Pope Benedict XVI hit his head during his March 2012 trip to Mexico, the Vatican says, denying it had any “relevant” role in his resignation.
Italy’s La Stampa newspaper reported today that Benedict hit his head and bled when he got up in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar bedroom in Leon, Mexico.
The report said blood stained his hair and sheets.
Vatican spokesman the Rev Federico Lombardi confirmed the incident but said “it was not relevant for the trip, in that it didn’t affect it, nor in the decision” to resign.
The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reported earlier in the week that Benedict had taken the decision to resign after the Mexico-Cuba trip, which was physically exhausting for the 85-year-old Pope.
It was the latest revelation of a hidden health issue to emerge from the Holy See since the Pope’s shock announcement, and adds to questions about the gravity of the pontiff’s condition.
On Tuesday, the Vatican said for the first time that Benedict has a pacemaker, and that he had its batteries replaced just three months ago.
Earlier today, Benedict held a 45-minute, off-the-cuff reminiscence about the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, blaming the media for what he called the media’s distorted interpretation of the church meetings at the time for many “calamities” that plague the Catholic Church today.
It was the second day in a row that Benedict has sent very pointed messages to his successor and the cardinals who will elect him about the direction the church must take once he is no longer Pope.
While his farewell remarks yesterday were in many ways bittersweet, Benedict was more combative today as he addressed an audience hall full of thousands of priests.
Benedict was a young theological expert at Vatican II, the 1962-65 meetings that brought the Catholic Church into the modern world with important documents on the church’s relations with other religions, its place in the world and the liturgy.
Benedict has spent much of his eight-year pontificate seeking to correct what he considers the misinterpretation of Vatican II, insisting that it wasn’t a revolutionary break from the past, as liberal Catholics paint it, but a renewal and reawakening of the best traditions of the ancient church.
He nailed that point home today, blaming botched media reporting of the council’s deliberations for having reduced the work to “political power struggles between various currents in the church”.