Editor's Note:
Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor.
His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America.
Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.
The opinions expressed here are solely his.
(CNN Spanish) -
Every other day they also send me messages explaining that Joe Biden is too old to make the right decisions.
Biden is 78 years old, he was born in 1942. On November 20 he will turn 79. There are people who are that age but show no signs of mental deterioration. But there are those seriously altered by old age. Biden himself oscillates between splendid speeches full of energy and less alert ones. I am also 78 years old, and I can attest that at 75, in my case, I was visited by a multitude of chronic pains and diseases that had respected me up to that minute.
Parkinson's, for example, primed in my brain, preventing the creation of dopamine, a mysterious neurotransmitter that plays a very important role in voluntary movements and its disappearance tends to make them desperately slow.
Fortunately, Parkinson's disease has nothing to do with the creation of written texts, since these are done in a different place in the brain and not where the substantia nigra is made.
What is the appropriate age to know how to choose what favors a nation of more than 331 million people in whom each has a different opinion?
That is far from clear.
The Vatican, which has been meditating on a similar issue for more than 2,000 years, recently reached a "Solomonic" solution.
Never better said.
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I believe that it is Canon Law that limits the role of bishops to a maximum of 75 years.
At that age, bishops must present a letter of resignation to the pope.
On the other hand, cardinals, whose main function is to elect the pope, can only do so until they are 80 years old.
As soon as they exceed that age, they cannot participate in the conclaves in which the successor of Saint Peter is chosen.
This is a reasonable consequence of the fact that we currently live for many years and in some cases there is a distance between people's physical state and their intellectual deterioration.
However, Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) and Francisco (Jorge Bergoglio) were elected at 78 and 76, respectively, very close to the fateful 80. Benedict XVI is 94 years old and Francis, 84. Ratzinger resigned from the papacy in 2013 becoming in pope emeritus. Both, due to their ages, can die at any moment. Even a recent colon surgery performed on Francisco aroused concern in the media in Italy and the rest of the world, given the secrecy with which these issues are generally discussed in the Vatican.
Former President Donald Trump, obviously, is the one behind the campaigns denouncing the alleged decrepitude of Joe Biden, but he must do so very carefully, because he is already 75 years old, and in the 2024 elections he will be the same age as Joe Biden is today. and they increase the chances of a massive heart attack, cancer, a stroke or being the victim of a chronic disease.
In the same way that, after the experience of the four consecutive elections that Franklin Delano Roosevelt won, a constitutional amendment limited the stay in the White House to two presidential terms, we are in a favorable situation to set age limits on candidates for the US presidency I think 70 years is very acceptable for Tyrians and Trojans.
That is, for Democrats and Republicans.