Conclave

by Robert Harris

“Come,” he said. “Join me. Let us say a Mass for our friend together.” As they walked back into the Casa Santa Marta, he took Lomeli’s arm. “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.”

Celibacy had not made him feel neutered or frustrated, as the secular word generally imagined a priest must be, but rather powerful and fulfilled. He had imagined himself a warrior within a knightly caste: a lonely and untouchable hero, above the common run. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 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. 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.

“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. Even Christ was not certain at the end. ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?’ He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ 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. “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.”

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

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