Conclave

by Robert Harris

I cry out to You, God, but You do not answer.

“Once, God explained all mysteries. Now He has been usurped by conspiracy theorists. They are the heretics of the age.”

Tedesco’s voice sounded hollow in the cavernousness of his official residence.

This is a nice line

The children of the Son of Man were all equal at the last, he reflected; all were dependent on God’s mercy for the hope of resurrection.

“The Pope had doubts about God?” “Not about God! Never about God!” And then Bellini said something Lomeli would never forget. “What he had lost faith in was the Church.”

An excess of simplicity, after all, was just another form of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility a sin.

In the doorway was a large vase of fresh white lilies; they exuded a sickly scent.

We are an Ark, he thought, surrounded by a rising flood of discord.

A member of the Swiss Guard in his plumed helmet walked with them, carrying a halberd. It might have been a scene from the sixteenth century, except for the noise of their wheeled suitcases, clattering over the cobbles.

that change almost invariably produces the opposite effect to the improvement it is intended to bring about,

“He plainly has no intention of tempering his views to win votes.” “He never has. I rather admire him for that.”

The men who are dangerous—the men who must be stopped—are the ones who actively desire it.”

“My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

We do not need a Church that will move with the world but a Church that will move the world.

Conclave. From the Latin, con clavis: “with a key.” Since the thirteenth century, this was how the Church had ensured its cardinals would come to a decision. They would not be released from the chapel, except for meals and to sleep, until they had chosen a Pope.

I pray that soon You will give us the wisdom to understand what it is You are trying to say.

Me too please

The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.

To think that whoever was elected Pope would never be able to wander around the city at will, could never browse in a bookstore or sit outside a café, but would remain a prisoner here!

We are mortal men. We serve an ideal; we cannot always be ideal.”

Was it really possible that he had spent the past thirty years worshipping the Church rather than God?

her presence has been requested by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, His Eminence Cardinal Tremblay.

I audibly gasped

cash was the apple in their Garden of Eden,

“No one who follows their conscience ever does wrong, Your Eminence. The consequences may not turn out as we intend; it may prove in time that we made a mistake. But that is not the same as being wrong. The only guide to a person’s actions can ever be their conscience, for it is in our conscience that we most clearly hear the voice of God.”

“Eminences,” she began, “although we Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul are supposed to be invisible, God has nonetheless given us eyes and ears,

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made…

I am what God made me, Your Eminence. It seemed to me more of a sin to correct His handiwork than to leave my body as it was.