Cardinal Reinhard Marx at a press conference in Munich on June 4, 2021. (LENNART PREISS/AFP via Getty Images)
It's the sort of thing old Vatican hands will sit around and game out on a slow news day, or over jug wine at a favorite trattoria on an almost balmy Friday in a late Roman spring -- a day like Friday -- except it wasn't a game.
This Friday started as a slow news day. It turned into anything but, when the cardinal-archbishop of Munich and Freising, Reinhard Marx, announced that he has submitted his resignation from the see he has held since 2008, nearly a decade before he reaches retirement age and at a moment of epochal crisis in the Church.
