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I accept that Benedict the XVI wanted to retire because he was a very old and very fragile man physically. He had all his marbles. Having been a radical intellectual (periti) at Vatican II serving German bishops who were radical even then and rammed through their miserable agenda at Vatican II, as the results of the Council and the empty pews and the disappearance of priestly vocations and the work of some of the Vatican II idiots, he became a far more conservative man and determined to undo the damage of Vatican II.

For a time, he was Cardinal Archbishop of Munich. Later, after the election of John Paul II, Ratzinger became his right hand man as the head of the Holy Office, the Congregation for the doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Inquisition. He used his superior intellect and his encyclopedic knowledge of all things Catholic to relentlessly track down "liberation" "theologians," (the kind who envision Jesus Christ and Che Guevara wielding machine guns against any non-communist running any Latin American country), silencing them, defrocking them and driving them out of the priesthood. Pope Francis, by contrast, is inviting the same communist priests to the Vatican for public approval.

For the mechanics of the conclaves that elect popes, see Fr. Malachi Martin's novel The Final Conclave, written a year before Paul VI's death and predicting that death of heart failure to happen in the very month Paul VI died of heart failure, August, 1978. If you read the novel, I will tell you the real life cardinals after whom the fictional ones were created. The 1978 conclaves that elected John Paul I and St. John Paul II were a clash of about five conspiracies, few of them good, and Belgium and Germany were in the front pew of the evil. Good prevailed both times.

Something bad must have happened to allow the personalities who are said to have participated to prevail. A ring leader of the conspiracy until his death was the utterly leftist Cardinal Martini of Milan who had wanted to be pope to lead the Church leftward until its morality and liturgies were no longer recognizably Catholic. Godfreed Daneels' predecessor and patron was Leo Cardinal Suenens, one of the most evil prelates of modern times.

Walter Cardinal Kaspar who is now approaching 80 and mandatory retirement is another Suenens. Another German Cardinal in the group would be Cardinal Marx (that's his name) and the now dead English Cardinal Basil Hume who is very accurately portrayed in Martin's novel for the quisling that he was. These guys would have despised Ratzinger not only as a hard-line Church conservative but as one who defected from their ranks.

This story of a conspiracy needs more details as to HOW these people thwarted Benedict XVI and HOW the elected Bergoglio at the next conclave in which each and every voting cardinal had been appointed by either John Paul II or Benedict XVI, but the story rings true to my Catholic ears.

God bless you and yours!