Benedict XVI’s insomnia was the “main reason” for his resignation in 2013, the former sovereign pontiff said in a letter sent weeks before his death to a biographer and published by a German weekly on Friday, AFP and Agerpres reported.

On October 28, 2022, just a few weeks before his death, the former Pope Emeritus sent a letter to German biographer Peter Seewald.

In this letter, published by Focus weekly, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who died aged 95 in December, said the “main reason” for his resignation in February 2013 was “insomnia” which “had accompanied him continuously since Catholic Youth Day, organized in Cologne in August 2005, a few months after he was elected Pope following the death of John Paul II.

His personal physician then prescribed “strong medicine” that allowed him to fulfill his mandate in the first phase.

But, according to the former Pope’s letter, over time these sleeping pills would run out and “less and less guarantee” his ability to work. In addition, this sleeping pill was the cause of an incident that occurred during a visit to Mexico and Cuba in March 2012.

An incident that would force Pope Benedict to resign from the pontificate

The morning after the first night of that visit, Pope Benedict XVI would find his handkerchief “completely soaked in blood,” according to a letter published in Focus.

“I think I bumped into something in the bathroom and fell,” said the former pope emeritus. The doctor managed to make it so that the wound was not visible, and the new personal physician after the incident would insist on prescribing him a “reducing sleeping pill” and would also advise the Pope not to appear in public except in the morning when traveling abroad .

The pope emeritus said in that letter that he was fully aware that these medical restrictions “can only be observed for a short time,” a revelation that led him to resign in February 2013, a few months before the World Catholic Youth Days in Rio. de Janeiro. , an event he said he felt he “couldn’t handle.”

Thus, Benedict XVI would have stepped down early so that his successor, Pope Francis, could fulfill the obligations caused by the visit to Brazil.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, whose resignation in 2013 shocked the world, died on December 31 in a monastery in the Vatican.

His pontificate was marked by several crises, such as the VatiLeaks scandal in 2012, which exposed a vast network of corruption in the Vatican, as well as cases of pedophilia involving Catholic priests.