"We pray the Word of the Lord over the Vatican. God is going to set a cat amongst the pigeons. God is going to bring about shakings in the Vatican. This will be the beginnings of the end of the spirit of religion. Within the Vatican there will be men like Nicodemus that will begin to stand up against it. We prophesy that a fragmentation will come upon the Vatican. What will happen in the Vatican be shocking because it will be something that the Vatican never thought would happen in history. Something very serious is about to happen in the Vatican."
Three and a half months after this Word was release, on the 11th of February 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned. He made history by becoming only the second pope to resign in the Church's 2 000-year existence and the first to do so in 700 years. Headlines all over the world carried the caption: "Pope's sudden resignation sends shockwaves through Church."The Pope's decision is shocking, and unprecedented in modern times. The last Pope to resign was Gregory XII, in 1415, and that was during a time of extreme turmoil—of Popes and anti-Popes—in which the Church was looking to break a standoff between three contenders to the throne of Saint Peter.
Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to step down at the end of the month (February 2013) was a surprise—but not a total surprise. Rumors that the Pope might resign began last summer after the so-called Vatileaks scandal, in which the Pope’s personal attendant was arrested for stealing numerous documents from the Pontiff’s correspondence. The letters revealed infighting among the highest ranks of the Curia.
His final sermon was a hard-hitting one. He condemned the "hypocrisy" of those who use their religion just for show and urged an end to "rivalry" and "divisions" within a Church that has been plagued in recent years by a series of scandals. “We can reveal the face of the church and how this face is, at times, disfigured,” Benedict said. “I am thinking in particular of the sins against the unity of the church, of the divisions in the body of the church.” He called for his ministry to overcome “individualism” and “rivalry,” saying they were only for those “who have distanced themselves from the faith."
