation that would go into effect in the event that the Germans should come to arrest him, said to his closest collaborators: “When the Germans cross that line, they will find not the pope, but Cardinal Pacelli.”
But this was not at all the case for Benedict XVI. In resigning, he had no thought of being able to go back to being “Cardinal Ratzinger.” It was and is his firm conviction that there is something of his election as pope that remains “forever.”
And this is what some scholars have been trying to identify and justify.
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