Well, I can see this thread is already going to be a waste of time.
And you wonder why there's no discourse in Free Your Mind.
Well, it is the Pope.
It is actually a remarkably modern thing to say that you are no longer up to snuff and you want to move aside for the next generation to take your place. Compare that with the last couple of years of JPII's papacy, where he was essentially a walking corpse.
I was going to post pretty much this. Better to resign than have all that morbid speculation about when you'll finally cark it, too.