Conclave

by Robert Harris

Before the Casa Santa Marta had been built, more than twenty years earlier, the cardinal-electors were housed for the duration of a Conclave in the Apostolic Palace. The powerful Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Siri, a veteran of four Conclaves and the man who had ordained Lomeli a priest in the 1960s, used to complain that it was like being buried alive. Beds were jammed into fifteenth-century offices and reception rooms, with curtains slung between them to provide a rudimentary privacy. Washing facilities for each cardinal consisted of a jug and a basin; sanitation was a commode. It was John Paul II who had decided that such quaint squalor was no longer tolerable on the eve of the twenty-first century and who had ordered the Casa to be built in the south-western corner of the Vatican City at a cost to the Holy See of twenty million dollars. It reminded Lomeli of a Soviet apartment building: a grey stone rectangle lying on its side, six storeys high.