by Morris West
“Amen.” Luca Rossini’s assent was strong, but, even as he uttered the word, he wondered whether his own belief would survive the outcome.
The meeting went on for another half-hour. When it was over, he offered formal courtesies, pleaded another pressing engagement and left in haste.
He wandered down the Via della Conciliazione and turned into a shop selling pieties to the tourists. He idled away a half-hour buying a gold medallion of the Virgin and a handsome trinket box to hold it. He wrote, in a fine Italianate script, the card which Isabel had ordered: “The little Virgin you gave me has made me very happy. I send you her image, so you will not be lonely without her. I send it in gold to thank you for becoming my sister. Pray for me as I shall pray for you. Isabel Ortega.”
He asked the sales assistant to take great care with the wrapping, since he would be asking the new Pope to bless it. He paid the bill, acknowledged the fictional discount “for our distinguished prelates”, shoved the package in his pocket and strolled like any tourist down towards the river. As he walked, he found himself haunted by an irrelevant tag of verse which Piers Hallett had tossed at him over a dinner-table:
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife.
He would have written sonnets all his life?
Back in his own apartment, he began instructing his small household. Tonight, at eight, he would dine at home with Piers Hallett for company. Tomorrow he would enter the conclave. His luggage should be packed for what could be a week’s sojourn – more or less, according to how well the electors co-operated with the Spirit working among them!
His daily uniform would be the black cassock with scarlet piping, the scarlet skull cap, and his pectoral cross. He would need enough underwear to accommodate any breakdown in laundry services at the House of Saint Martha. He would need a pair of white surplices and his mitre for the ceremonial aftermath, because, although he was a Cardinal Presbyter by rank, he was also a titular bishop of the Church of San Sebastian on the Palatine.
He would need his diary and some private stationery. No mail could be sent or received during the conclave, but private communication within it was permissible, if possibly indiscreet. On the heels of these thoughts came the vagrant impulse to write to Isabel and to Luisa. Instantly he suppressed it. That, too, could be another indiscretion. Raul Ortega had care of them now; all Luca Rossini could do was wait for news.
His thoughts turned back to the events of the morning: the eloquence of the Japanese Cardinal, and the unexpected silences of the Camerlengo and the Secretary of State. His own resentment had died as swiftly as it had surged. This was, after all, the name of the political game in the hierarchy of a Papal court. Silence had a thousand interpretations and carried no penalties. Words were subject always to gloss, interpretation and altered emphasis. They were weapons for the hostile, but defences frail as gossamer against a determined attacker. Yet neither Baldassare nor Turi had attacked him. They had simply withdrawn themselves to watch how their junior colleague might fare in his joust with the Grand Electors.
There would be more jousts to come inside the conclave itself, when the Grand Electors and the outsiders met together in the lounge and the coffee bar and the smoking-room in the House of Saint Martha, or as they walked in procession to the Chapel where the votes were cast, four times a day, until a new Pope was named.
Alone, now, and cold at heart, Luca, Cardinal Rossini, reasoned with himself. He had walked thus far on his own two feet. He would walk the last mile and leave the future to God – provided God were still present in the cosmos and the human chaos.
Fourteen
Luca, Cardinal Rossini, and his personal confessor, Monsignor Piers Hallett, presented themselves at the reception desk of Saint Martha’s House at four in the afternoon.
Named for the bustling biblical housewife, sister of the resurrected Lazarus, the building had been planned in 1993 as a hotel-residence for visiting church officials and semi-permanent Vatican staff. The funds, according to report, had been furnished by the Knights of Columbus in the United States. Now it was turned over to the conclavists and their small army of attendants, from scullions to sacristans. The architect of the conclave and his technicians had been working desperately to make it secure against intrusion by outsiders, or escape by its inmates, who would be held there incommunicado until they were able to announce the election of a new Pontiff.
The building had not been without its problems. The Green Party of Italy had protested that it would block the view of Saint Peter’s dome from the Via di Porta Cavalleggeri. So the architects had lopped off one storey and built a sub-basement area. Then came the difficulty of providing a secure entrance and exit into the Vatican confines for the sequestered Cardinals. So a temporary sealed passageway had been provided through the Basilica itself to the Sistine Chapel where the votes were cast.
When they came to register, with a long line of international colleagues, Cardinal Rossini was assigned a chamber among his peers on the second floor, while Hallett was relegated to the basement. In this place, some servants of God were more equal than others. Their baggage, however, was searched with equal thoroughness by Vatican security staff to make sure that neither was carrying a mobile phone, a bugging device, or any other suspicious electronic item. Clearly the Church had small trust in the ultimate integrity of its princes. It was specifically prescribed, for instance, in the Apostolic Constitution that the crime of simony, the buying or selling of the Papal office, would not invalidate the election. It was further prescribed that any promises made to procure an election were unenforceable afterwards. In earlier times, the office had been bought and sold. Sometimes murder had been done for it. It was clearly acknowledged that ancient tricks might be repeated in this millennial age. Each guest was presented with a folder which contained all the necessary information for his stay: the facilities of the house, its restrictions, the names and telephone numbers of its residents and service personnel, a chart of its public rooms, precautions in case of fire, the texts of the oaths of secrecy which would be administered in public that same evening, both to electors and conclave staff, a list of confessors, secretaries and medical attendants. All these items were embossed with the Sede Vacante symbol, the red and yellow striped umbrella, called the Pavilion.
There was a momentary confusion when Rossini sought to confirm the special arrangements which had been made for him to receive news of Isabel from New York. There were the usual Roman shrugs, pursed lips, fumblings through papers, misinformation punched up on computer screens. There appeared to be no record of such arrangements.
Rossini stood over the desk, menacing as an Andean condor, until the relevant directive was located and the approved contact was presented to him and to Hallett. Then he demanded that a copy of the directive be provided immediately for himself and Piers Hallett. Could it not wait, Eminence? No, it could not. Tomorrow would be another day. There would be someone else behind the desk and the conclavists would, in any case, be denied access to this part of the house. So, please, my friend, just hand over the papers – in duplicate.
When the documents were passed to him, he responded with a thin smile of thanks; then permitted the porter to show them through the foyer to elevators which led to their temporary prison house. Piers Hallett celebrated the moment with a Cromwellian quip:
“I like the way you do business, Eminence. Trust in God and keep your powder dry!”
“Your first duty, Piers, is to check the Vicariate office three times a day. I don’t want messages lost or filed away until doomsday.”
“Trust me, Eminence.”
“I do, Piers! It’s the others I worry about. We’ll meet in my room after the second afternoon ballot each day for a libation and a chat.”
“How long do you think the election will take?”
“Hard to say. I have the feeling this could be a long process. The rifts between the parties are wide. The stakes for the conservatives are very high. The fears of the liberals that w
e may have another ice age run very deep. There’s no way of making a forecast until the voting begins tomorrow. They’ll be administering the oaths at seven tonight. The Secretary of State will deliver his message on the state of the Church. I’ll say my piece. Then we’ll dine like good brothers together. There will be one vote on the first morning and four a day thereafter, morning and afternoon, until a new Pope is named. You’ll have a lot of free time on your hands. Keep your ears open and let me know any gossip you hear below stairs!”
“For shame, Eminence!” said Hallett with a grin. “This is a sacred enterprise. What could there possibly be to gossip about?”
“As you say, Piers, what could there possibly be?”
“Meantime, apart from the gossip, what am I supposed to do with myself?”
“Pray, if you can, and think a lot,” said Rossini soberly. “This is the underside of the tapestry, my friend. You’ll see the best and the worst of this Church of ours. There are no illusions here and you have a decision to make. As, indeed, have I.”
“I wish you light and courage, Eminence!”
The porter carried Rossini’s luggage into the elevator while Hallett, carrying his own bags, descended on foot to the lower depths.
After settling himself in his quarters, a compact but comfortable bedroom with its own shower and toilet, a desk, an armchair and a prie-dieu with a crucifix set above it, Rossini scanned the list of conclavists, ticking off the names of those he had met in his travels, making his own cabbalistic notations on the career background of each one and the dispositions of each in terms of character and personal loyalty.
They came from all over the world: Ethiopia and Africa, Lebanon, India, China, the Philippines, the Americas, Asia and the East Indies and the Pacific islands. Their skins were black as ebony, yellow and brown, and pale as old porcelain. Their names made a polyphonic litany. Their languages were a motley of tongues, helped out by the Latin of their schooling, coloured by the vestiges of regional and tribal accents from their mother tongues. They were all high in dignity. In normal times their power was measured by the size of the populations they governed, by their nearness to, or their distance from, the seat of power in Rome, by the weight their counsels carried in the Papal court.
The courtiers themselves – the Cardinals of the Curia – moved among them with a certain patronising ease. They were, after all, the castellans of this Roman fortress. They knew all its winding passageways, all the adits to all the congregations and councils and committees and where the tentacles of power twined, and how – swiftly or by a lifetime of slow circuits – an outlander might arrive at a personal dialogue with the Pontiff. They were not all Italians, as they had been in the past. The Curia had been internationalised to include British, Belgians, French, Germans, Italians, Slovaks, Spaniards, South Americans, Africans, Asians and Australians.
There was another group also, peripheral to this one and smaller, but still powerful – the metropolitans of the big Italian Sees, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Naples, Florence, Palermo, Turin. They were clothed with another kind of authority: pastors of great cities with long autonomous histories. In the election itself, they were men to be reckoned with because they were known as pastors and not as bureaucrats, and their lives were set among ordinary folk.
The Archbishops from the United States were – as one wag put it – mutants of earlier migrants from Europe: Irish, Italian, Polish. Any one of these was a possible candidate, but all were marked with an invisible sign. They were the offspring of a democratic revolution, which in historic terms was still too recent for comfort. More importantly, they were members of an aggressively capitalist society, in which the profession and practice of any religion was a free option, while its imposition was outlawed.
Strangely enough, the largest contingent of electors came from the former colonial territories of Africa: Angola, Benin, the Cameroons, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and the rest. The image of an African Pope was a seductive one. It would revive the image of a universal Church, a House of all Nations. It would rebut for ever the charges of a racist religion, a Eurocentric Christianity. But, in the cold light of modern history, it could also emphasise the bloody tribalism which still bedevilled the African continent.
For his own part, Rossini was convinced that they must find and elect a man on his own visible merits and virtues, a good man, a simple man, which did not signify a stupid one, but one who could speak from the heart to the hearts of the people of God. The politicians of the Sacred College were a necessary evil, but their shifts and stratagems matched ill with the stark simplicity of the Gospel. The clerical money-men were ever present in the precincts of every temple, but they should not control the Holy of Holies. The censors and inquisitors should be held where they belonged: in service to the sacred deposit of faith. They should not – not ever again – be appointed as judges over the people, or usurp the primacy of their consciences.
So, as he moved casually from group to group, saluting old acquaintances, introducing himself to new ones, Luca Rossini tried to decide on whom to cast the first vote in the first ballot the next morning. This first ballot was always a trial run to establish, if possible, the spread of the candidates and to identify, if possible, the voting blocs which were pushing them. This evening, however, was simply prelude and preamble: a reunion of the smallest but the most powerful club in the world. Drinks were served. Canapes were offered. The talk was temperate, the exchanges were tentative. The members were more eager to hear opinions than to offer them.
Rossini did not linger too long with any individual group. He knew that he was being courted, solicited, studied, not merely for his single vote, but for what influence he might exercise after a quarter of a century of survival inside the Vatican. There were occasional jokes about his recent notoriety in the press. He could read them as he chose: jibes or gestures of respect for a seasoned campaigner. He paused for a moment with a pair of prelates from the United States. One was the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, the other was the man from Los Angeles who had been present at the previous day’s meeting with the Camerlengo. The latter had a large constituency of migrants and refugees from the South Americas and a fluent command of Castilian and dialectal Spanish. He seemed eager to make good his lost opportunity with Rossini.
“That interview with Guillermin in Le Monde, a splendid performance. I liked your stand-up style on the sex question. Muy viril! It helps us all. You know the firestorm we’ve just been through on the sex issues! I thought Gruber was way out of line when he suggested you resign your candidacy. I was tempted to intervene, but …”
“As well you didn’t,” Rossini was smooth as honey. “Our colleague from Tokyo said what was needed, and still avoided contention.”
“He’s an impressive guy. A shade exotic in his theologies, perhaps; but that’s a personal opinion. We of the West are much more comfortable with Aquinas, wouldn’t you say?”
“It depends on how we teach him,” said Rossini. “We’ve had some dangerously narrow theologies in recent years.”
“Are you suggesting,” the man from Baltimore intervened in the talk, “are you seriously proposing we should change our teaching?”
“Rather that we be prudent in the choice of our new leader,” said Luca Rossini.
“How would you feel about a Pope from the United States?” He said it with a smile, but the smile was not in his eyes. “This time it’s probably too early; but the Americas, North or South, will have to make, sooner or later, a bid for the See of Peter. After all, the United States still holds the world in military and financial balance.”
“Spiritually,” said Rossini, “you seem often much divided. You profess freedom of speech and conscience, but you still train killers for counter insurgency in the South Americas. You claim right to life, but you still conduct state executions. You claim freedom of conscience but you conduct violent blockades of abortion clinics. I should hate to be the first American Pope.”
“Someone has to make a start
.” Lacey of Los Angeles had a sense of humour. Baltimore was less tolerant. He challenged Rossini.
“So, whom would you propose to us?”
“I propose no one,” said Rossini amiably. “I cast my vote and let the Spirit take care of the outcome. Excuse me, gentlemen.”
As he faded back into the gathering crowd, Baltimore said tersely:
“There’s another arrogant son of a gun. What does Rome do to these people?”
“I don’t think he’s arrogant,” said Lacey of Los Angeles. “He’s a hard man who knows the name of the game. He might be the best protection we’ve got against Opus Dei and the Grand Electors.”
“And what, pray, is wrong with Opus Dei?” demanded Baltimore. “We’ve done very well working with them.”
“I’m sure you have,” said Lacey. “But I’d reserve judgment until you’ve seen their final bill.”
Rossini’s next encounter was a more agreeable one, with his former professor and biblical scholar, who was now the Archbishop of Milan, the most important diocese in Italy. He was a man of quiet warmth and rich scholarship who, when he was not on the road among his parishes, conducted seminars in his own Cathedral for Christians, Jews, Muslims and secular scholars of all faiths, to whom he offered an open forum for discussion and debate. With him was the Archbishop of Montreal, who had just put the question:
“Whom do we have who can overleap the centuries and take us back to the simplicities of the Apostolic Church?”
“No one,” said Rossini. “We all carry too much history on our backs and the history qualifies everything we do or say. The Holy Father went to Paris to greet the young. Great demonstrations, great fervour and enthusiasm – until suddenly the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day loomed up like a black cloud out of the past!”
