Calls for Benedict to resign as Pope

Pope Benedict XVI (pictured) is going through the public relations disaster from hell right now. Last month he rehabilitated the British bishop Richard Williamson, a member of the breakaway Catholic traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, only to find that he was a Holocaust-denier who had claimed in a recent interview that no Jews died in gas chambers during the Second World War.

If that wasn't bad enough, at the weekend it was revealed that his Holiness had promoted an Austrian cleric who is on record as saying that Hurricane Katrina was visited upon the people of New Orleans as some sort of divine retribution because of its relaxed attitude towards sexual promiscuity and homosexuality.

Now some leading Catholics, among them the eminent liberal theologian Hermann Haering, are saying the unthinkable: that 81-year-old Benedict should step down as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In an interview with German newspaper Tageszeitung, Hareing said: "If the Pope wants to do some good for the Church, he should leave his job. That would not be a scandal; a bishop has to relinquish his position at 75 years, a cardinal loses his rights at 80 years."