08/10/2026
He had a private medical team, no commute, no bills, and two thousand years of institutional support behind him. None of it could fix his sleep.
In a letter to his biographer, Pope Benedict XVI named chronic insomnia as the central motive behind his resignation in 2013. It had followed him for years. Medication helped less and less. Eventually the man millions saw as untouchable made the hardest call of his life, in part because of something most people treat as a minor complaint.
Insomnia does not care who you are. If it has been winning for months, that is not a willpower problem. It is a medical one, and it is treatable.