Conclave

by Robert Harris

“All I can say, Your Eminence, is that I hope you take better care of the Keys of St. Peter than you do of the keys to your room!”

The pangs of hunger would serve as a useful mortification of the flesh, a constant tiny reminder throughout the first round of voting of the vast agony of Christ’s sacrifice.

“I implore you even at this late hour to listen to what St. Paul actually says: that we need unity in our faith and in our knowledge of Christ in order not to be children ‘tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine.’

“This is a boat in a storm he is talking about, my brothers. This is the Barque of St. Peter, our Holy Catholic Church, which, as never before in its history, is ‘at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit.’ The winds and the waves our ship is battling go by many different names—atheism, nationalism, agnosticism, Marxism, liberalism, individualism, feminism, capitalism—but every one of these ‘isms’ seeks to divert us from our true course.

“Your task, cardinal-electors, is to choose a new captain who will ignore the doubters among us and hold the rudder fast. Every day, some new ‘ism’ arises. But not all ideas are of equal value. Not every opinion can be given due weight. Once we succumb to ‘the dictatorship of relativism,’ as it has been properly called, and attempt to survive by accommodating ourselves to every passing sect and fad of modernism, our ship is lost.

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

Now i agree with Cardinal Scavizzi more than Cardnal Lomeli about doubtness lol

“Let us pray to God that the Holy Spirit enters these deliberations and directs you to a pastor who will put an end to the drifting of recent times—a pastor who will guide us once again to knowledge of Christ, to His love and to true joy. Amen.”

Conclave. From the Latin, con clavis: “with a key.” Since the thirteenth century, this was how the Church had ensured its cardinals would come to a decision. They would not be released from the chapel, except for meals and to sleep, until they had chosen a Pope.

I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one who before God I think should be elected.

The three men who would count the ballots had been chosen by lot the previous week. They were the Archbishop of Vilnius, Cardinal Lukša; the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Mercurio; and the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Newby.

He shielded his ballot paper with his arm, like a candidate in an examination who doesn’t want his answer to be seen by his neighbour, and wrote in capital letters: BELLINI. He folded it, stood, held it aloft and walked to the altar.

Another man who had faith in his own abilities was Adeyemi, who swore the oath with his trademark boom. He had made his name as Archbishop of Lagos when the Holy Father had first toured Africa: he had organised a Mass attended by a congregation of more than four million. The Pope had joked in his homily that Joshua Adeyemi was the only man in the Church who could have conducted the service without the need for amplification.

Bill Rudgard, the Junior Cardinal-Deacon—had

Tedesco 22 Adeyemi 19 Bellini 18 Tremblay 16 Lomeli 5 Others 38

Hadn’t Sabbadin, his campaign manager, predicted at dinner that he was certain to be in the lead after the first ballot, with up to twenty-five votes, and that Tedesco would receive no more than fifteen? Yet Bellini had come in third, behind Adeyemi—no one had envisaged that—and even Tremblay was only two votes behind him.

One thing was certain, Lomeli concluded: no candidate was anywhere near the seventy-nine votes it would take to win the election.

Under the rules they were obliged to keep on balloting until they found a candidate who could command a two-thirds majority, if necessary for as many as thirty ballots, extending over twelve days. Only at the end of that time would they be permitted to use a different system, whereby a simple majority would be sufficient to elect a new Pope.

Three cardinals, known as revisers, also chosen by ballot before the Conclave, were required to recount the tallies. The rules were centuries old and indicated how little the Fathers of the Church had trusted one another: it would require a conspiracy of at least six men to rig the election.

Lomeli laughed. “I would be delighted if there was a plan—secret or otherwise! But I sense that the only one with a plan for this Conclave is God, and so far He seems to be determined to keep it to Himself.”

And thank you, O Lord, for speaking to us through the voting in the Conclave, and I pray that soon You will give us the wisdom to understand what it is You are trying to say.

Although in theory the papal constitution forbade the cardinal-electors from entering into “any form of pact, agreement, promise or commitment” on pain of excommunication, this had now become an election, and hence a matter of arithmetic: who could get to seventy-nine votes?

The nuns who were serving the food could hardly help overhearing the state of play, and afterwards several of them were to prove useful sources for reporters trying to piece together the inside story of the Conclave: one even preserved a napkin on which a cardinal had jotted the voting figures of the first-round leaders.

For example, when the cardinals rose for coffee and the Patriarch of Lisbon, Rui Brandão D’Cruz, went out into the enclosed courtyard to smoke his evening cigar, Lomeli noticed how Tremblay immediately hurried after him, presumably to canvass his support.

If he were a white man, he 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.

The double standard of leftist, especially white liberals

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.”

“Forgive me, Dean, but if we do that, won’t we simply make you look like a paragon of modesty? If one was being Machiavellian about it, one could almost say it was a clever move to swing votes.”

“No, that’s kind of you, but I fret too much, and we cannot have a Pope who frets. You will have to be careful, though, Jacopo. I’m serious: if my position weakens further, much of my support will probably switch to you.”

What a hypocrite.

“Think about it. Our fellow countrymen are desperate to have an Italian Pope, but at the same time most of them can’t abide the thought of Tedesco. If I fade, that leaves you as the only viable candidate for them to rally behind.”

There's no way the liberal cardinals dislike traditional cardinals like this in real Papal Conclave right??

“Adeyemi? A man who has more or less said that all homosexuals should be sent to prison in this world and to hell in the next? He is not the answer to anything!”

No traditionalist clergy ever made an official statement as far as i'm aware of, in real life. This book just likes to depict the Traditionalists as the villain (W for Tedesco anyway; though i have to disagree with Adeyemi's opinion on this)

“Ah, I wish you had! He was strange. Unreachable. Secretive. I believe he sensed his death was approaching and his mind was full of curious ideas. I feel his presence very strongly, don’t you?”

And then, to Lomeli’s surprise, Bellini kissed him lightly on either cheek before turning away and continuing on up the staircase.

Is this common in clergy in their daily life??

Could it really be true that the Holy Father had known the Filipino well enough, and trusted him enough, to criticise his own Secretary of State? Yet the remark had the ring of authenticity. “Brilliant but neurotic”: he could almost hear the old man saying it.

As for women, and everything to do with them, never a word, never; it was as if there were no women in the world. This absolute silence, even between close friends, about everything to do with women was one of the most profound and lasting lessons of my early years in the priesthood.

The chasm between the figure he appeared to be and the man he knew he was had never seemed so wide.

When Lomeli queued to receive Communion and knelt before the cardinal, the sacrilegious thought occurred to him that just this one service might have been worth three or four votes to the Canadian.

Is it mortal sin to have such thoughts?

He presumed they were under orders not to speak: when one nun poured coffee for Adeyemi, he did not even turn to look at her. Yet the late Holy Father used to make a point of eating with a group of these sisters at least once a week—another manifestation of his humility that made the Curia mutter with disapproval.

From here he had a view across the trees to the low hills of Rome, grey in the pale November light. To think that whoever was elected Pope would never be able to wander around the city at will, could never browse in a bookstore or sit outside a café, but would remain a prisoner here!

Even Ratzinger, who resigned, could not escape but ended his days cooped up in a converted convent in the gardens, a ghostly presence. Lomeli prayed yet again that he might be spared such a fate.

Lomeli sensed that he was expected to speak first. But he had learnt long ago not to babble into a silence. He did not wish to refer to what he had seen, had no desire to be the keeper of anyone’s conscience except his own.

We are all tested in our faith, Dean. We all lapse. But the Christian faith is above all a message of forgiveness. I believe that was the crux of what you were saying?”

“Exactly. Tolerance. I trust that when this election is over, your moderating voice will be heard in the very highest counsels of the Church. It certainly will be if I have anything to do with it. The very highest counsels,” he repeated with heavy emphasis. “I hope you understand what I’m saying. Will you excuse me, Dean?”

He clamped his arms around the shoulders of both and hugged them to him, 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.

“O Father, so that we may guide and watch over Your Church, give to us, Your servants, the blessings of intelligence, truth and peace, so that we may strive to know Your will, and serve You with total dedication. For Christ our Lord…”

Amen

In 1978, Karol Wojtyła brought a Marxist journal into the Conclave that elected him Pope, and sat reading it calmly during the long hours it took for a total of eight ballots to be cast. However, as Pope John Paul II, he did not accord the same distraction to his successors. All electors were forbidden by his revised rules of 1996 to bring any reading material into the Sistine Chapel. A Bible was placed on the desk in front of every cardinal so that they could consult the Scriptures for inspiration. Their sole task was to meditate on the choice before them.

“The first vote cast in the second ballot is for Cardinal Lomeli.”

Adeyemi 35 Tedesco 29 Bellini 19 Tremblay 18 Lomeli 9 Others 8

Did the author really base Adeyemi from Cardinal Sarah??? No way

Thus, out of the fog of human ambition, did the will of God begin to emerge.

It was only as he checked his calculations for a second time that Lomeli noticed another small surprise—a footnote, as it were—that he had missed in his concentration on the main story. Benítez had also increased his support, from one vote to two.

Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, Scozzazi,

Opposite him, Adeyemi was staring straight ahead, so utterly immobile he might have been a figure carved in ebony, oblivious to the glances he was attracting from all sides of the Sistine.

I wish to be calm and collected and reserved like Cardinal Adeyemi