Conclave

by Robert Harris

“Some are chosen to be shepherds, and others are needed to manage the farm. Yours is not a pastoral role. You are not a shepherd. You are a manager. Do you think it’s easy for me? I need you here. Don’t worry. God will return to you. He always does.”

“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.

“I assume we are going to finish in time?” “They’ll work through the night if they have to,” O’Malley said. “It will be fine, Eminence, it always is.” He shrugged. “Italy, you know.”

He was not entirely naïve. He had known what it was to desire, and to be desired, both by women and by men. And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness.

“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.

But then another possibility occurred to him—one that, however absurd, was much more alarming. He was almost afraid to examine it: What if God had a plan for him? Could that explain why he had been seized by that extraordinary impulse in St. Peter’s? Were those few sentences, which he now found so hard to remember, not actually his at all, but a manifestation of the Holy Spirit working through him?

Bellini threaded his arm through Lomeli’s, and together the two old friends began to climb the stairs.

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

As he did so, he noticed the little kit of toiletries that O’Malley had provided for Benítez on the night of his arrival—a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a bottle of deodorant, and a plastic disposable razor, still in its cellophane wrapper.

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

Across one page the Holy Father had scrawled, in shaky pencil, a quotation from St. Mark’s Gospel: Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers.

Lomeli studied him for a moment, then got to his feet. The pain behind his eye was almost blinding. “You grieve me, Aldo. You do. Five times I cast my ballot for you, in the true belief that you were the right man to lead the Church. But now I see that the Conclave, in its wisdom, was correct, and I was wrong. You lack the courage required to be Pope. I’ll leave you alone.”

He remembered how the late Holy Father always used to say that cash was the apple in their Garden of Eden, the original temptation that had led to so much sin.

“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.”

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

He was not so solipsistic as to believe that a bomb had gone off merely because he had written his own name on a piece of paper. But he was not so prosaic that he did not believe in the interconnectedness of things. How else to interpret the timing of the blast, which had struck with the precision of a thunderbolt, except as a sign that God was displeased with these machinations?

“On that first night, when I took Cardinal Benítez the toiletries he was lacking, he told me I needn’t have bothered with a razor, as he never shaved.”

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.