Opinion: 80 and still on the job
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In celebrating his 80th birthday, Pope Benedict XVI has achieved an age at which he would be ineligible to vote for pope if he were still a cardinal. That isn’t the only oddity about the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward advanced age.
Cardinals who are archbishops are expected to submit their resignations (which the pope can decline) at age 75, meaning that some cardinals who no longer occupy the position for which they received the cardinal’s hat in the first place can participate in a papal election five years into their retirement. Thus Cardinal Adrianus Simonis of the Netherlands, who recently retired as archbishop of Utrecht, will be able to participate in the election for Benedict’s successor if the pope dies during the next four years.
On the other hand, cardinals who are still on what Patrick Fitzgerald would call their ‘day jobs’ past 80 – notably Eastern Catholic patriarchs – are barred from participating in papal elections. Eighty-six year old Cardinal Pierre Sfeir, the patriarch of the Maronite Church in Lebanon, is ineligible to vote even thouigh he heads the most important Catholic body in the Middle East.
The 80-and-out rule for cardinal ‘electors,’ imposed by Pope Paul VI, has other consequences. Some of the over-80 cardinals are liberals who, had they participating in the last conclave, might have supported someone other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Of 184 living cardinals, 76 are older than 80, according to the Catholic Hierarchy Web site.he double standard for popes and cardinals when it comes to age is controversial among both conservatives (who see the 80-and-out rule as a newfangled gimmick) and liberals (who, besides resenting the exclusion of octogenarian liberals from papal elections, prefer to emphasize that the pope is a bishop, albeit the bishop of of Rome).
At the least, the age of retiring as a bishop and losing one’s vote is the conclave should be the same. But that still wouldn’t address the incongruity that 80-year-olds aren’t trusted to choose the pope but an 80-year-old can be pope.