The riformisti had no obvious candidate: Cardinal Martini was eighty and had Parkinson’s disease; he walked with a stick, and in any case, had excluded himself. The reformers were relying—fatefully, it turned out—on the pre-conclave process for a candidate to emerge. In contrast, the curial bloc of cardinals had for some time been putting forward Cardinal Ratzinger. Even though few remembered the last one, the curiali knew how a conclave worked—that what counted in a conclave was early momentum, how the votes traveled to whomever had a strong showing fresh off the starting block—and they worked hard in the days before the conclave so that Ratzinger could count on a good share of the first vote.
Promoting the Ratzinger candidacy among the English- and German-speaking cardinals was Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, while the two Latin-American curial cardinals, Alfonso López Trujillo and Jorge Medina Estévez, buttonholed Spanish and Portuguese speakers as they arrived in Rome. A Brazilian cardinal who spoke anonymously to O Globo later that year described how not long after putting down their suitcases, the two Latin-American curiali had invited them to meetings and dinners. “In those conversations they made it clear that they had consulted Ratzinger and he had given a green light for the campaign.” The rigoristi argued persuasively that Ratzinger was a towering theologian, the only one capable of carrying forward John Paul II’s legacy, and whose experience in the Curia meant he could take on the problems there, too.27
In the run-up to the conclave, the Italian newspapers were claiming that Ratzinger could count on perhaps forty votes. There was a long list of other potential papabili, but the main speculation was that the next pope would be a Latin-American. Bergoglio was included in the lists, but mostly reporters pointed to the mediagenic Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, or the Franciscan, Claudio Hummes of São Paolo, Brazil, who had higher profiles. But the speculation was just that. Apart from López Trujillo and Medina Estévez on behalf of Ratzinger, the Latin-American cardinals were neither organizing nor being organized, Bergoglio least of all. He refused all dinner invitations, gave no interviews, and stayed over quietly, as ever, at the Via della Scrofa, dining with friends rather than other cardinals.
Bergoglio had with him Father Marcó to refuse interviews on his behalf and to deal with any stories arising out of events in Buenos Aires. One of those stories was aimed at Bergoglio in Rome. Three days before the conclave, a human-rights lawyer filed a complaint in a Buenos Aires court claiming that Bergoglio had been complicit in the kidnapping of Yorio and Jalics. The lawsuit—which Marcó told the press was an “old calumny”—went nowhere legally, but it created a news story, as was surely intended, and the impression, on the eve of the voting, that Bergoglio had a past that would be raked over if he became pope.
The lawsuit was based on the claims in El Silencio, a book published in February that year by Horacio Verbitsky, the former montonero who had become a close ally of Kirchner’s. The book, which was about the alleged complicity of the Church in the dirty war, claimed in one chapter to have new evidence to support the old Emilio Mignone claim about Bergoglio’s actions over Yorio and Jalics.
Verbitsky in the book said he had kept an open mind about Bergoglio, conscious that the founders of his human-rights organization CELS, Mignone and Alicia Oliveira, had been at odds over the archbishop’s dirty war record; and that in interviewing Bergoglio in 1999 he had found his version of events to have merit. But since then, Verbitsky wrote, he had stumbled on new evidence that led him to doubt the cardinal’s testimony. Before getting there, however, Verbitsky reviewed the old allegations, including that of the unnamed Jesuit accusing Bergoglio of wanting Yorio and Jalics out of the slum “and when they refused let the military know that they were no longer under his protection, and with that nudge and a wink had them arrested.” (Verbitsky did not identify the anonymous Jesuit as Juan Luis Moyano, nor mention that Moyano was in Peru at the time of the events he claimed to know about.)
When he finally pulled it out, Verbitsky’s smoking gun turned out to be a 1979 memorandum written by an immigration officer who had spoken to Bergoglio in connection with a passport application on behalf of Francisco Jalics, who had wanted to return to Argentina. According to the memo, Bergoglio told the officer that Jalics had been arrested for alleged guerrilla contacts, which led the officer to refuse Jalics a passport. This showed, Verbitsky triumphantly declared, that Bergoglio was Janus-faced, claiming to help someone while behind their backs undermining them—the same behavior he was accused of over Yorio and Jalics; the repetition of which, ipso facto, demonstrated the truth of Mignone’s account. Yet Verbitsky omitted to mention that it was Bergoglio himself who applied on Jalics’s behalf for the passport; that in Bergoglio’s application he had said nothing of Jalics’s arrest, but that the officer to whom he delivered the letter had asked him why Jalics had left the country in such a hurry. Bergoglio had had to give him the reason, but added emphatically that it wasn’t true, that Jalics had had absolutely nothing to with the guerrillas. The officer had, however, omitted from his memo that part of what Bergoglio told him.28
The Verbitsky claims were summarized in anonymous envelopes delivered to Spanish-speaking cardinals in Rome in the days before the conclave.
Two elements of this dirty-tricks campaign remain unclear. The first was who was behind it. The Argentine press cited Vatican sources in Rome following Francis’s election, claiming that it had been a Kirchner government sting, organized by Argentina’s ambassador to the Holy See, Juan Pablo Cafiero, with the collaboration of a friendly cardinal. (Cafiero strongly denied this.) The second question is what impact it had. Cardinals loathe outsiders—especially those with political interests—trying to influence the conclave, and the accusations (if the cardinals had time to trawl through them) are likely to have elicited sympathy rather than horror. One senior American cardinal said in 2013 that in 2005, “we all knew about the allegations, and we knew they weren’t true.”29
The cardinals moved into the new Vatican guesthouse, the Casa Santa Marta, on the evening of Sunday April 17, and the next morning concelebrated the pro eligendo papa Mass—a special liturgy “for the election of a Roman Pontiff”—in St. Peter’s. That afternoon, April 18, the 115 cardinals processed into the Sistine Chapel, which Bergoglio saw for the first time in his life. There they swore the oaths—to obey the procedures, and not to reveal details of the election—before the doors were closed on them and an enormous key turned in the lock: “conclave” comes from cum chiave, “with a key.” The first round of voting, or scrutiny, was at 5:30 p.m. Twenty-four hours later, on the first scrutiny of the afternoon of the next day, the fourth of the conclave, Joseph Ratzinger was elected Benedict XVI.
* * *
DESPITE the oath of confidentiality, a picture of the way the votes went emerged later from a diary kept by one of the cardinals, who felt the tallies should be part of the historical record. The account, which formed the basis of an Italian foreign affairs journal article in September 2005, has not been contradicted, and is accepted by most Vatican commentators as authentic, not least for little scenic details such as the patriarch of Lisbon, Cardinal José da Cruz Policarpo, popping out of the Santa Marta for a cigar.30
On the first vote on Monday evening, Ratzinger received forty-seven votes, followed by Bergoglio with ten and Martini with nine. There were a handful of others, including four for Sodano, three for Rodríguez de Maradiaga, and—according to the anonymous Brazilian cardinal—some for Hummes. But the real surprise was Bergoglio, whose support indicated that more than half of the eighteen Latin-American residential cardinals (that is, excluding the Latin-American curiali) had voted for him, and most of the rest for Rodríguez and Hummes.
The riformisti did the math. If Bergoglio—a Latin-American pastoral archbishop, a Jesuit like Martini, who shared the reformers’ concerns for collegiality—added Martini’s votes, as well as those for Rodríguez and Hummes, to his own, there could be a two-horse race, and a genuine choice.
&
nbsp; Back in the Santa Marta, they got to work. The diarist describes the president of the German bishops’ conference, Karl Lehmann, and Godfried Danneels, the archbishop of Brussels, as the leaders of “a significant squad of U.S. and Latin American cardinals, in addition to a couple of curial cardinals.” There were animated conversations at the table over supper, and in small groups of two or three meeting in the corridors and suites. The reformers’ strategy was to raise Bergoglio’s support to at least thirty-nine through an alliance of European and US reformers plus Latin-Americans who agreed on wanting a more collegial, pastoral church governance. That would leave Ratzinger unable to reach the necessary two-thirds majority of seventy-seven. Either his votes would travel to Bergoglio or, if the college stayed divided, another candidate would then emerge, as happened in the second conclave of 1978 that produced John Paul II.
The next morning there were two scrutinies. In the first, Ratzinger’s votes increased to sixty-five, and Bergoglio’s to thirty-five, with fifteen votes scattered elsewhere (Sodano’s four remained, but those for Martini, Rodríguez, and Hummes had gone to Bergoglio). By the second scrutiny, the reformers had done it: Ratzinger had reached seventy-two, five short of the two-thirds needed, but Bergoglio had hit forty, meaning that—assuming the Argentine cardinal’s support held—Ratzinger could not be elected. Both teams returned to the Santa Marta in some excitement.
Bergoglio at this point pulled the plug. What happened over lunch is not described by the diarist, but another source says Bergoglio begged the other cardinals “almost in tears” to vote for Ratzinger, whether by speaking to them individually or by making a general announcement is not clear.31 That afternoon, in the first scrutiny, Bergoglio dropped to twenty-six, and Ratzinger was elected with eighty-four votes.
Why had he been upset? The diarist says he went up to vote with an expression of suffering on his face, gazing up at Michelangelo’s Last Judgment “as if imploring, ‘don’t do this to me.’” Yet after the conclave, when a cardinal asked Bergoglio what name he would have taken had he been elected, he didn’t hesitate. “I would have taken the name John, after il papa buono [the ‘good pope,’ John XXIII] and I would have been totally inspired by him,” Bergoglio told Francesco Marchisano, the archpriest of St. Peter’s.32 To have pondered both name and program does not indicate a man unsure or afraid. Yet he had been upset. When he saw Father Marcó, he told him he had never needed prayers as much as that Tuesday morning. And back in Buenos Aires, he told a friend: “You’ll never guess what they did to me.”
One of his biographers suggests that Bergoglio stepped aside in order to avoid a prolonged conclave that would have indicated a Church divided. But this does not explain why Bergoglio was so perturbed. One commentator believes he was angry at being “used” by the progressive party, who had misread him: Bergoglio “was very much part of the pro-Ratzinger coalition” and “doubtless appalled by the whole exercise on his putative behalf,” claims George Weigel.33 But while this has truth to it—the reformers made a mistake in not seeking Bergoglio’s consent—its premise is false: Bergoglio esteemed and liked the future Benedict XVI, and thought he should be pope, but he was not part of any group or coalition, least of all the rigoristi. Equally, the reformers knew that Bergoglio wanted reform and collegiality, but he was not “of” that party the way the St. Gallen group was.
Indeed, his problem was that there were parties at all. What upset Bergoglio was that he was the focal point of a fracturing, one destined to polarize, as in the 1970s, into ideological blocs. It upset him at a purely psychological level, in the sense that overcoming this divide had been a major part of his life’s work. But what was more likely was that he had discerned the presence of the bad spirit. The conclave should be guided by the Spirit in the direction of unity and consensus; Bergoglio saw the 2005 conclave going in the opposite direction. “The evil spirit always divides, and divides Jesus,” as he told the Spanish bishops to whom he gave an Ignatian retreat in January 2006. “Thus it denies unity.”34 That is why he felt able, indeed obliged, to put a stop to what was happening. And it was why he was upset: not for himself, but for the Church. He had glimpsed the serpent’s tail in the Sistine Chapel.
He also believed he was not ready: more important, Latin America wasn’t. His Uruguayan philosopher friend, Alberto Methol Ferré, explained as much in an interview just days after John Paul II’s death. Latin America, as the oldest of the non-European Churches, had been moving from a “reflection Church” to a “source Church” that would in time invigorate the universal Church; but that process had been halted, even reversed, in the 1980s and 1990s. Until the continent’s bishops came together through the next CELAM General Conference—it had been thirteen years since the disaster of Santo Domingo—any pope elected from Latin America would represent only his nation’s reflection of the European Church.
Methol Ferré had been convinced that what was needed was a transitional European papacy, and that Cardinal Ratzinger “was the most suitable to be pope at this time.”35 On this point “their views coincided,” says the Uruguayan at that time in the Council for Laity, Guzmán Carriquiry, who knew both men well. As Pope Francis told journalists on the plane back from Rio: “I was so happy when he was elected pope.”
This explains why, when Bergoglio returned to Rome later that year, just after the publication of the cardinal’s secret diary, he was so upset by its picture of him as an anti-Ratzinger blocker or stalking horse. “He may have been seen as an alternative by some of those who voted for him, but he never—absolutely never!—wanted to be seen as an alternative to Ratzinger,” says Carriquiry, who saw him soon after he arrived. Bergoglio was annoyed enough to tell journalists he was “confused and a bit hurt” by “these indiscretions,” which he said had given a false picture. Giving anecdotes and facts about the conclave suggested that it was the men who were doing the deciding, he said, whereas “we were all conscious of being nothing but instruments, to serve divine providence in electing a proper successor for John Paul II. That is what happened.”36
He had returned to Rome for the October synod on the Eucharist, the first under Benedict XVI. The synod showed welcome signs of greater openness and genuine discussion, not least because of the death earlier that year of its controlling secretary general, Cardinal Schotte. The question of admitting to Communion practicing Catholics across the Western world who had entered second (civil) marriages emerged as a major topic in bishops’ speeches. One New Zealand delegate described it as a “eucharistic hunger” that could be compared to physical hunger. But like collegiality, the question of Communion for the remarried was too big an issue for the synod’s existing structure, and so the existing practice was simply reaffirmed, leaving many bishops frustrated. According to press leaks, of the 250 bishops, 50 did not vote for Proposition 40, which said that if a couple’s marriage could not be annulled, and “objective conditions render their cohabitation irreversible,” they could only receive the Eucharist if they were able to transform their relationship into a “loyal friendship.” Later, Cardinals Kasper and López Trujillo clashed through the media, the first claiming that the issue could not be considered closed, the second insisting that it was “neither disputed, nor disputable.”37
Bergoglio did not speak on that neuralgic topic, but meditated on the link between the Eucharist, Mary, and the pueblo fiel. Later, as Pope Francis, he would act on the conclusion he reached at that time: that the topic needed a more thorough treatment in a very different kind of synod, one with stronger powers, as part of a far-reaching collegial reform.
Shortly before the synod’s conclusion he was elected by the highest number of delegates’ votes (eighty) onto its council, to oversee the development of the synod’s conclusions. Back in Argentina the following month, he was elected president of the bishops’ conference.
The year 2005 had been rich in votes, not all of them welcome.
* * *
THE Ignatian retreat Bergoglio gave to Spanish bishops in Janu
ary 2006 showed that, nearly fifteen years after moving away from the Society of Jesus, he had not lost his touch as a Jesuit spiritual director. The meditations drew on some of his old retreats and writings, supplemented by quotes from Cardinal Martini—a controversial figure to some in the Spanish hierarchy—as well as his favorite Church document, Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi. But what made the meditations especially rich was the application of Saint Ignatius’s discernment rules to the experience of running a major diocese. The retreat, which tackled a huge range of lights and shadows in the modern Church, displayed Bergoglio’s formidable depth of vision.
Addressing fellow bishops in a European nation where the Church felt beleaguered by a hostile state and a sharp drop in religious practice, he warned them against seeing faith in terms of success and failure, of progress and decline, and so missing something deeper. In this mind-set of desolation, he told them, “we take bitter note of the weakening of the faith, declining Mass attendance, and we compare today with the good old days.” He went on:
We forget that the Christian life is a continual battle against the seductive power of idols, against Satan and his effort to lead man to unbelief, to despair, to moral and physical suicide. We forget that the Christian road is measured not only by the distance traveled, but also by the magnitude of the battle, by the difficulties encountered, by the obstacles overcome, and by the ferocity of the assaults that have been repulsed.
That is why arriving at a sober assessment of the faith in our day is so complicated. Sociological statistics are not sufficient. It is not enough to count the number of Christians, the number who practice, etc. One also has to consider the sometimes dramatic battles that Christians must wage every day in order to continue believing and acting according to the Gospel.38
The Great Reformer Page 37
