Conclave

by Robert Harris

“The Holy Father told me of your difficulties with prayer,” he whispered. “Perhaps I can help. You know that he had doubts himself, by the end?” “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.”

“Well, Eminence,” said the Secretary of the College, O’Malley, in his Irish accent. “I’d say this is a pretty fair vision of hell.” “Don’t be blasphemous, Ray,” replied Lomeli. “Hell arrives tomorrow, when we bring in the cardinals.”

He said, “I wonder where Cardinal Tedesco has got to?” O’Malley said, “Perhaps he isn’t coming.” “That would be too much to hope! Ah, forgive me. That was uncharitable.”

“Thank you. I knew I could always come to you. Would you bless me, Eminence?” Lomeli laid his hand on the archbishop’s head. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” At the door, he turned. “And perhaps you would be kind enough to remember me in your prayers tonight, Janusz? I fear I may have greater need of intercession than you.”

Benítez spoke. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Your gifts, which we are about to receive from Your bounty. Bless, too, all those who cannot share this meal. And help us, O Lord, as we eat and drink, to remember the hungry and the thirsty, the sick and the lonely, and those sisters who prepared this food for us, and who will serve it to us tonight. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.” “Amen.”

“The Universal Church? But how can a thing be considered universal if it speaks fifty different languages? Language is vital. Because from language, over time, arises thought, and from thought arises philosophy and culture.

He pictured a great shaft of cacophonous darkness, filled with taunting voices thundering down upon him from heaven. A divine revelation of doubt. At one point in his despair he picked up the Meditations and flung it at the wall. It bounced off it with a thump. The snoring ceased for a minute, and then resumed.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.

“Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a Pope who doubts, and by his doubts continues to make the Catholic faith a living thing that may inspire the whole world. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins, and asks forgiveness, and carries on. We ask this of the Lord, through the intercession of Mary most holy, Queen of the Apostles, and of all the martyrs and saints, who through the course of history made this Church of Rome glorious through the ages. Amen.”

The Filipino had an attractive quality, he thought, not easy to define: an inner grace. Now that he was becoming better known, he might go far.

Eminence, From Cardinal Benítez’s file in the dicastery, it would appear that the late Holy Father first met him during his African tour in 2017. He was sufficiently impressed by his work to create him monsignor. When the Baghdad archdiocese fell vacant, the Holy Father rejected the three suggested nominations put forward by the Congregation for Bishops and insisted on appointing Fr. Benítez. In January this year, following minor injuries sustained in a car-bomb attack, Archbishop Benítez offered his resignation on medical grounds, but withdrew it after a private meeting in the Vatican with the Holy Father. Otherwise, the file is remarkably scanty. RO’M

Benítez shook his head. “Bellini seems to me—what was the phrase the Holy Father once used to me to describe him?—‘brilliant but neurotic.’ I’m sorry, Dean. I shall vote for you.”

Lomeli woke with an impending sense of doom

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“The first ballot cast is for Cardinal Lomeli…” Oh no, God, he prayed, not again; let this pass from me.

Studying for his doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Lateran University, he had read Canetti’s Crowds and Power.

“And yet he seems perfectly fit in mind and body to me, and last night when I asked after his health, he seemed surprised by the question.” Lomeli realised he was whispering. He laughed. “Listen to me—I sound like a typical old maid of the Curia, gossiping in darkened corners about appointments!”

“We’ll never find a candidate who doesn’t have some kind of black mark against his name. We’ve had a Pope who was a member of the Hitler Youth and fought for the Nazis. We’ve had Popes who were accused of having colluded with communists and fascists, or who ignored reports of the most appalling abuses…Where does it end? If you’ve been a member of the Curia, you can be sure someone will have leaked something about you. And if you’ve been an archbishop, you’re bound to have made a mistake at one time or another. We are mortal men. We serve an ideal; we cannot always be ideal.”

“Ah, the new boy! Are you plotting, Your Eminence?” “No—or at least no more than anyone else.” “Then you are plotting.”

The lock slid back and the door half opened. “Your Eminence?” Benítez was clutching his unbuttoned cassock together at his throat. His thin brown feet were bare. The room behind him was in darkness.

Lomeli watched the Filipino as he sat on the bed and pulled on his socks. He was struck afresh by how young and trim he looked for a man of sixty-seven—boyish almost, with his lock of jet-black hair spilling like ink across his face as he bent forward. For Lomeli these days, putting on a pair of socks could take ten minutes. Yet the Filipino’s limbs and fingers seemed as lithe and nimble as a twenty-year-old’s. Perhaps he practised yoga by candlelight, as well as praying.

“That is an extraordinary allegation. The Church is not merely an institution, as you call it, but the living embodiment of the Holy Spirit.” “Ah, well here we differ. I feel I am more likely to encounter the embodiment of the Holy Spirit elsewhere—for example in those two million women who have been raped as an act of military policy in the civil wars of central Africa.”

“I meant no offence, Dean, and I am sorry if I have given it. But I cannot vote for a man unless he is the one I deem most worthy to be Pope. And for me, that man is not Cardinal Tremblay: it is you.” “How many more times, Your Eminence?” Lomeli struck the side of his chair in his frustration. “I do not want your vote!” “Nevertheless, you will have it.”

He went into the bathroom, licked his thumb and forefinger, and snuffed out the candle beside the washbasin. 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.

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. It was famously—according to the report issued by the Vatican press office—the last book the Holy Father had been reading before his heart attack. The page he had been studying was marked with a yellowing bus ticket, issued in his home city more than twenty years before:

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.”

For several seconds no one spoke. Then Adeyemi rose. Slowly he brought up his arm to point at Tremblay. In his deep, well-modulated voice, which sounded to his listeners, that morning more than ever, like the wrath of God made manifest, he intoned the single word, “Judas!”

Gracious God of majesty and awe, I seek Your protection, I look for Your healing. Poor troubled sinner that I am, I appeal to You, the fountain of all mercy. I cannot bear Your judgement But I trust in Your salvation…

As he tipped his vote into the urn, there was a terrific bang, the floor quivered, and from behind him came the sound of panes of glass shattering and crashing on to stone. For a long moment Lomeli was sure he must be dead, and in those few seconds, when time seemed suspended, he discovered that thought is not always sequential—that ideas and impressions can arrive piled on top of one another, like photographic transparencies. Thus he was at once terrified that he had brought God’s judgement down upon his own head and yet simultaneously elated to be given proof of His existence. His life had not been lived in vain! In his fear and joy he imagined that he must have passed on to another plane of existence. But when he looked at his hands, they still seemed solid enough, and suddenly time snapped back to its normal speed, as if a hypnotist had clicked his fingers. Lomeli registered the shocked expressions of the scrutineers, who were staring past him. Turning, he saw that the Sistine Chapel was still intact. Some of the cardinals were rising to find out what had happened.

Lomeli had placed his hands palm-down on the desk to stop them shaking. When he had been dealing with the security men, he had felt completely calm, but the moment he resumed his seat, the shock had hit him. 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? You set me a task and I have failed You. The wailing of the sirens was rising to a crescendo like a chorus of the damned: some ululated, some whooped, some emitted a single scream. To the drone of the first helicopter had been added the noise of a second. It made a mockery of the Conclave’s supposed seclusion. They might as well have been meeting in the middle of the Piazza Navona.

The counting of the ballot resumed. “Cardinal Benítez…” Lomeli took up the sheet of paper on which he had roughed out the notes for his speech and tore it into tiny fragments.

The choice of name took Lomeli by surprise. To derive one’s papal title from a virtue—innocence, piety, clemency—rather than from a saint was a tradition that had died out generations ago. There had been thirteen Popes named Innocent, none of them in the last three centuries. But the more he considered it, even in those first few seconds, the more he was struck by its aptness—by its symbolism at such a time of bloodshed, by the boldness of its declaration of intent. It seemed to promise both a return to tradition and yet a departure from it—exactly the sort of ambiguity the Curia relished. And it fitted the dignified, childlike, graceful, softly spoken Benítez to perfection.

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.

I have drawn on the work of many reporters and authors. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the following: John L. Allen, All the Pope’s Men and Conclave; John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I and The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy; Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Century and The Year of Three Popes; Richard Holloway, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt; Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope; Pope John XXIII, Journal of a Soul; Sally Ninham, Ten African Cardinals; Gianluigi Nuzzi, Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican and Ratzinger Was Afraid: The Secret Documents, the Money and the Scandals that Overwhelmed the Pope; Gerald O’Collins SJ, On the Left Bank of the Tiber; Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, An English Spring; John-Peter Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession; Marco Politi, Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution; John Thavis, The Vatican Diaries.