The Pope

by Anthony McCarten

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  The ceremony began with a private requiem mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica attended by members of the College of Cardinals and the nine Patriarchs of Oriental Catholic Churches, which, though celebrating different liturgies and having their own structures of government, are in full communion with the pope. His body was laid inside a coffin made from cypress wood, a centuries-old tradition that symbolizes his humanity among men, and would later be further enclosed in two caskets of lead and elm, signifying his death and dignity respectively. Inside the coffin a sealed document officially concluding his entire life’s work as pope was placed alongside “three bags, each containing one gold, silver, or copper coin for each year in Pope John Paul II’s reign,” before a white silk veil was placed over his face and hands. That ceremony concluded, the now-closed coffin was carried by twelve papal gentlemen—formerly known as secret chamberlains, these are laymen of noble Roman families who have served the popes for centuries as attendants of the papal household—and accompanied by the slow procession chanting hymns, who made their way into St. Peter’s Square to begin the public funeral.

  Many would come to believe that Cardinal Ratzinger’s conduct during this three-hour-long spectacle secured him the papacy. In his homily, amid continual interjections of applause from the crowds, he spoke at length in “human, not metaphysical, terms” of John Paul’s life from his childhood in Poland through to the end of his days in Rome. In his recollection of one of the pope’s last public appearances, the usually unemotional and ultraformal German’s voice cracked as he choked back tears. It was a magnificent and surprising performance to all who witnessed it.

  As the funeral drew to a close and the motorcades and helicopters of the dignitaries began to depart, the crowds were left chanting, “Santo subito!” (Sainthood now!) When exhaustion finally descended across the city, people too weary to attempt the journey home lay sleeping on the streets. Talk inside the Vatican and among the world’s media turned to who would succeed the pope now buried in the “bare earth” in the crypt below St. Peter’s Basilica, in accordance with his wishes.

  ISSUES FACING THE CARDINAL ELECTORS

  With just ten days to go before the 115 cardinals who had assembled in Rome for the funeral would be drawn into conclave to choose the next pope, discreet conversations to promote favored candidates—open campaigning is strictly forbidden—could begin in earnest. This was a delicate balancing act, and the process needed to be handled carefully to avoid the dreaded Pignedoli Principle. This respected theory, conceived by George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is named after Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, hotly tipped by the press to win the 1978 conclave that elected Pope John Paul II. The principle states that “a man’s chances of becoming pope decrease in proportion to the number of times he is described as papabile [the unofficial term used to refer to cardinals who are viewed as potential future popes] in the press.” Technically, all cardinals entering the conclave were eligible candidates for consideration; however, this veneer of simplicity shielded myriad theological and political outlooks that mean electing a successor to the Chair of St. Peter would be far from simple, just as it had been throughout the 729 years since the first conclave, in 1276.

  Following an impasse that resulted in an interregnum of almost three years, Pope Gregory X was elected in 1271 and set about developing a format to ease the process whereby cardinals were required to remain in conclave until a decision was reached and even have their food rations reduced to just bread, water, and wine after five days or more of deadlock. Unfortunately, despite efforts to implement these changes when Gregory died, on January 10, 1276, political power plays and infighting would see four popes in as many years after his death and three further interregnums lasting more than two years, in 1292–94, 1314–16, and 1415–17. Centuries would go by until conclaves ceased to last longer than a week, with the election of Pope Pius VIII in 1831. All meetings bar one were held in Rome—which perhaps influenced the Italians’ complete dominance in the role from 1523 until the election of Polish John Paul II in 1978—and had a strictly European result before Pope Francis’s succession in 2013.

  The warmth and affection for John Paul displayed by the millions of mourners at his funeral could almost mislead one to believe that the Catholic Church was in better shape than it had ever been. The harsh reality was that this was a church increasingly at odds with modern society, one that seemed unable to find a way to keep pace with, let alone guide, the lives of its followers around the globe. John Paul’s tenure had been like no other in touching the faithful, but dwindling numbers of church attendees in country after country proved that this was not enough to sustain the church’s position. Michael J. Lacey, coauthor of Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity, described the Catholic Church as suffering from “an underlying crisis of authority … the laity seems to be learning to deal with it to their own satisfaction by not expecting too much from Rome or from their local ordinaries.…” What was the church to do to combat these problems?

  Problems had been further intensified by the sexual abuse crisis that rocked the church in 2002 and continues to shake it to this day. The Vatican fervently defended John Paul’s record of handling abuse cases reported to the church, claiming, in 2014, that he did not understand the severity of the “cancer” because the “purity” of his mind and thoughts made this whole situation “unbelievable” to him. But the crisis loomed large in the minds of the assembling cardinals, and as respected Catholic author and journalist David Gibson describes, “the anger over the scandal went much deeper than the sexual abuse itself … and centered principally on the abuse of authority that had allowed such crimes to go unchecked for years, even decades. In that sense, the sexual abuse scandals were symptomatic of a larger crisis afflicting the Church, one that centered on how authority—and the power that authority conferred—was wielded in the Church of John Paul II.”

  Alongside these key issues, cardinals brought their own regional troubles to the table, among them “secularism in Western Europe, the rise of global Islam, the growing gap between rich and poor in the north and the south, and the proper balance in church government between the center and the periphery.”

  Thanks to the positive media attention that had surrounded the funeral, one could easily assume that the swell of public feeling presented the ideal opportunity for the church to shake things up and tackle its institutional failings. Internally, however, opinions were quite the opposite. It was felt that the problems facing the church in the future were so great that radical changes at this juncture could not resolve the dividing issues faced by cardinals from Western and developing nations, while at the same time continuing John Paul’s legacy as an inspirational and engaging man of the people. It was too tall an order, and the majority of cardinals decided they needed a safe pair of hands and a smooth transition to deal with issues that could crush the church irreparably. The only remaining question was, Whose hands?

  THE CANDIDATES

  As the pressure began to mount, the Vatican took the unprecedented move of imposing a media blackout from April 8 until the opening of the conclave. Putting aside the irony of such a move, given that the process itself was secret, this was seen by many to be a frustrating interference by none other than the famed Vatican enforcer of rules and doctrine, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger. In reality, it was an attempt to even the playing field for the cardinals from non-Italian or non-English-speaking countries, especially those from Africa, South America, and Asia, who believed themselves to be at an unfair disadvantage to European and American cardinals, who had a disproportionate amount of airtime in which to outline their opinions on the issues facing the church.

  The media blackout, unsurprisingly, did not prevent gossip from reaching the newspapers, but many of the cardinals remained diplomatic, insisting that there was no clear favorite in the lead-up to the conclave. In reality, there was considerable
speculation about a number of candidates representing both conservative and progressive ideologies. One issue that most were certain of, after the twenty-six-year papacy of John Paul, was that the new pope was unlikely to be a young man, so as to ensure a significantly shorter tenure than that of his predecessor—although few would have believed just how short it would be. As writer Paul Collins notes, “a weakened or even senile pope who is unable or unwilling to resign could confront the Church with a massive constitutional conundrum. Under present rules, no one can sack the pope.” John Paul’s personalization of the papacy had resulted in a reign more akin to a centralized autocracy, where little freedom of action was afforded to individual bishops or heads of religious orders; consequently, there had been a direct correlation between the pope’s deteriorating health and the reduced ability of the church to act on pressing issues. It had been left in limbo, unable to act on any major decisions, “forced to mark time with important problems unaddressed as [it awaited] the demise of the Pope.”

  John Paul II had appointed more cardinals than any other pontiff (231) and had set the record for largest number created at any one time when he named forty-four in February 2001, a move seen by many as an effort to secure his legacy by choosing cardinals who espoused his theological views on the direction the church should take after his death. These were swiftly followed by a further thirty creations in 2003. The total number of cardinals still young enough to vote—after the age of eighty, cardinals become ineligible—at the conclave who had been chosen by John Paul himself was 113. While not all were carved in John Paul’s mold as orthodox conservatives with a passion for the disenfranchised poor, this staggering figure did ensure that his shadow lingered long in the minds of many when voting began.

  The nine meetings (known as consistories) in which John Paul created his 231 new cardinals occurred over a period of twenty-four years and had allowed for the evolution of many differing opinions, in the most simplistic terms, two opposing camps within the modern church.

  THE CONSERVATIVES

  This group of cardinals had all been appointed precisely because of their strong belief in John Paul’s teachings and a papal-centric church and in the hope that they would continue his work after he was gone. They believed that “Catholicism must increasingly stand against the prevailing post-modern culture” and that “there [was] a real danger that many Catholics, including priests and theologians, [would] become completely compromised by secularism and relativism.” Fundamentally, the conservative candidates were all strong believers that doctrine must not be altered to assimilate the church into a changing society.

  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany (age 78)

  As John Paul II’s longtime right-hand man, and considered by many to be the obvious successor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a front-runner from the start.

  Of the 115 cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave, Ratzinger was one of only two whom John Paul II had not appointed himself. The two men had, however, formed a close bond when both were cardinals. As Ratzinger described it himself, “As soon as he became pope he had made up his mind to call me to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF]. He had placed a great, very cordial, and profound trust in me. As the guarantee, so to speak, that we would travel the right course in the faith.” Having occupied this role since 1981, Ratzinger was John Paul’s doctrinal watchdog—the press referred to him as “God’s Rottweiler,” his fellow clerics as the “Panzer Kardinal”—and one of the most powerful men in the Vatican. The two men shared and exercised hard-line conservative beliefs, tempered by a social conscience for the poor and disadvantaged.

  The official role of the CDF, founded in 1542 and perhaps better known by its original name, the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition, was “to promote and defend the doctrine of the faith and its traditions in all of the Catholic world.” The world had changed somewhat since the sixteenth-century days of heresy and the Inquisition. The most recent Vatican Council meeting, from 1962–65 (more commonly known as Vatican II), had managed to “[drag] the Catholic Church, part of it kicking and screaming, out of the early nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century … [and opened] the Church to the contemporary world … to enter into a serious but critical dialogue with it.” It soon became apparent to many that the conclusions of the council had in fact been left wide open to opposing interpretations. Consequently, when John Paul II became pope, many of those who had assumed him to be a liberal and progressive candidate were surprised at the speed with which he reinterpreted Vatican II in a much more conservative light.

  From within his department at the CDF, Ratzinger was considered to have had the last word on the enforcement of John Paul’s theological interpretation of Vatican II, as well as on disciplinary matters within the church—including, most recently, high-profile sexual abuse cases. Ratzinger aired his concerns for the church’s future in a speech the day before the death of John Paul, stating that North America and Europe had “developed a culture that excludes God from the public consciousness, either by denying him altogether or by judging that his existence cannot be demonstrated, is uncertain and, therefore, somewhat irrelevant.”

  As well as his pivotal role in the CDF, Ratzinger also held the office of dean of the College of Cardinals. When it came to the conclave, he once more was to be found presiding over official proceedings. He was ideally placed to do so, for he knew all the cardinals by name and, moreover, spoke a reported ten languages. Although he was previously dismissed as a quiet but divisive theologian and scholar with a weak public presence, his successful handling of events prior to and following the death of John Paul culminated in a huge shift of opinion in his favor.

  It was not just his commanding performance of John Paul’s funeral homily that had turned the heads of many cardinals. On Good Friday, March 25, 2005, Ratzinger had spoken in place of the ailing pope during the traditional Way of the Cross procession. When he came to the Stations of the Cross, colleagues listened in disbelief as he said, “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him.” And praying to God, he said, “Lord, your church often seems like a boat about to sink, a boat taking on water on every side.”

  It is hard to read these words and not feel that this was a thinly veiled attack on all those involved in the sexual abuse crisis that was poisoning the reputation of the Catholic Church. What was this performance if not that of a man showing he was capable of challenging the rot within the church head-on and publicly? But did he intend to do so as another pontiff’s right-hand man, or was Ratzinger in fact proposing himself for consideration with this startling condemnation of church failings?

  The cardinal’s past—to those who had studied it—would indicate otherwise. He had resisted elevation to high office on numerous occasions, preferring instead to devote himself to a quiet life of theological writing. But only the days that followed would reveal if Ratzinger did want to be pope. If he did, his complete lack of pastoral experience, and his own advancing age and poor health—he had suffered a stroke in 1991—might lead some cardinals to wonder if he was too weak and ill equipped for the task.

  Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria (72)

  A convert to Christianity at age nine, Arinze was born into the Ibo tribe in Nigeria and became a rising star among African Catholics when he was consecrated a bishop at just thirty-three years old. The idea of a pope from a developing country would be greeted with a rapturous response from neighboring regions, but Arinze’s outspoken, ultraconservative views weighed against any real chances.

  Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Vicar of Rome (73)

  Described as getting “high marks for administration but low marks for charisma,” Ruini was another of John Paul’s close allies and a familiar face in Italian media. Though he was regarded as “the most powerful Italian cardinal,” his quadruple bypass surgery in 2000 and outspoken criticisms of Italian government policies on, among other things, euthanasia, same
-sex marriage, and artificial insemination, meant opinions of him were strongly divided.

  THE REFORMERS

  The opposing group of cardinals were mostly from pluralist societies in which traditional church teachings on such controversial issues as divorce, abortion, and homosexuality were continually up for debate among faithful and clergy alike. These men, while having been appointed by John Paul, were only now as cardinals free to express dissenting opinions on orthodox doctrine and a centralized church without fear of their career prospects being curtailed. They acknowledged and respected John Paul’s many diplomatic achievements in global peace conflicts and his passion for greater social equality, but many of these cardinals “had real problems with his moral, doctrinal, reproductive and intra-mural church stances.”

  Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Italy (78)

  Unlike the majority of his Italian colleagues, Cardinal Martini was an outspoken, left-of-center cardinal who had both pastoral and administrative experience. A highly respected and thoughtful Jesuit theologian, he was a surprising appointment for the notably conservative John Paul and was described by John Allen Jr. as being “the great white hope of Catholicism’s liberal wing for more than two decades.”