Why did the pope retire?

[longship]

14. Meh! Does it even matter?

The Catholic Church will never admit they were wrong about the sex scandal anyway. So what's with all the cockamaimie conspiracy theories when they have, and always have had, the power to sweep it under the rug. This, no matter what the scandal or the evidence.

Read about Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, for details of how it's done. Although that was the turn of the sixteenth century, the church had been doing the same for centuries preceding that.

This behavior goes way, way back, probably to near the birth of the church, when they decided to make it a hierarchy of allegedly celibate men.

They no longer need to force a pope out for scandal and they haven't for many, many centuries. Well, there was that anti-pope thing in the fifteenth century.

Why else would they call their adherents sheep!?