There is no justification in 2025 for the Church to allow the Papacy to waste the Flock’s time .The notion that an elected pope must go on until he drops does just this . The

Surprisingly-to me at any rate-it was Pope Benedict was the first for a long time to retire ,on the sensible grounds that he was tired ,and felt he had nothing to say. The Polish Pope,somehow, felt it was better to spend years of suffering with Parkinson’s and other ailments to let the Flock see how to take suffering, rather than help them by retiring .This might have saved ten years of nothing being done about clerical abuse of children . Also, as he modestly remarked, were critics asking Christ to come down from the Cross?

Consider also once you get your breath back even Pope Francis may well have found it difficult to watch his back as well as his front, but when you have to be carried about everywhere you’ve actually lost a lot of attention .

I may have quoted Eamon Duffy on this before but why not : “The notion that earthly authority is underpinned by heavenly sanction may fly in the face of known experience but the hope that it may be has proved remarkably hard to eradicate.”

Let a reasonable retiral age be chosen and stick to it -65 or 70 max. Otherwise old men run the Church. Old men, especially in their eighties do not get much done. Old men function on irrelevant memories. Old men can’t keep up well with new ideas. The Church is obsessed with tradition and precedent ,a direct insult to the Holy Spirit when you think about it.Old men quaver “But is there a precedent ?”,an appeal rapidly abandoned at the suggestion of trying a mouthful of herbs instead of dialysis. Those still capable of thinking should remember what they thought of people even as old as thirty when they were in their teens.

Is there any organisation which drives with the brakes on ?

And above all can this stupidity ever help to provide the Eucharist for the Flock as Christ asked on the first Holy Thursday ?

What the new Pope must do

The new Pope must buy property, but not in Rome.Rome as the administrative centre of the Church is offensively Eurocentric ,especially as it shrinks in authority and numbers .Modern communications technology makes this unnecessary. Worst of all the congealed mass of bureaucrats in the Curia and in the one tiny area automatically leads to the idea that the Church can only be run by a clergy.

The world is full of unused office property without which no great city is apparently complete. Empty office blocks , in Los Angeles, Jakarta ,Manila,Lagos or where ever must be bought for the Vatican. Its weirdly named committees-“dicasteries “- can ba allotted a new city in minutes. The world’s great companies, I am sure, will be delighted to lend their employees if necessary. Unimpressed and unimpeded by the centuries of documentation felt by the Curia to be a bulwark against change, the New Curia can place it reverently aside , and let the Church get on with its life.