The Vatican was at that time imploding. As Bergoglio traveled to Rome for the February 2012 consistory to create twenty-two new cardinals (most of whom were curiali), the headlines were full of what became known as the Vatileaks scandal. It had begun in January with the airing of an Italian TV documentary, and would reach new depths in May with the publication of documents copied from the pope’s desk by Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele. The sensational fact of the leaks themselves—not to mention the image they conjured of an ineffectual pope sitting powerlessly atop a Vatican riven by Borgia-style factionalism and rivalry—eclipsed the reporting of their content. What the letters showed was that many believed Benedict XVI’s attempts to reform the Curia (especially the scandal-dogged Vatican Bank) and clean up corruption were being endlessly blocked by powerful factions within the Vatican, as well as by his secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone. The letters also revealed mounting frustration at the way Benedict XVI, an increasingly remote and inaccessible governor, was being kept in the dark about what was going on under his nose. Gabriele had acted out of frustration: his purpose had not been to harm the pope but to sound the alarm, to show the world what was happening and so force action. The frustration behind Gabriele’s desperate action was widely shared.48
There was a sense in Rome of an era coming to an end. Diplomats accredited to the Holy See compared themselves to the final ambassadors to the Republic of Venice just before its collapse in 1797. Yet if Bergoglio saw this, he was giving nothing away. In an interview with the vaticanista Andrea Tornielli, Bergoglio said that the Church was his mother, and that he should look at its faults as he would look at his own mother’s, preferring to remember the good and beautiful things she had done for him rather than her failings. He took the same line when asked about the Vatican Curia, acknowledging that it had its faults but that most people who worked in it were good and holy. Although he spoke against spiritual worldliness and vanity, nothing in his reply suggested that he believed the Vatican needed reform, or what that might look like. If anything, he went overboard the other way, blaming the media for focusing only on scandal and dirt, which made him sound like a member of the Vatican old guard whose reaction to any exposure of impropriety was to blame the messenger.49
In Benedict XVI’s speech to the cardinals in February 2012 there was little to suggest that resignation was on his mind. He asked for their prayers “that I may continually offer to the People of God the witness of sound doctrine and guide the holy Church with a firm and humble hand.” But the following month, at the end of a fleeting trip to Mexico and Cuba, he realized that he could not go on. He had stumbled on the steps of the cathedral of León in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and that night he hit his head on the sink as he fumbled his way to the bathroom in his hotel in the city. The cut was not deep, and few knew because his skullcap covered it, but, as often happens to old people after such falls, it brought a sudden cognizance of his frailty.50
It was this, not Vatileaks—traumatic though it was for him—that led Benedict XVI to design a plan to stand down. Guarding the secret from all but a few of his very closest advisers—which, given the porosity of the Curia at the time, was no small feat—he agreed with them to a resignation date less than a year later: February 28, 2013, to be announced two weeks earlier. It would give time to allow a new pope to be installed in time for Easter 2013 and to go on to lead World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro the following July. Given Benedict XVI’s confidence in the Latin-American Church he had showed at Aparecida, there is something poignant about the old German pope, unsteady on his feet in Mexico, thinking ahead to Brazil, and deciding to be the first pope in six hundred years to stand down, possibly even guessing that the Argentine cardinal would be elected as his successor. Looking back, it is hard not to see in that decision an exhausted European Church standing back to allow the vigorous Church of Latin America to step forward.
Tired was precisely the word used of the Church in Europe by that other towering figure of twentieth-century Catholicism, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who died at age eighty-five on August 31. He had given an interview a few weeks earlier to a longtime Jesuit collaborator, with instructions that it be published after his death. When it was, between his death and his funeral, it provoked a slew of headlines. Martini began:
The Church is tired, in the Europe of well-being, and in America. Our culture is aged, our churches are large, our religious houses empty; the Church’s bureaucratic apparatus is growing, and our rites and vestments are pompous. Do such things really express what we are today? Well-being weighs us down. We find ourselves like the rich young man who went away sad when Jesus called him to become his disciple. I know that it’s not easy to leave everything behind. At least we could find people who are free and closer to their neighbors, as Bishop Romero was, and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador. Where, among us, are our heroes to inspire us?… How can the embers be freed from the ashes in order to rekindle the flame of love?… I advise the pope and the bishops to look for twelve people outside the lines and give them leadership positions, people who are close to the poorest and surrounded by young people and trying out new things. We need that comparison with people who are on fire so that the spirit can spread everywhere.51
While the more intellectual Italian cardinals did their best to explain away Martini’s message with a fug of elaborate theorizing about what he must have meant, others dismissed his uncomfortable words as the product of dementia. Yet thoughtful Catholics on all sides of the Church saw it as a mature light-and-shadows discernment, fearlessly expressed, which nailed a truth: something had died in the rich Church of the north, while the Church in the poor south exhibited an impressive vigor and prophetic power.52
One of the symptoms of the Church’s weariness identified by Martini was the way the sacraments had become a bar to inclusion rather than a means of healing. “The sacraments are not a disciplinary instrument, but a help for people at times on their journey, in life’s weaknesses,” Martini said, adding: “Are we bringing the sacraments to people who are in need of a new strength?”
It seems too much of a coincidence that just two days after that interview was published, Bergoglio issued a searing denunciation of priests who refused to baptize children born out of wedlock, calling their attitude “hypocritical Pharasaism.” He painted a picture of a woman who had refused the pressure to abort—“had the courage to bring that child into the world, when she could have thrown it away”—who “went from parish to parish, looking for someone to baptize him.” Those who refuse such women, he said, “are the hypocrites of today, those who clericalized the Church, keeping the people of God from salvation.” Bergoglio saw baptizing babies, however they came into the world, as part of what it meant to be pro-life.53
Borrowing an image from the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, Martini had spoken in his interview of how to kindle the fire of the Holy Spirit: “I see in the Church today so many ashes above the embers that I’m often assailed by a sense of powerlessness. How can the embers be freed from the ashes in order to rekindle the flame of love?” A few weeks later, Bergoglio used the same phrase in a retreat to Caritas. The Church, he said, “has to find the embers of faith, the embers of hope, the embers of love.” What kept the ashes cold was what he called “the disenchanted Church”—a self-sufficient Church of fear and spiritual worldliness that had Jesus tied up in the sacristy and failed to let him out. This Church, he said, was distant from the “enchantment” that the Holy Spirit brings to God’s holy faithful people caring tirelessly for others, “the enchantment that the Holy Spirit gives when it speaks in our hearts and prays for us, with those sighs too deep for words that Saint Paul talks about.”54
Bergoglio spoke in that retreat of the synod of bishops that had finished a few days earlier in Rome. Its topic was the “new evangelization,” a concept first formulated in Latin America and articulated by John Paul II in the 1980s, but which under Benedict XVI had increasingly been used to refer to mean rescuing Eu
rope from secularism. A new pontifical council had been created to develop the concept; the synod was intended to give the council ideas and strategies for implementing it.
Father Carlos Galli, Bergoglio’s theological assistant at Aparecida who was teaching in Rome in early 2012, was alarmed by the preparatory document, which suggested that the synod’s primary topic was the crisis of faith in Europe. He called Bergoglio, who urged him to make clear to the organizers that the new evangelization was about all five continents, not just Europe. The synod council confirmed that it was, yet comments by leading curial cardinals continued to reflect a Eurocentric assumption: that the European crisis of faith was the only really important question; that what was good or bad for the Church in Europe was good or bad for the universal Church; and that the strategy developed for the new evangelization in Europe would somehow also work for the Churches elsewhere. Both diagnosis (the problem is relativism and secularism) and the perceived cure (creative strategies are needed to engage contemporary Western culture, using the new ecclesial movements as a model) were very far from the Aparecida vision of a missionary Church focused on the margins. Father Galli realized with alarm that this Euroecentric model was what the Curia was projecting for the universal Church post-Benedict.55
The Latin-American bishops coordinated their inputs at a CELAM meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, in July 2012, and met again in Rome just after the start of the synod in October, which was attended by forty-nine cardinals, seventy-one archbishops, and 127 bishops from across the world. Almost every Latin-American bishop’s speech in those three weeks referred to Aparecida and its missionary, periphery-oriented evangelization. Their language and their outlook—hopeful, energetic, pastoral—struck a chord with other developing-world bishops at the synod, especially the Asians, who spoke of hope and joy, fruits of the Spirit, despite often severe persecutions and challenges. The Europeans and the Americans, in contrast, focused on declining congregations and the threat to the Church and religious freedom posed by an increasingly hostile culture. The cumulative effect of their speeches was depressing: tellingly, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney said they lacked “fire and energy,” while a frustrated Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York told reporters that “instead of whining about [secularism], or running from it, perhaps we should think about ways to better engage it.” Yet, as ever, the synod’s modus operandi allowed no chance of examining any of the Church’s norms that made that engagement harder.56
Father Galli, who was part of the Argentine delegation at the synod, said afterward that the most impressive contributions had been from the Church in poor countries: “The wind blew from the south,” was how he put it to Vatican Radio.
Down in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio saw it, too. The synod had exposed what Alberto Methol Ferré had foreseen: Europe was no longer the source Church. In Ignatian terms, the European Church was in desolation: turned in on itself, excessively focused on the shadows, with an exaggerated fear of perceived threats. Why else was it that an Asian or Middle East bishop whose flocks were deprived of basic liberties, or even being killed and bombed, could be so hopeful and joyful, yet bishops in a Church where nobody suffered that real kind of persecution spoke as if Christianity faced annihilation?
Bergoglio saw that the rich-world Church was blaming the culture, rather than itself, for its decline. But the first obstacle was not the culture, but the Church, which was no longer evangelizing. It had allowed the living water to go stale. It had become comfortable, worldly, self-sufficient, “disenchanted.” The problem was that “we have Jesus tied up in the Sacristy,” he told the Caritas retreatants. Citing a verse from the book of Revelation about Jesus standing at the gate, calling, Bergoglio said he had come to see that it wasn’t about Jesus knocking to be let in, but about Jesus being trapped on the inside, asking to be let out.
NINE
CONCLAVE
(2013)
STARING AT THE Vatican’s video link in her agency newsroom, Giovanna Chirri knew more than enough Latin to grasp what the pope was uttering in a deadpan voice: ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum.… He had even given the date it would happen: February 28. But could she run the story without official confirmation? The reporter dialed the director of the Vatican press office, Father Federico Lombardi, but after leaving a message decided she couldn’t wait: after all, she had heard the pope with her own ears. She dictated the story and called her editor. “The amazing thing is,” she began, but then broke off because Father Lombardi was on her cell phone. “You understood correctly,” he told her. “The pope is resigning.” Chirri’s scoop flashed out on the wires, sparking a media tsunami. “I collapsed on my desk,” she remembers. “And I cried.”1
February 11, 2013, was a Vatican holiday, marking the day in 1929 when the fifty-nine-year standoff between Italy and the Holy See over the occupation of the papal states was finally resolved. Benedict XVI had called a minor consistory, involving only the cardinals resident in Rome, officially to make the less-than-shattering announcement of three new saints. One of those in the Consistory Hall that day was a Scottish official in the secretariat of state, Archbishop Leo Cushley, who thought Benedict looked tired but otherwise well, and had no idea what was about to happen.
After Cardinal Angelo Amato read the list of the three beati, or “blesseds,” to be canonized, Pope Benedict, with his secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein close by, began to speak, reading as ever from a prepared text. Cushley’s Latin allowed him, too, to understand what the pope was saying—“I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine mystery”—and as it sank in he felt his stomach turn over. Something not seen for six hundred years, the voluntary resignation of a pope, was happening in front of his eyes.
It seemed to me that, in slow motion before me, an assistant television cameraman put his hand to his mouth in a cartoon-like gesture of astonishment, the monsignor sitting next to me started to sob quietly, Archbishop Gänswein’s shoulders seemed to drop. The cardinals leaned forward to make sure they understood precisely what was being said and I found myself checking that my jaw wasn’t dropping open. Then there was silence.2
In Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio praised the decision as a “revolutionary act” that had been carefully thought out in the presence of God. He spent the next fortnight making arrangements for a three-week absence before landing in Rome on an overnight flight on February 27, the day before Benedict XVI’s resignation took effect. He had been sent a first-class ticket by the Vatican but had changed it for coach class, asking for an emergency exit seat with more leg room because his sciatica troubled him on long journeys. The conclave date could not be fixed until the cardinals began their meetings, but most expected it to be around mid-March, with the new pope’s inauguration Mass a few days later. His return ticket was for March 23, to allow time to go over the homilies he had prepared for the Easter liturgies at the end of the month, some of which he had sent out to his evangelical and Jewish friends for comment. He had told the kiosk owner on the other side of the Plaza de Mayo, Daniel del Regno, that he would be back in twenty days and that he should keep delivering his La Nación in the meantime.
This time—unlike 2005, when he had Father Marcó with him—Bergoglio traveled alone. At Fiumicino Airport there were limousines scooping up the arriving cardinals, but after collecting his small suitcase from the carousel he took the train as usual to Termini station, then a bus to the Via della Scrofa where, for 85 euros ($110) a night (including meals), he checked into his room in the Domus Internationalis Paulus VI residence for clergy. As he unpacked in the seventeenth-century stone palazzo that was once a Jesuit college, on the other side of the Tiber Benedict XVI was giving his last general audience, telling tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square of the peace of mind his decision had brought him, how there had been times in his eight-year papacy when the water was rough and “the Lord seemed to sleep.”
The media in those weird, interim days were looking back over the highs and lows of Benedict’s papacy and ahead to who might now take the reins in the Church’s hour of need. The consensus among the vaticanisti—the dozens of permanently accredited Vatican journalists—was that the field of candidates was wide open, with no obvious front-runner. The lists of papabili—cardinals who fitted the unusual job description—ranged from three or four names to more than a dozen. None included Bergoglio, although the more knowledgeable fingered him as a kingmaker, a respected veteran whose opinions would influence his Latin-American peers. But he was off the papabile radar, partly because of his age—most cardinals were saying that the next pope should be in his late sixties or early seventies—and mostly because, Bergoglio hardly ever having been in Rome and invisible when he was, few knew much about him. Almost none of the four thousand journalists pouring in from sixty-five countries could have said much about the archbishop of Buenos Aires beyond his reputation for austerity and not giving interviews. The vaticanisti knew that he had been papabile in 2005 but believed his moment had passed. No runner-up at a conclave had ever been elected pope in a following one, and who had heard much of him since?
* * *
THE poignant drama of Benedict XVI’s departure the night of February 28 to the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo was told through the lens of the Vatican Television Center, whose recently appointed director was a Milanese former professor of cinema, Monsignor Dario Viganò. He arranged a stunningly elegaic mise-en-scène. After the white helicopter rose—ascended was the better word—above the Vatican, it twice encircled the dome of St. Peter’s before moving across the sky above Rome, throwing a shadow that slid over the city’s sun-kissed monuments. The images paid homage to the famous opening scene of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, when a statue of Jesus suspended from a helicopter transporting it to the Vatican seemed to bless the city’s houses with its shadow. Viganò, too, wanted to make this “a journey of blessing of the pope.”3
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