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He had been briefed about security by the Italian Minister of the Interior, a fresh-faced economist from a well-known Catholic family, who had never worked outside politics and whose hands had shaken as he read through his notes. The threat of terrorism was considered serious and imminent, the minister had said. Surface-to-air missiles and snipers would be stationed on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the Vatican.
Yikes. I had no idea.
What an extraordinary variety of races they represented—what a testament to the breadth of the Universal Church that men born so different should be bound together by their faith in God!
the German, Cardinal Löwenstein (aged 77, Archbishop Emeritus of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, investigated for heresy by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1997).
For what heresy?
the Archbishop of Riga, Gatis Brotzkus, whose family had converted to Catholicism after the war and whose Jewish mother had been murdered by the Nazis.
Why? Conversion wouldn't have saved his mother or her children.
the Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Courtemarche, Archbishop of Bordeaux, once excommunicated as a follower of the heretic Marcel-François Lefebvre, and who had been secretly taped claiming that the Holocaust had never occurred.
!
And finally—and broadly speaking it was finally—there came that separate and most rarefied species of cardinal, the two dozen members of the Curia, who lived permanently in Rome and who ran the big departments of the Church.
Good men though they were, they were somehow knowing; they were blasé. Lomeli had recognised this spiritual disfigurement in himself. He had prayed for the strength to fight it. The late Pope used to rail against it to their faces: “Be on your guard, my brothers, against developing the vices of all courtiers down the ages—the sins of vanity and intrigue and of malice and gossip.”
“I want a Church that is poor,” the Pope had complained more than once in Lomeli’s hearing. “I want a Church that is closer to the people. Guttuso has a good soul but he has
“Yes, well, I confess that my Latin is poor, but I would inflict it on you all nonetheless, simply to make a point. Because what I would try to say, in my simple peasant Latin, is this: that change almost invariably produces the opposite effect to the improvement it is intended to bring about, and that we should bear that in mind when we come to make our choice of Pope.
Maybe this is what lies behind slippery slope arguments: the conservative fear of any change
when you and I were boys, Dean, and the Tridentine Mass was still the liturgy of the entire world, the cardinals at a Conclave were able to converse with one another in Latin. But then in 1962, the liberals insisted we should get rid of a dead language in order to make communication easier, and now what do we see?
They have only succeeded in making communication harder!”
“The abandonment of Latin,” persisted Tedesco, “will lead eventually to the abandonment of Rome. Mark my words.”
fear this Conclave may be our last chance to preserve our Mother the Church. Another ten years like the last ten—another Holy Father like the last one—and she will cease to exist as we know her.”
“True, but he never actually did it. How can a woman instruct a bishop, let alone select a bishop, when she isn’t even allowed to celebrate Communion? The College will see it as ordination by the back door.”
Another slipery slope argument, a logical version.
And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness. It was only when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that he had begun to brood on what he had missed. Because what was he nowadays? No longer a shining knight: just another impotent old fellow, no more heroic than the average patient in a nursing home. Sometimes he wondered what had been the point of it all. The night-time pang was no longer of lust; it was of regret.
He saved others; himself he cannot save—the jeer of the scribes and elders at the foot of the cross. The paradox at the heart of the Gospel. The priest who celebrates Mass and yet is unable to achieve Communion himself.
The novel explains what's missing in the movie.
Here and there he registered the leading contenders—Bellini, Tedesco, Adeyemi, Tremblay—sitting far apart from one another, each preoccupied with his own thoughts, and it struck him what an imperfect, arbitrary, man-made instrument the Conclave was.
It had no basis in Holy Scripture whatsoever. There was nothing in the reading to say that God had created cardinals. Where did they fit into St. Paul’s picture of His Church as a living body?
God could, after all, have created a single archetype to serve Him. Instead, He created what a naturalist might call a whole ecosystem of mystics and dreamers and practical builders—managers, even—with different strengths and impulses, and from these He fashioned the body of Christ.”
In other words, we should have no fear of diversity, because it is this variety that gives our Church its strength.
“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.
“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.
He sensed astonishment. Lomeli—the smooth, the reliable, the competent Lomeli; Lomeli the lawyer; Lomeli the diplomat—had done something they had never expected. He had said something interesting. He had not expected it of himself, either.
All he had ever desired in this contest was to be neutral. Neutrality had been the leitmotif of his career. When the traditionalists had taken control of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the nineties, he had kept his head down and got on with his work as Papal Nuncio in the United States.
Now, though, as he made his way across the lobby to the elevator, he found to his dismay that although he was receiving some friendly acknowledgement—the occasional pat on the back, a few smiles—this came entirely from the liberal faction. At least as many cardinals who were listed in Lomeli’s file as traditionalists frowned or turned their heads away from him. Archbishop Dell’Acqua of Bologna, who had been at Bellini’s table the night before, called out, loudly enough for the whole room to hear, “Well said, Dean!” But Cardinal Gambino, the Archbishop of Perugia, who was one of Tedesco’s
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thought, Adeyemi would be condemned by the liberals as more reactionary even than Tedesco. But the fact that he was black made them reluctant to criticise his views. His fulminations against homosexuality, for example, they could excuse as merely an expression of his African cultural heritage.
There was a set prayer for every garment—cassock, cincture, rochet, mozzetta, zucchetto—and he recited them as he put on each item. “Protect me, O Lord, with the girdle of faith,” he whispered as he knotted the cincture around his waist, “and extinguish the fire of lust so that chastity may abide in me, year after year.” But he did so mechanically, with no more feeling than if he were giving out a telephone number.
If he no longer feels lust, why is he o obsessed with conquering it? It' s as if he neexs to have somethng to fighr in order to prove that be 's spiritually worthy. The others seem to treat their voctionsas jobs. Bellini is describex as neurotic but Lobelli is nus as crazy.
leaving Lomeli to trail behind, wondering if he had imagined things, or if he had just been offered, in return for his silence, his old job back as Secretary of State.
Of course he had. Why hammer the point?
Few cardinals would wish to risk a schism in the Church by obstructing such a dramatic manifestation of the Divine Will. Nor, to be practical about it, would they wish to make an enemy of the incoming Pope, especially one with as powerful a personality as Joshua Adeyemi.
riso
Lomeli could not bear to imagine his agony. God forgive me for what I have had to do.
Despite his religious views, he is a kind man.
It wasn’t that those who turned a blind eye were evil; it was simply that they didn’t understand the scale of the wickedness they were dealing with, and preferred a quiet life.
So tell me: am I supposed to go around like some witchfinder general, searching for my colleagues’ lapses of more than thirty years ago?”
And if we believe that the Holy Spirit is operating through the Conclave, we have to accept that God—improbable as it may seem—wishes us to give the Keys of St.
Odd how the cardinals are both pious and political.
Peter to Joe Tremblay.”
“I believe in God, Your Eminence. And in God alone. Which is why I don’t share your alarm at the idea of a long Conclave—or even a schism, come to that. Who knows? Perhaps that is what God wants. It would explain why our Conclave is proving to be such a conundrum that even you can’t solve it.”
Again, the blief that God controlss what men do. Almost fatlistic.
Lomeli was so taken aback it was a moment before he could reply. He said stiffly, “I can assure you I would never for a moment countenance breaking my oath to God—whatever the consequences for the Church.”
What izs the connection betwen the Holy Spirit and the Catholic Church?
His dialogue with Benítez had disturbed him profoundly. He was unable to get it out of his mind. Was it really possible that he had spent the past thirty years worshipping the Church rather than God? Because that, in essence, was the accusation Benítez had levelled against him.
there was Tedesco and his gang sniping away at him, practically accusing him of heresy whenever he said anything that sounded too much like common sense about gays or divorced couples or promoting more women. Hence the cruel paradox of his papacy: the more the outside world loved him, the more isolated he became inside the Holy See.
“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.”
Seems a little zimplistic
