Tony Gentile / Reuters

Pope Francis personally called a Buenos Aires kiosk to cancel his newspaper delivery.

He's the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics around the globe, but Pope Francis isn't too busy or important to cancel his newspaper delivery.

The new pontiff — known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio until his election — shocked an Argentinian newspaper seller when he phoned earlier this week to say he wouldn't be needing the papers any more.

"Hi Daniel, it's Cardinal Jorge," he told Daniel Del Regno, according to the Catholic News Agency.

Del Regno, whose father owned the Buenos Aires newspaper kiosk, thought it was a joke.

"Seriously, it's Jorge Bergoglio," the pope continued. "I'm calling you from Rome."

Del Regno said once he realized one of the most influential men in the world really was calling to make sure no more papers were delivered to his apartment, he was "in shock."

"I broke down in tears and didn’t know what to say,” Del Regno told the Argentinean newspaper La Nacion. "He thanked me for delivering the paper all this time and sent best wishes to my family."

"I told him to take care and that I would miss him," Del Regno added. "I asked him if there would ever be the chance to see him here again. He said that for the time being that would be very difficult, but that he would always be with us."

His father, Luis Del Regno, said he delivered the papers six days a week but on Sundays, the cardinal would come by in person and chat before getting on a bus.

Once a month, he would even return the 30 rubber bands that were put around the papers to stop them from blowing away.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was famous for rejecting the trappings of his lofty position. Every parish priest had his home phone number and he set aside time for them to call each morning.

The younger Del Regno said that when Bergoglio left for the conclave last month, he asked about his chances of being elected pope.

"He answered me, 'That is too hot to touch. See you in 20 days, keep delivering the paper.' And the rest is, well, history," he said.

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Osservatore Romano via AFP - Getty Images

Pope Francis greeting the faithful after a March 17 mass at Santa Anna church. He plunged into crowds pushing against barricades outside a Vatican gate as security men and Swiss Guards stood nervously by.

Pope Francis' love of getting up close and personal with his flock is giving his security detail a bit of agita.

The new pontiff, who used to take a packed bus or subway to work as a cardinal in Buenos Aires, does not seem content to sit in his Popemobile and wave to crowds from afar.

His willingness to suddenly wade into a sea of people presents new challenges for the Swiss Guard and other security forces.

"We are worried if there is more contact with people, because that means there's a greater possibility something can happen," Cpl. Urs Breitenmoser of the Swiss Guard told the Catholic News Service.

Breintenmoser said the pope's style "is perfectly fine" and that the security teams are nimble enough to react to his spontaneity, though it's clear those responsible for his safety are nervous.

The head of the Vatican police looked concerned when the pope greeted some 200 people after a March 17 mass at the Church of St. Anne in Vatican City and then headed right for the throngs at the barricades outside.

Courtesy Sergio Rubin via AFP - Getty Images

Before he was pope, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio took mass transit in Buenos Aires.

"I'm sure it's a nightmare for them," Claude Moniquet a security expert who heads the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center and has written about protecting heads of state, told NBC News.

"The point of security plans is to limit the moments with direct contact, so this is a hole in security."

Vatican security breaches are rare but frightening.

Pope John Paul II was shot and gravely wounded by Turkish national Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter's Square in 1981. In 2007, a German man tried to climb onto Pope Benedict XVI's open vehicle as he tooled around the square, and a 25-year-old woman with psychiatric problems tried to tackle Benedict during Christmas Eve Mass in 2009.

Moniquet said that Francis' penchant for crowd-pleasing leaves him less vulnerable to a terrorist attack than to an unstable lone wolf who blends into the audience.

The Swiss Guard and the Vatican's gendarme corps can plead with the pope to keep his distance but it probably won't work, he said.

"It's impossible to prevent a VIP like this from doing what he wants," Moniquet said. "If you have a clear and imminent threat, you can tell him no. If not, he does what he wants."

And he said a pope may be harder to sway than a prime minister or a vice president.

"If the people believes his mission is to go to the people, what can you say?" he said. "Maybe he believes God will protect him or maybe he believes if he dies, it's the will of God. He would be difficult to convince."

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35 years waiting for smoke: A witness to Vatican history

The Pakistani teen marked for death because she campaigned for girls' education went back to school Tuesday for the first time since a Taliban gunman shot her in the head five months ago, a family spokesperson said.

Malala Yousafzai is attending classes in Birmingham, England, and not her homeland, where the Taliban had vowed to make another attempt on her life.

Still, it was a sweet victory for a 15-year-old who endured multiple surgeries to reconstruct her skull and restore her hearing after she was shot on her way home from school Oct. 9.

"It’s what I dreamed," she said in a video released by the public relations firm that works with her family.

"I dream for all the children that they should go to their school because it’s their right…their basic right.”

She wore the school’s green uniform top over a long black skirt, her head covered in a dark scarf, with a pink backpack slung over her shoulder.

She joked about the overcast weather in Britain with her father, saying, “I wish I could see the sun.”

Malala was already a well-known activist in Pakistan when a militant stormed her school bus and opened fire, wounding her and two other girls and sparking international outrage.

Slideshow: Schoolgirl attacked by Taliban in Pakistan

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Fifteen-year-old Malala Yousufzai was shot by the Taliban for speaking out against Pakistani militants and promoting education for girls.

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The Taliban, which opposes education for girls, later said it wanted to punish her "Western thinking."

She said in the video that being able to go back to school was “the happiest moment.”

“Today I will hold my books, my bag and I will learn. I will talk to my friends and I will talk to my teacher,” she said.

“I want to learn how to bring change in this world.”

Her two wounded friends, whose injuries were less severe, are also back at school in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where they are protected by government guards, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

"Before I was a normal girl," Kainat Riaz, 16, told the paper. "Now I am afraid to go out and can't go anywhere freely."

Malala Press Office via AP

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Taliban, with her father Ziauddin, as she attends her first day of school.

NBC Islamabad Bureau Chief Amna Nawaz contributed to this report

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Jerry Lampen / Reuters file

White smoke rises from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, indicating a new pope has been elected, in this file picture taken April 19, 2005.

It's right there in black or white: At the end of every conclave voting session, a smoke signal is released from the Sistine Chapel's chimney.

Black means no agreement. White means the Catholic Church has a new pope.

But as history has shown, relying on the burning of ballots to communicate with the world sometimes puts the men in the red hats in a gray area.

Thomas Coex / AFP - Getty Images file

Black smoke from one of the earlier votes at the 2005 conclave.

There has been white smoke that looked dark and black smoke that wasn't dark enough and plenty of other technical problems that seem to clash with the meticulous ritual that accompanies the election of a pontiff.

"Even with all this planning, they still can't get it right," said Christopher Bellitto, a professor of history at Kean University in New Jersey who has written books on Catholicism.

The public assumption is that the Vatican must use smoke signals because that's what has been done since the time of Peter. Not so, said Frederic Baumgartner, author of "Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections."

For centuries, bells or cannons were used to spread the news. It wasn't until the 1800s that the faithful gathered in the piazza every day began to look to the chimney for an indication that a vote had taken place; the first election where the cardinals used two different types of smoke to announce the outcome didn't happen until 1903, Baumgartner said.

Getting a good fire going just from the ballots was a challenge, but stoking the flames got easier after Pope Pius X ordered that every scrap of paper used in the conclave be incinerated. He was afraid the cardinals' notes would leak to the press.

"Pius X was offended by the newspaper accounts that appeared after his election," Baumgartner said.

At first, damp straw was used to blacken the smoke, but it didn't always produce a definitive shade. In 1958, after two false alarms, someone got the bright idea to buy smoke bombs. The color was right, but they filled the Sistine Chapel with smoke.

Osservatore Romano via Reuters

The Sistine Chapel stoves that will send up the smoke signal that lets the world know if a pope has been elected.

Five years later, they tried army flares. In the first of the two 1978 conclaves, they switched to chemical additives, but the backdraft was sickening and the cardinals "came out hacking and wheezing," John Thavis writes in his book "The Vatican Diaries."

For the second one, they changed back to the less offensive flares, but when the cardinals voted in Pope John Paul II, the smoke was gray.

By 2005, the Vatican was anxious to get it right and unveiled a two-stove system. One would incinerate the ballots; the other would burn chemical cartridges to color the smoke.

And there was a backup plan: the 10-ton campanone, the ninth largest bell in the world, would be rung to verify a new pope had been chosen.

How could it fail?

Well, after the cardinals elected Pope Benedict XVI, the smoke that poured out of the narrow stovepipe was a decidedly murky shade. Inside the chapel, things were not going well, Thavis wrote.

Every time the door to the stove was opened for more ballots to be shoved in, black smoke belched into the chamber decorated with Michaelangelo's priceless frescoes.

"These cardinals are not exactly handymen," Bellitto said.

Even worse, in all the excitement, no one had gotten a message to the Vatican electrician sitting nervously with a rotary phone in the bell tower control room, waiting for the go-ahead to ring the campanone, according to Thavis' book.

To confuse matters further, some bells were ringing -- the ones that simply marked the six o'clock hour -- but there was a 17-minute delay before the big one started to peal and everyone knew the church had a new leader.

There's no guarantee the smoke signals will be any clearer at the end of this conclave. Regardless, even in the age of Twitter -- including a tongue-in-cheek account called @PapalSmokeStack -- and text messaging, the Vatican is content to rely on a stove and flue to break its biggest news.

"Innovation is not in its DNA," Bellitto explained. "And nobody does ritual like the Catholic Church."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Maurizio Brambatti / EPA

Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet is among the non-Europeans who are considered possible papal candidates.

It's been 35 years since an Italian pope has ruled the Catholic Church, and some Vatican watchers believe the conclave that starts Tuesday could be the first to elect a pontiff from outside Europe.

While the Italians control a quarter of the votes, recent scandals suggest that they might be too beset by deep divisions to unite early around one candidate from their home turf.

The church's influence in Europe is on the wane, and its biggest area of growth is in sub-Saharan Africa, leading some to suggest that it might be time to look beyond the traditional countries for a pope with global appeal.

"The Catholic Church has moved far beyond the notion that any one nationality has a peculiar aptitude for the Office of Peter," said NBC News Vatican analyst George Weigel, author of "Evangelical Catholicism."

"The secondary reason why this is a wide-open field from which a non-European candidate may emerge is that the Catholic Church is in serious difficulty throughout western Europe and in parts of central and eastern Europe.

"Even stalwart Poland is beginning to show some troubling signs of the influence of secularism."

Catholic Center for Media via AP

Cardinal Robert Sarah is from Guinea but also has a strong Vatican background.

A number of non-Europeans keep showing up on Vaticanologists' lists of papabili, those cardinals thought to have the right stuff: Marc Ouellet of Canada, Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines, Odilo Pedro Scherer of Brazil, Robert Sarah of Guinea.

The Rev. Thomas Reese, an analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, said that when insiders talk about crossing the European borders, the conversation often ends up in Africa, "where the church is growing, where it's dynamic and where it's a success in vocations."

"The church looks good in Africa," he said. "The counter-argument is: The church in Africa is doing fine. We need someone to deal with the church in Europe, North America and Latin America, where it's in trouble."

Reese said he's "not sure that geography is the answer" to the Vatican's problems, but at the same time he sees the appeal of a pope from afar.

"It would certainly send a message that this is a global church, this is not a European church any more," he said.

With just three days to go before the conclave, there is no indication that the cardinals are rallying around any one candidate, including the Italians.

Weigel said many of the top non-European candidates have impressive Roman credentials:

Cardinal Marc Ouellet: The former archbishop of Quebec City, he heads the Congregation for Bishops, has worked in two Vatican departments and has taught at the Lateran University. He also has Latin American experience, having taught there, and has confronted an "aggressively secular environment" in Quebec. But some will question whether the scholarly pastor can reform the curia, the administrative apparatus of the Vatican.

Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer: The archbishop of Sao Paolo, Brazil, worked for the conclave's senior cardinal, Giovanni Battista Re, at the Congregation of Bishops under Pope John Paul II. Now he has the top job in the country with the most Catholics. He lacks charisma, though, and many cardinals feel they need someone with personality.

Cardinal Robert Sarah: Appointed archbishop of Conakry, Guinea, when he was just 34, Sarah now heads the pontifical council Cor Unum, which is the Vatican's parallel to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Weigel noted, however, that Rome has often not been as friendly as it could have been to African church leaders.

Franco Origlia / Getty Images

Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle has lots of energy and charisma but might be seen as too young.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan: The archbishop of New York's personality could be a double-edged sword. "No member of the College of Cardinals lights up a room like [Dolan]," Weigel said, but skeptics could find him too effervescent. Plus, there is a longstanding prejudice against so-called "superpower popes."

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle: The passion and emotion of Manila's top Catholic could be attractive to electors looking beyond Italy for a candidate. His youth -- he's just 56 -- could go against him. "He could be pope for 40 years. If that's the case, he better be a great one," Reese said.

Other geographic outliers who have been mentioned and might get some votes in early balloting include Malcolm Ranjith of Sri Lanka, Thomas Collins of Toronto, Sean O'Malley of Boston and Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

An oft-mentioned cardinal, Peter Turkson of Ghana, is favored in the Italian press, which Weigel said historically means his candidacy is over even before voting starts.

Reese said regardless of how many worthy candidates there are, he wouldn't bet on a pontiff from another continent.

"The odds are against it when more than half the College of Cardinals is from Europe," he said. "They always begin by looking at the Italians."

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Guido Montani / EPA, file

Cardinals are preparing for the conclave that will select Pope Benedict XVI's successor. Hopefully it will go smoother than some other conclaves from centuries past.

Vatican watchers say the conclave about to be held in Rome could be one of the most contentious in years — but that's by modern standards.

Dust off the history books and go back a few hundred years and there are papal conclaves rife with international intrigue, royal rigging, even riots.

This conclave might last a couple weeks if the cardinals deadlock, but before the conclave process was instituted, papal elections could go on for months, even years.  

The election that started in 1268 lasted nearly three years, ending only when the townspeople of Viterbo locked up the cardinals, tore the roof off their palace, fed them nothing but bread and water and threatened to do worse.

The pope they finally elected decided a repeat would be unwise and instituted what are now known as conclaves, with the electors kept behind closed doors until they make a decision.

That cut down on the length of the elections, but they could still be quite colorful. Here are some of the more memorable conclaves from centuries past:

Off with their hats!
For much of the 14th century, the papacy resided in France, until Pope Gregory XI decided to relocate to Rome. When he died in 1378, the mostly French cardinals repaired to the Lateran Palace to choose his replacement.

"Rioting broke out in the city," said John O'Malley, author of "A History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present." "The Romans were afraid they might elect another French pope. They broke into the conclave."

The mob made it clear they meant business, said Frederic Baumgartner, author of "Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections." One of their slogans? "Give us a Roman pope or your heads will be as red as your hats!"

The cardinals met them halfway, picking a non-Roman but Italian archbishop whom they hoped would meekly return with them to Avignon.

Pope Urban VI "turned out to be a disaster," Baumgartner said. "He had a very violent temper."

His behavior was so strange that "the cardinals began to wonder if they had elected a sane person," O'Malley said. They hightailed it out of Rome, declared they had been bullied into picking the wrong guy, and elected a Frenchman, Clement VII.

Small problem: Urban didn't go quietly. He created a whole new set of cardinals and thus was born the Great Schism, which divided the church until the Council of Pisa in 1409. That's when the French and Roman cardinals elected a third pope to run the show.

Naturally, the other two didn't step down, so there was more than one pope for more than a decade, until one finally agreed to resign and another died.

Popes, politics and poison?
When Pope Paul III died in 1549, the rules of the conclave went out the window as King Henry II of France and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sought to control the outcome.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images, file

Pope Julius III was elected in 1550 after a conclave that featured bribery and rumors of poisoning.

"There was a great deal of skulduggery going on," Baumgartner said.

And not a lot of secrecy. Charles V boasted in a letter that he "will know when they urinate in this conclave," Baumgartner said.

Bribes were paid and there was even some insider trading: The cardinals' attendants supposedly cut deals with Roman bankers taking bets on who would be the next pope.

After a cardinal considered a top candidate fell deathly ill and withdrew, rumors that he had been poisoned spread. One witness reported the other cardinals were "terrified" and insisted only their own aides deliver meals, according to one account.

As the weeks dragged on, the situation got so out of control —and the conclave halls so smelly — that a reform committee was convened. A set of new rules ejected many outsiders, banned clandestine meetings and confined the cardinals to their cells at night.

Finally, after 72 days and 61 ballots, Pope Julius III was elected as a compromise candidate.

All in the family
The drama of the 1559 conclave began before the cardinals were sequestered. Pope Paul IV was a despised figure — he had driven all the prostitutes out of Rome — and when he died, all hell broke loose.

"Rioters in Rome attacked the palace of the Inquisition ... and toppled the statue of the pope that stood on the Capitol," Michael Walsh wrote in "The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections."

Hulton Archive via Getty Images, file

Pope Pius IV was elected after a four-month conclave in 1559 to replace Paul IV, who was so disliked that Rome rioters tore down his statue.

The conclave dragged on for four months. Among the stumbling blocks: One of the cardinals refused to vote for a strong candidate on the grounds that he had a son, Baumgartner said.

With no one running the papal state, chaos threatened to break out and "an immense amount of money was spent trying to keep order in the city, and the funds began to be exhausted," O'Malley said.

Finally, the cardinals coalesced around a compromise candidate, Pope Pius IV. He had fathered at least a couple of kids, but the cardinal who had objected to the previous candidate claimed not to know it, Baumgartner said.

"That's the last pope I know of who actually had children," he said.

Battle over the ballots
When the conclave of 1914 began, Europe was embroiled in World War I, but that wasn't the source of the tension that accompanied the election of Pope Benedict XV.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images, file

Pope Benedict XV was not happy when a Spanish cardinal suggested he might have broken the rules and voted for himself.

After four days, Benedict was chosen by the smallest possible margin, a precise two-thirds vote. The rules decreed that a cardinal could not vote for himself.

Spain's Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, who was secretary of state under the just-deceased Pius X, was apparently a stickler for the rules and he demanded the ballots be checked to make sure Benedict had not cast one for himself.

"Benedict was deeply offended," Baumgartner said.

But as the recount showed, he was the duly elected pontiff.

According to NBC News Vatican expert George Weigel, Benedict archly told Merry del Val: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone," quoting Psalm 118.

"Then Benedict washed him right out of the Curia," Baumgartner said.

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Slideshow: Hugo Chavez through the years

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The life of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez from his rise as a lieutenant colonel after his failed coup attempt in 1992.

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Hours before Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died, his second-in-command accused enemies of giving him cancer and announced the expulsion of two U.S. diplomats for an alleged plot to destabilize the government.

"There's no doubt that Commandante Chavez's health came under attack by the enemy," Vice President Nicolas Maduro said in an address to the nation from the presidential palace.

"The old enemies of our fatherland looked for a way to harm his health,'' according to Maduro, drawing a parallel to the illness and 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which some supporters blamed on poisoning by Israeli agents.

He said a special commission would investigate how Chavez, 58, ended up with the unspecified cancer that months of chemotherapy and radiation and four surgeries failed to tame.

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said in a statement it was "absurd" to suggest that the U.S. was somehow involved in Chavez's illness.

The allegation was made against a backdrop of diplomatic tension, with Caracas announcing that two American Air Force attachés had been given 24 hours to leave the country.

AFP - Getty Images

Venezuelan Vice-President Nicolas Maduro (L) speaking at a meeting on Venezuela's political future in Caracas on March 5, 2013, in a picture provided by the government press office.

Maduro accused one of them, David Delmonaco, of spying and meeting with Venezuelan military officials for nefarious purposes. The expulsion of the second, Devlin Kostal, was announced soon after.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said Delmonaco would be leaving Caracas and that Kostal was already in the U.S. and denied the allegations against them.

"We completely reject the Venezuelan government's claim that the United States is involved in any type of conspiracy to destabilize Venezuela government," he said.

Ventrell also dismissed the accusations.

"Notwithstanding the significant differences between our governments, we continue to believe it important to seek a functional and more productive relationship with Venezuela based on issues of mutual interest," he said.

"This fallacious assertion of inappropriate U.S. action leads us to conclude that, unfortunately, the current Venezuelan government is not interested in an improved relationship."

Venezuela's relations with the U.S. have been strained for years, and Chavez saw conspiracies everywhere.

In 2008, he expelled the American ambassador, claiming the U.S. was orchestrating a military coup. He had repeatedly claimed to be the target of assassination plots from domestic and international opponents.

NBC News' Havana bureau chief Mary Murray, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

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A meeting with the red-clad “princes of the church.” A 10-minute helicopter ride to Castel Gandolfo. A quick wave from the balcony to throngs in a candlelit square.

That’s the script for Pope Benedict XVI’s final hours as spiritual leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Roman Catholics before his resignation becomes official at 8 p.m. Thursday -- ending an often rocky eight-year tenure and launching the church into a potentially contentious search for his replacement.

His farewell address has already happened – a speech Wednesday morning before a cheering crowd of more than 100,000 in front of St. Peter’s, where he acknowledged moments of great joy and difficulty and asked followers to pray for him in his retirement.

The spotlight will remain on Benedict, however, for at least another day before attention turns to the highly ritualized conclave that will choose his successor.

Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

Cardinal Antonio Rouco Varela (3rd L) reacts while attending the last general audience of Pope Benedict XVI.

At 11 a.m. Thursday, Italian time, he is scheduled to meet the cardinals that have rushed to Rome for the historic event. Each will have the chance to say a few parting words to him, but a major speech is not expected.

The personal goodbyes will continue as he leaves the Apostolic Palace before 5 p.m. and is driven to the helipad, where Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, will see him off.

The 85-year-old pope knows how to fly a helicopter but presumably will rely on a pilot from the 13^th Squadron of the Italian Air Force for the jaunt to the hilltop town where he will live in his summer residence for a few months while a monastery in the Vatican Gardens is prepared for him.

Town priests are planning a prayer vigil in Castel Gandolfo to begin a few hours before Benedict’s arrival, and he is likely to bestow a brief greeting on the thousands crammed into the town square, clutching rosaries and candles.

Once he leaves Rome, there will be only a few more hours in his papacy, which officially ends at the stroke of 8 p.m. Thursday. From that moment on, he will be known as pope emeritus, and aides say a life of quiet reflection will commence.

“I think we’ll probably catch some glimpses of him walking in the garden,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke told NBC’s TODAY. “He’s not the kind of guy who is going on a book tour.”

At the Vatican, the Swiss Guards will go off duty – and the cardinals will be officially called back to work the next day with a formal announcement of what’s called the sede vacante, Latin for "the seat being vacant."

A Vatican spokesman told the Catholic News Service the college will probably not meet over the weekend but could gather the following Monday for informal talks to set a date for the conclave and begin talking about priorities for 266th pope.

Under old church law, the conclave couldn’t start until March 15, but an amendment this week will allow the cardinals to push up the date as along as all 115 electors are in place. There were supposed to be 117, but one is too sick to attend and another recused himself after being accused of inappropriate behavior with priests.

And, of course, the Vatican guesthouse where the cardinals will stay during the conclave must be swept for listening devices before they can move in for the duration.

The length of the conclave — with its four secret ballots a day, cast in the Sistine Chapel — is anyone's guess; it took just two days to elect Benedict and three to choose his predecessor, John Paul II.

Vatican watchers say there is no clear front-runner and Benedict's legacy will loom large as they look to the future.

An introverted theologian, he is credited with pushing the "new evangelization" and repairing rifts with Jews but faulted for not taking stronger action as a sex-abuse scandal tarnished the church's reputation and letting the Vatican bureaucracy run amok.

He alluded to the crises during Wednesday's address, saying he had often felt like "St. Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of ​​Galilee."

"The Lord has given us many days of sunshine and gentle breeze, days in which the catch has been abundant," he said. "[But] there have been times when the seas were rough and the wind against us, as in the whole history of the Church it has ever been — and the Lord seemed to sleep."

Slideshow: Pope Benedict XVI's departure

Gabriel Bouys / AFP - Getty Images

The pope delivers his final audience in St. Peter's Square as he prepares to stand down.

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Related:

Pope Benedict tells cheering crowd: I am not abandoning the church

Papal historian: Cardinals likely to choose an 'extrovert'

'Amateur hour': Vatican conclave drama is one for the history books, experts say

Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP – Getty Images

Dominique Strauss-Kahn leaves Paris' courthouse after a hearing Tuesday on a tell-all penned by an ex-lover.

French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn lost his bid to have a court ban a kiss-and-tell book by an ex-lover who has described him as a sex-obsessed "half-man, half-pig" -- but he will collect damages.

In a ruling late Tuesday, a judge green-lighted publication of "Beauty and Beast" by Marcelle Iacub, a lawyer and columnist who had a seven-month affair with the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Le Monde reported.

The court agreed to Strauss-Kahn's demand that a disclaimer declaring his privacy had been invaded be included in every copy. It also ordered the author, the publisher and a magazine that printed excerpts to pay him $98,000, the newspaper said.

Hours before his partial victory, Strauss-Kahn appeared in a Paris courtroom to complain of the "horror" of having his love life exposed, The Guardian reported.

Christian Hartmann / Reuters

"Belle et Bete" ("Beauty and Beast") by Marcela Iacub details her seven-month affair with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Is anything allowed in order to make money?" he asked, branding the book a cheap shot against "a man already down on the ground."

The affair chronicled in the book unfolded while Strauss-Kahn was embroiled in scandal over allegations he sexually assaulted a hotel maid in New York. Criminal charges were dropped by prosecutors who questioned the woman's credibility; Strauss-Kahn later settled a civil claim out of court.

Iacub's book, which is due to go on sale Wednesday, doesn't name Strauss-Kahn, but she has said it's about him. Excerpts published in Le Nouvel Observateur -- accompanied by an interview in which she referred to him as "half-man, half-pig" -- are decidedly unflattering.

"You were old, you were fat, you were short and you were ugly," the 48-year-old former mistress wrote, according to the Guardian. "You were macho, you were vulgar, you were insensitive and you were stingy. You were selfish, you were brutal and you had no culture. And I was mad about you."

Strauss-Kahn's lawyers contend he was seduced into a money-making trap and they tried to persuade the court with an email in which Iacub purportedly confessed the romance was a plot cooked up by her co-workers.

Iacub said she didn't remember the email, disavowed its contents and issued a warning to the Socialist leader once touted as presidential material before scandal doomed his career.

"I don't think it's in [Strauss-Kahn's] best interest for me to start searching through my emails," she said, according to London's Daily Telegraph.

Strauss-Kahn, who is under investigation in connection with a French sex ring, had asked for a disclaimer to be printed in every copy of "Beauty and Beast" already distributed, a ban on more copies being printed, and $130,000 in damages. 

As he left the courthouse, he said there was one more thing on his wish-list: "To be left alone."