Conclave

by Robert Harris

Bellini, the great intellectual hope of the liberals for as long as Lomeli could remember, a former rector of the Gregorian University and former Archbishop of Milan;

Tremblay, who as well as serving as Camerlengo was Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, a candidate therefore with links to the Third World, who had the advantage of seeming to be an American without the disadvantage of actually being one;

Adeyemi, who carried within him like a divine spark the revolutionary possibility, endlessly fascinating to the media, that he might ...

Tedesco had been the most savage, pushing his attacks on the Holy Father and on Bellini to the point, some thought, of schism. There had even been talk of excommunication. Nevertheless, he enjoyed a devoted following among the traditionalists, which was bound to make him a prominent candidate for the succession.

“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.

The treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in God’s mystery—

He was the Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia. Before that he had been the Cardinal-Priest of San Marcello al Corso in Rome. Before that, the titular Archbishop of Aquileia. In all of these positions, however nominal, he had played an active part: had preached sermons and celebrated Mass and heard confessions. But one could be the grandest prince of the Universal Church and still lack the most basic skills of the commonest country priest.

If only he had experienced life in an ordinary parish, just for a year or two! Instead, ever since his ordination, his path of service—first as a professor of canon law, then as a diplomat, and finally, briefly, as Secretary of State—had seemed only to lead him away from God rather than towards Him.

The higher he had climbed, the further heaven had receded. And now it fell to him, of all unworthy creatures, to guide his fellow cardinals in choosing the...

On the left was the Brazilian Cardinal Sá, Archbishop of São Salvador de Bahia (aged 60, liberation theologian, a possible Pope, but not this time),

on the right, the elderly Chilean, Cardinal Contreras, Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago (aged 77, arch-conservative, one-time confessor of General Augusto Pinochet).

Between them walked a small, dignified figure it took him longer to place: Cardinal Hierra, the Archbishop of Mexico City, of whom Lome...

He recognised the Archbishop of Boston, Willard Fitzgerald (aged 68, preoccupied with pastoral duties, still clearing up the mess of the abuse scandal, good with the media);

Mario Santos SJ, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston (aged 70, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, cautious reformer),

Paul Krasinski (aged 79, Archbishop Emeritus of Chicago, Prefect Emeritus of the Apostolic Signatura, traditionalist, strong supp...

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! From the Eastern ministries, Maronite and Coptic, came the Patriarchs of Lebanon, Antioch and Alexandria; from India, the major Archbishops of Trivandrum and Ernakulam-Angamaly, and also the Archbishop of Ranchi, Saverio Xalxo, whose name Lomeli took pleasure in pronouncing correctly: “Cardinal Khal-koh, welcome to the Conclave…”

From the Far East came no fewer than thirteen Asian archbishops—Jakarta and Cebu, Bangkok and Manila, Seoul and Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City and Hong Kong…And from Africa another thirteen—Maputo, Kampala, Dar-es-Salaam, Khartoum, Addis Ababa…Lomeli was sure that the Africans would vote as a solid block for Cardinal Adeyemi.

Lomeli was struck by how much they deferred to Adeyemi, even the elderly grey-headed eminences like Zucula of Mozambique and the Kenyan, Mwangale, who had been around a lot longer.

And it was still the cardinals of Europe—fifty-six in all—who dominated the Conclave. These were the men Lomeli knew best. Some, like Ugo De Luca, the Archbishop of Genoa, with whom he had studied at the diocesan seminary, had been his friends for half a century. Others he had been meeting at conferences for more than thirty years.

Arm in arm up the hill came the two great liberal theologians of Western Europe, once outcasts but lately awarded their red hats in a show of defiance by the Holy Father: the Belgian, Cardinal Vandroogenbroek (aged 68, ex–Professor of Theology at Louvain University, advocate of Curial appointments for women, no-hoper), and the German, Cardinal Löwenstein (aged 77, Archbishop Emeritus of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, investigated for heresy by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1997).

The Patriarch of Lisbon, Rui Brandão D’Cruz, arrived smoking a cigar, and lingered on the doorstep of the Casa Sant...

The Archbishop of Prague, Jan Jandaček, made his way across the piazza still limping as a result of his torture at the hands of the Czech secret police when he was worki...

There was the Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, Calogero Scozzazi, investigated three times for money-la...

the Archbishop of Riga, Gatis Brotzkus, whose family had converted to Catholicism after the war and whose Jewish moth...

There was the Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Courtemarche, Archbishop of Bordeaux, once excommunicated as a follower of the heretic Marcel-François Lefebvre, and who had been secretly tap...

There was the Spanish Archbishop of Toledo, Modesto Villanueva—at fifty-four the youngest member of the Conclave—an organiser of Catholic Youth, who maintained that the...

“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.”

Yet it was the Pope who had appointed them all. Nobody had made him pick them. For example, there was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Simo Guttuso. The liberals had had such high hopes for the genial Archbishop of Florence. “A second Pope John XXIII,” they had called him.

“If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

Bill Rudgard, for example, who arrived soon after Guttuso: he might come from New York and look like a Wall Street banker, but he had failed entirely to gain control over the financial management of his department, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (“Between you, me and the bedpost, I should never have given the job to an American. They are so innocent: they have no idea how bribery works. Did you know that the going rate for a beatification is said to be three quarters of a million euros? The only miracle is that anyone pays it…”).

As for the next man to enter the Casa Santa Marta, Cardinal Tutino, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, he would surely have gone in the New Year. He had been exposed in the press for spending half a million euros knocking two apartments together to create a place big enough to house the three nuns and the chaplain he felt necessary to serve him.

No sane man could possibly want the papacy.”

leaving Lomeli to face the Patriarch of Venice. Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco was the least clerical-looking cleric Lomeli had ever seen. If you showed his picture to someone who didn’t know him, they would say he was a retired butcher, perhaps, or a bus driver. He came from a peasant family in Basilicata, right down in the south, the youngest of twelve children—the kind of huge family that used to be so common in Italy but had almost vanished since the end of the Second World War. His nose had been broken in his youth and was bulbous and slightly bent. His hair was too long and roughly parted. He had shaved carelessly. In the fading light he reminded Lomeli of a figure from another century: Gioachino Rossini, perhaps. But the rustic image was an act. He had two degrees in theology, spoke five languages fluently, and had been a protégé of Ratzinger’s at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he had been known as the Panzer Cardinal’s enforcer.

At a quarter to six, the Archbishop Emeritus of Kiev, Vadym Yatsenko, was pushed up the slope in a wheelchair. O’Malley made an exaggerated tick on his clipboard and declared that all 117 cardinals were now safely gathered in.

Lomeli contemplated Woźniak. Might he be lying? No. He was a simple soul, plucked from a small town in Poland to be a chaplain and companion for John Paul II in his declining years. Lomeli was sure he was telling the truth. “Does anyone else know about this, apart from you and Cardinal Tremblay?”

Lomeli knew Hector Morales, although not well. He had been one of the Pope’s private secretaries. A Uruguayan.

Those are the rules, as you know: ‘The first member of the Curia to be officially notified in the event of the Pope’s death is to be the Camerlengo.’

“His name is Vincent Benítez, Eminence. He’s the Archbishop of Baghdad.” “Baghdad? I wasn’t aware we had an archbishop in such a place. Is he an Iraqi?” “Hardly! He’s a Filipino. The Holy Father appointed him last year.”

In pectore (“in the heart”) was the ancient provision under which a Pope could create a cardinal without revealing his name, even to his closest associates: apart from the beneficiary, God alone would know.

In all his years in the Curia, Lomeli had only ever heard of one case of a cardinal created in pectore, whose name was never made public, even after the Pope’s death. That had been in 2003, under the papacy of John Paul II.

The Filipino was fingering his rosary, entirely absorbed. Lomeli felt intrusive merely watching. Yet he found it hard to look away. He envied him. It was a long time since he had been able to muster the powers of concentration necessary to shut oneself off from the world. His own head these days was always full of noise. First Tremblay, he thought, now this. He wondered what other shocks awaited him.

“Papal infallibility covers doctrine. It does not extend to appointments.”

Paragraph thirty-nine of the Apostolic Constitution is quite specific: ‘Should any cardinal-electors arrive re integra, that is, before the new pastor of the Church has been elected, they shall be allowed to take part in the election at the stage which it has reached.’ That man is legally a cardinal.”

The sermon was headed Pro eligendo Romano pontifice—“For the election of a Roman pontiff”—and its purpose, in accordance with tradition, was to set out the qualities that would be required of the new Pope.

In 1958, Cardinal Antonio Bacci had delivered a liberal’s description of the perfect pontiff (May the new Vicar of Christ form a bridge between all levels of society, between all nations…) that was virtually a word-portrait of Cardinal Roncalli of Venice, who duly became Pope John XXIII.

Five years later, the conservatives tried the same tactic in a homily by Monsignor Amleto Tondini (Doubt should be cast on the enthusiastic applause received by the “Pope of peace”), but it only succeeded in provoking such a backlash among the moderates, who thought it i...

Quiet fell over the room, apart from the elderly Archbishop Emeritus of Caracas, who continued to talk loudly until his companion waved at him to be quiet and pointed at Lomeli. The Venezuelan peered around and fiddled with his hearing aid.

He led the Filipino over towards his fellow countrymen, Cardinal Mendoza and Cardinal Ramos, the archbishops of Manila and Cotabato respectively.

Eight African cardinals were seated at the neighbouring table. The cardinal who had spoken, the elderly Archbishop Emeritus of Kinshasa, Beaufret Muamba, stood, beckoned Benítez to him, and clasped him to his chest.