The Church was now in sede vacante, governed, in the absence of a pope, by the college of cardinals. They began meeting on March 4 for their daily general congregations in the synod hall, while workmen installed a false floor and jamming devices in the Sistine Chapel in preparation for the conclave. Most cardinals turned up in limousines to escape the media throng, but Bergoglio walked each day to the Vatican in his black raincoat, unrecognized.
There were 151 cardinals once the last had arrived. Of these, 115 were under eighty and eligible to vote, the same number as in 2005. But this conclave differed from that one in vital respects. There were no funeral arrangements to soak up the discussion time, and the bigwigs in the college—the dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and the chamberlain, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone—were too associated with Vatican scandals to be papabili. This time, too, the cardinals knew each other much better, for Benedict XVI had brought them together five times in his eight-year papacy, and had included a daylong meeting before each consistory.
The general congregations took place behind closed doors, but between Father Lombardi’s daily briefings, the US cardinals’ press conferences up at the Pontifical North American College (known as the NAC), as well as leaks by translators in the pay of Italian newspapers, it was broadly known that Vatican corruption and dysfunction were a common thread in the speeches. Three cardinals appointed months before by Pope Benedict to probe the rot were on hand to brief their confrères on their three-hundred-page confidential report, which would be on the next pope’s desk.
The American cardinals were especially keen to discuss the dysfunction, for they had had the benefit over the previous months of an insider briefing. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (no relation to the Vatican TV director), the Holy See’s ambassador to Washington, DC, had warned Benedict XVI that the secretariat of state had named him to the post in October 2011 to get him out of Rome, after he had uncovered corruption in the awarding of contracts that cost the Holy See millions of euros. Deeply shocked by what they had learned from Viganò, the US cardinals—the American Church, together with the German, is a key Vatican funder—were determined that the next pope would bring with him a big broom. As the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, puts it in his conclave memoir: “We knew that the world awaited the election of a pontiff who might usher in some significant reforms that begged for implementation within the Church.”4
Curial dysfunction was more than financial corruption. It was also about petty factionalism, the way different patronage networks—the Italians use the English word lobby—led to some being promoted beyond their abilities and others with the right qualifications being frozen out. The so-called gay lobby was one of these: a group of lay people, and some priests, who used blackmail and preferment to protect and advance its interests. The four thousand lay people and one thousand priests in the Curia were mostly competent and good, and many were exceptionally dedicated, but they battled with a culture of entitlement in which middle-level bureaucrats expected jobs for life, and competence was less important than who you knew. What was needed was wholesale culture change—a new ethos of service to the pope’s mission.
There was much talk of reform of governance—the need for a pope who was accessible, informed, and free to act—and for fluid contact between Rome and the local Church. Collegiality had been “a constant theme in these discussions,” Father Lombardi told journalists on March 9. “We were all pretty certain that there would be dramatic changes and a new way of looking at the Curia, with more collegiality,” recalls the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Seán O’Malley.5 The diagnosis of the St. Gallen group in the early 2000s was now the plat du jour. All could agree that Vatican dysfunction was a serious impediment to evangelization, and that Roman centralism and lack of accountability were major causes of the dysfunction. Some spoke of reforming the synod of bishops so it could manage real change; others wanted to discuss the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the so-called Vatican Bank, and the mysterious firing of its reforming president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. All agreed on the need for the Curia to live less for itself and to better serve the local Church. At least one cardinal suggested that the task of governing the universal Church was simply too great for one man and that the next pope needed a council of cardinal advisers from outside Rome to assist him.
Among the most eloquent on this topic was Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, a Vatican canon lawyer who had been an auxiliary bishop under Cardinal Martini in Milan. He spoke of the need for restructuring the Curia, ensuring contact between heads of the departments and the pope, and between local dioceses and Rome. The implosion of the Vatican had turned even rigoristi into reformists. The energetically conservative Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, for example, was shocked to discover curial appointments of people without proper technical knowledge and the constant leaking of confidential information to the media. In the general congregations, he was among the most vigorous advocates of curial reform and the need for the pope to consult outside Rome. The only defenders of the status quo, in fact, were curial cardinals convinced that they alone were qualified to treat the Vatican’s malaise.6
Normally, with the assistance of the Italian diocesan cardinals, the curiali stitched up the conclave in advance, but this time needle and thread had slipped from their hands. The curiali were divided between pro-Bertone and pro-Sodano factions, although both wanted to stop Cardinal Angelo Scola, the brilliant but sulfurous archbishop of Milan, who was seen by many outside Italy as the natural successor to Benedict XVI, but opposed by heads of major Italian dioceses. An attempt at organizing an alternative to Scola came from the curial faction around the powerful former secretary of state and now dean of the college of cardinals, Angelo Sodano, who was too old to vote but remained the Curia’s kingmaker. His group’s plan was to promote the cardinal archbishop of São Paolo, Brazil, Odilo Scherer, a former Vatican official they saw as pliant. The idea was that, as pope, Scherer would appoint the Argentine curial official Leonardo Sandri, Sodano’s former number two, as secretary of state, thus securing the status quo ante. By bringing in an outsider to govern, they believed they could restore the insiders to power. But the plan was neutered by being exposed in the press even before the congregations began, contributing to the generalized anti-Italian feeling in the college, which had spread even to the Italians.7
Spotting their moment, the initiative was now seized by the European reformists who in 2005 had pushed for Bergoglio. Some of them, like Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, were too old to vote in the conclave; others—including Walter Kasper (who was just under eighty when the papal see fell vacant), Godfried Danneels, and Karl Lehmann—were electors. They had learned their lessons from 2005. They first secured Bergoglio’s assent. Asked if he was willing, he said that he believed that at this time of crisis for the Church no cardinal could refuse if asked. (Murphy-O’Connor knowingly warned him to “be careful,” that it was his turn now, and was told: capisco, “I understand.”) Then they got to work, touring the cardinals’ dinners to promote their man, arguing that his age—seventy-six—should no longer be considered an obstacle, given that popes could resign. Having understood, from 2005, the dynamics of a conclave, they knew that votes traveled to those who made a strong showing out of the gate. Their objective was to secure at least twenty-five votes for Bergoglio on the first ballot. An ancient Italian cardinal kept the tally of how many votes they could rely on before the conclave started.
Team Bergoglio could count on the bulk of the nineteen-strong Latin-American cardinals, who since Aparecida regarded the Argentine cardinal as their leader. But they needed a solid number of Europeans, who made up more than half of the electors. As well as reformists like themselves—a number of the Germans, French, and Central Europeans came into this category—they could count on some of the Spanish cardinals who fondly remembered Bergoglio’s 2006 retreat. The Spanish cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, archpriest of St. Mary Major in Rome and a former nuncio in Latin America, was vig
orous in canvassing on Bergoglio’s behalf among the Iberian bloc. European support was also helped by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, one of Ratzinger’s main backers in 2005, and by Cardinal André Vingt-Trois of Paris, both of whom were pro-Bergoglio going into the conclave, if not before.
There were eleven African and ten Asian cardinals. For the ones from historically English-speaking nations, the British cardinal, Murphy-O’Connor, was a reference point, and key to bringing them onside. Bergoglio was at one stage approached by the African cardinals’ kingmaker, Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa, Congo, who inquired about his lung. Bergoglio told him he had been operated on in the 1950s and that it had functioned pretty well ever since.8
The North Americans—eleven cardinals from the United States and three from Canada—were the largest group outside Europe and Latin America, and crucial to win over. They began to consider Bergoglio only after March 5, at the end of the second day of the congregations, when a major dinner was held in the Red Room of the Pontifical North American College (NAC), with Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster and Pell of Sydney among the guests.
“The American cardinals were quite divided about where to go,” recalls Murphy-O’Connor. Their kingmaker was the archbishop of Chicago, Francis George, who was trying to choose between Scola and the other high-caliber papabile, the Canadian head of the bishops’ congregation, Cardinal Marc Ouellet. Murphy-O’Connor threw Bergoglio’s name into the ring, but it didn’t catch fire that night. Cardinal O’Malley of Boston (to whom Bergoglio had given a CD of the Argentine Mass, the Misa Criolla, when they spent time together in Buenos Aires in 2012) was in the “pro” camp. But for the other Americans he was an unknown quantity. Cardinal George in particular was worried about Bergoglio’s age. “The question is, ‘Does he still have vigor?’” he wondered.9
The following day, Wednesday, March 6, O’Malley of Boston and Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston told journalists at the NAC press briefing that the cardinals were not ready to set a conclave date and needed more time to discern what and whom the Church needed. That turned out to be their last briefing until after the conclave: at the congregations that afternoon it was agreed that the US cardinals should cease their daily press conferences, to enable a more private discussion. They were furious. They had been scrupulous in respecting the confidentiality of the discussions and saw the global media spotlight as a heaven-sent opportunity to speak not just to Catholics back home but to evangelize wider American society. A number of the cardinals, especially Dolan of New York, felt they were being scapegoated by the curiali for the indiscretions of the Italian cardinals (or translators).
The result of the ban was that the leaks—paid and partial—from the general congregations to the Italian vaticanisti came to dominate the pre-conclave media discussion, producing an echo chamber that exaggerated the significance of intra-curial and intra-Italian tensions. Dependent now on the Italian press for their pre-conclave insights, the world’s media reported that it was shaping up to be a Byzantine contest between different Italian and Vatican factions. For this reason, and because the organizers of his campaign stayed carefully below the radar, the Bergoglio bandwagon that began to roll during the week of the congregations went undetected by the media, and to this day most vaticanisti believe there was no organized pre-conclave effort to get Bergoglio elected. Not for the first time, the Argentine would appear to come out of nowhere, like a gaucho galloping in from the pampa at first light.10
* * *
BERGOGLIO was a once-in-a-generation combination of two qualities seldom found together: he had the political genius of a charismatic leader and the prophetic holiness of a desert saint. When he rose to speak at the general congregations on the morning of March 7, both were in play. In a pithy but powerful address, he managed to freeze-frame the moment the Church was in and offer both diagnosis and cure.
He spoke for barely three and a half minutes, just about the only time in that week of speeches that a cardinal used less than his allotted five minutes. Not much longer than the Gettysburg address—363 words in Spanish, compared to Lincoln’s 271 in English—and comparable in its simplicity and lyrical quality, his remarks reminded his listeners what they were there for, and, in a larger sense, who they were. His speech created a new narrative, or rescued one that had gotten buried. In the fog of endless interventions that week theorizing and analyzing, Bergoglio’s call to action rang out clear and strong, like the summons of a monastery bell across a field.
There would have been no record of this papal Gettysburg had Cardinal Jaime Ortega of Havana not afterward asked Bergoglio for a copy. The Argentine had no speech to copy—he had spoken in Italian from notes—but later wrote it out in Spanish with a fountain pen, handing it to Ortega the next morning. After Francis was elected, Ortega had a PDF scan of it uploaded onto the Havana diocesan website, which is how the world found out about it.11
Se hizo referencia a la evangelización … “Reference has been made to evangelization,” Bergoglio began. “This is the Church’s reason for being: Pope Paul VI speaks of ‘the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.’ It is Jesus Christ himself who, from within, impels us.” Evangelizing, he said,
implies in the Church the parrhesia [apostolic courage] to come out from itself. The Church is called to come out from itself and to go to the peripheries, not just the geographical but also the existential peripheries: those of the mystery of sin, of suffering, of injustice, of ignorance and lack of religion, those of thought and those of every kind of misery.
When the Church did not do this, he warned, “it becomes self-referential and gets sick: the bent-over woman in the Gospel (Luke 13:11) comes to mind.” Now he added his diagnosis of what had gone wrong in the Church, deploying an insight he had shared only a couple of months earlier in the Caritas retreat in Buenos Aires:
The evils that, over time, appear in Church institutions have their root in self-referentiality, a kind of theological narcissism. In the book of Revelation, Jesus says that he is at the door and calling, and evidently the text refers to him standing outside the door and knocking to be let in. But I sometimes think that Jesus is knocking from the inside, for us to let him out. The self-referential Church presumes to keep Jesus Christ for itself and not to let him out.
Without being aware of it, he went on, the Church becomes self-referential when it comes to believe it has its own light, and ceases to be the mysterium lunae, the “mystery of the moon.” The phrase was used by the early-church fathers to describe how, just as the moon is lackluster, lacking light of its own, but at night shines brightly as it reflects that of the sun, so the Church has no other purpose but to reflect Christ. When it ceases to do so, and tries to live from its own light, Bergoglio went on, it falls into “spiritual worldliness,” which, according to the theologian Henri de Lubac, he said, “is the worst evil that can befall the Church.”
He went on to distill the choice that the Church faced: on the one hand, an evangelizing Church that comes out from itself, devoutly listening to and faithfully proclaiming the Word of God, or “the worldly Church that lives in itself, of itself, for itself.” This, he said, “should give rise to the possible changes and reforms that have to be carried out for the salvation of souls.” He concluded:
Thinking of the next pope: he should be a man who, through the contemplation of Jesus Christ, from the adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out from itself toward the existential peripheries, and helps her to be the fruitful mother who lives from “the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.”
It was not the accepted practice to clap, but the stillness that followed was louder than applause. Cardinal Schönborn turned to a neighbor and said, “That’s what we need.” Cardinal Ortega described it as “magisterial, illuminating, committed, and true.” It was enough to swing Cardinal George, who told Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor that he got it now—he understood what they had meant about him. Bergoglio had given the cardinals a way forward: a
reform that ran deeper than just ridding the Curia of corruption or improving governance, one that would recall the Church to its purpose and the source of its life. That afternoon, the cardinals voted to enter the conclave the following Tuesday, March 12. Leaving the synod hall, Cardinal George’s beaming expression said it all. “We’re ready!” he told journalists.
Over the weekend, Bergoglio put on his invisibility cloak. While the frontrunner papabili—Scola, Scherer, and Ouellet—celebrated Sunday Mass at their media-mobbed titular churches, Bergoglio stayed away from St. Robert Bellarmine, preferring to lunch quietly with the ninety-two-year-old sister of his old friend, the former nuncio in Argentina, Archbishop Ubaldo Calabresi, who had died in 2004. At some point he also bumped into the emeritus archbishop of San Francisco outside a coffee shop. Archbishop John Quinn’s famous 1999 call for collegiality, The Reform of the Papacy, was a key text for the reformers—and for the Argentine cardinal. “I’ve read your book and I’m hoping what it proposes will be implemented,” Bergoglio told him.12
He knew by this time he was molto papabile and felt the weight of it. When he bumped into the Canadian priest and TV producer Father Tom Rosica in the Piazza Navona, Bergoglio grasped his hands and asked him to pray for him. “Are you nervous?” Rosica asked. “A little bit,” he answered. But when Gianni Valente and Stefania Falasca, Catholic journalists who were old friends, came by the Domus that evening, they found him serene and relaxed. “I’m sleeping like a baby,” he told them.13
The next morning, Tuesday, March 12, the cardinals moved into the 120-room Vatican guesthouse, the Casa Santa Marta, in readiness for the opening of the conclave that afternoon. The cardinals were relieved of their cell phones and laptops, and had their bags X-rayed. The windows were shuttered and mobile signals jammed.
The Great Reformer Page 46