Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is experiencing a post-retirement slump and has been depressed since stepping down as Pope in February, it has been reported.

A report in the UK newspaper Daily Mail quoted an aide of the 86-year-old Pope Emeritus as disclosing that he has suffered from the same sense of deflation many busy people feel when they suddenly stop work.

“His low mood is compounded by failing health,” the report quoted Whispers in the Loggia, the Catholic gossip blog written by Vatican observer Rocco Palmo, as saying.

Benedict, who is the first Catholic Pontiff in over 600 years to voluntarily resign from office, returned to Rome on May 1 to take up residence in a former convent in the Vatican gardens.

He was warmly received by incumbent Pope Francis I, thus kickstarting an unprecedented era of a retired pontiff living side-by-side with a reigning one inside the Vatican gardens.

The last time that Benedict XVI, who resigned on health grounds, had seen by the public was on March 23, and he appeared remarkably more frail and thin than when he left the Vatican on his final day as pope three weeks earlier.

Acknowledging Benedict’s post-retirement decline, Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, however insisted that the German-born ex-Pontiff is not suffering from any ailment and is just old.

“He is a man who is not young: He is old and his strength is slowly ebbing,” Lombardi said this week. “However, there is no special illness. He is an old man who is healthy.”

Since his Febuary 28 resignation, Benedict had been “hidden to the world” as he himself predicted, living at the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills south of Rome.

He chose to leave the Vatican immediately after his resignation to physically remove himself from the process of electing his successor and from Pope Francis’ first weeks as pontiff.

“His absence also gave workers time to finish up renovations on the monastery on the edge of the Vatican gardens that until last year housed groups of cloistered nuns who were invited for a few years at a time to live inside the Vatican to pray for the pontiff and church at large,” reports Daily Mail.

“In the small building, with a chapel attached, Benedict will live with his personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, and the four consecrated women who look after him, preparing his meals and tending to the household,” the report adds.

•Photo, courtesy Daily Mail, shows Emeritus Pope Benedict (left) being warmly greeted by the incumbent, Pope Francis.

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