by Morris West
“That’s the whole point, I believe,” said the studious man from Milan. “We can’t change history. We make our worst mistakes when we try to gloss over it or rewrite it. The captivities in Babylon and Egypt are as permanent a part of Jewish history as the holocaust of our time. Our problem is that we believe that time will wipe some of the dirt off us before we have to acknowledge our own misdeeds. It never does.”
“Public confession is, to say the least, a disarming process.” Rossini felt comfortable with these men. His whole manner was different, open and unconstrained. “For myself, I know I could not have survived in this city if I had tried to live by concealment and pretence. But too often we reduce ourselves to absurdities. Now, it is proposed we have glass-sided confessional booths, so that the faithful can monitor the conduct of confessor and penitent! At the same time, we try to suppress the most ancient practice of a public reconciliation by all the faithful at Mass! I don’t know what we or the people gain from that.”
“Little enough,” said the man from Milan. “Privacy is available to those who need it. Reconciliation has been a public act from the earliest days when Christ carne to the Baptist at Jordan Ford. The problem is that we, the pastors, cannot be seen to break the Roman rules and we can only bend them so far.”
“That’s one of the problems we’re here to solve,” said Luca Rossini. “We have to open the windows again, let fresh air blow through the House of God.”
“The windows have been closed too long,” said the Canadian. “The shutters are stiff and warped. It will take a strong man to force them open again.”
“Or a simple one,” said Rossini. “A plain country carpenter who isn’t afraid to use a chisel and a crowbar to break through useless timber.”
When he drifted away a moment later, the two senior prelates looked at each other. Their looks conveyed the same unspoken question: “Could he do the job?” For Rossini himself, the question posed itself differently. The Church needed a conciliator, a man with an open mind and an open heart and a sense of history. Sixteen centuries before, Milan had been the capital of the Western Empire and Ambrose, the governor of Aernelia and Liguria, had come to the city to mediate a dispute between the candidates for the Christian Bishopric. According to the historians, he himself had been proclaimed the Bishop even though he was not yet a Christian. Ambrose had been a phenomenon in his own time – and perhaps, Rossini thought, a prophetic paradigm of the future. He had been born and bred to a senatorial service in the twilight of an Empire; yet he had managed to preserve and pass on to succeeding ages the best of the yesterdays: a belief in continuity, in basic justice, a respect for civic order. He was a man who had straddled the world of spirit and the world of sense, and kept his foothold firm in both.
Rossini found himself wondering whether his own one-time mentor, a man of most eminent reason, wise in history, hopeful for the future, might well be the man to lead the Church into the twentieth century. It would certainly be a battle to elect him. He had no taste for intrigue. He was a Jesuit and the Jesuits had been a long time out of favour. The men of Opus Dei had been long entrenched in their posts of observation and financial control.
Even so, this was a man to hope in, a man on whom to risk his own personal vote.
By six-thirty in the evening, Saint Martha’s House had been cleared of all unauthorised personnel. The conclavists and their attendants were locked inside and the members of the Vatican Vigilanza were posted at entrances and exits. At seven o’clock, the first oath of the conclave was administered to all participants and staff.
I promise and swear that I will observe inviolable secrecy about each and every matter concerning the election of the new Pontiff which has been discussed or decided in the congregations of the Cardinals, also about whatever happens in the conclave or place of election, directly or indirectly, and finally about the voting and every other matter that may in any way come to my knowledge.
I will not violate this secret in any way, directly or indirectly, by signs, words or in writing or in any other manner. Moreover, I promise and swear not to use in the conclave any kind of transmitting or receiving instrument, nor to use devices for taking pictures; and this under pain of excommunication latae sententiae (that is, automatically) reserved in especial manner to the Apostolic See.
I will maintain this secret scrupulously and conscientiously even after the election of the Pontiff, unless special permission or explicit authorisation be granted to me by the same Pontiff.
In like manner I promise and swear that I will never give any help or support any interference, opposition or hostility or other form of intervention by which the civil powers of any order or degree, or any group of individuals might wish to interfere in the election.
So help me God, and these holy Gospels which I touch with my hand.
After this, the electors themselves made a separate oath to adhere to the Apostolic Constitution, to defend the rights of the Holy See, to refuse all vetoes by any secular power on the election. Once again, secrecy was enjoined and affirmed:
Above all, we promise and swear to observe with the greatest fidelity and with all persons, including the conclavists, the secret concerning what takes place in the conclave or place of election, directly or indirectly concerning the scrutinies; not to break this secret in any way, either during the conclave or after the election of the new Pontiff, unless we are given explicit authorisation from the Pontiff.
At seven-twenty precisely, the Secretary of State rose to deliver his formal report on the condition of the Church. It began with a brief valediction to the dead Pontiff: “We have mourned him. We have prayed for him, we have commended him to God as a good and faithful servant. For us the work goes on. First, we have to follow the apostolic tradition and elect a new Pontiff. Let me show you the world he will face …”
Briefly, he led them on a tour of the world’s powder magazines: resurgent Islam, China exploding into the twentieth century, America watching jealously for incursions into her markets, Africa dying a slow death by AIDS, India and Pakistan building their nuclear arsenals, Arabs and Israelis still at war over pocket handkerchief patches of dirt, the tribes of Europe battling still to maintain their ethnic and religious identities, the resources of the planet – forests, oxygen and water – being consumed at a profligate pace while the Church still refused to reason with the stark realities of over-population. Then, in the same dry fashion, he dropped a live grenade into the assembly:
“We, my brothers, bear our own share of blame for all this. We, too, have fomented our wars, compounded our massacres in the name of God. We repent our misdeeds too slowly. We make our reformations too late. We have fostered within the Church a powerful organisation of clergy and laity, a wealthy and secretive organisation, pursuing in the name of God programmes which, however they are formulated in documents and expressions, belie in practice the message of the Saviour. We are not a secret sanctuary. We are not – though some would like to believe we are – the privileged faithful of a remnant Church, persevering to the end an apocalyptic age. We are a city seated on a mountain, visible to the whole world. Think on this! Think on the scandals in which our secret money dealings have embroiled us.”
Listening to him, Luca Rossini was amazed at how little he had guessed of the man, on how much he was prepared to risk in this charge against the windmills. His discourse took on a new tone as he thrust towards the end.
“Think on these things. Try to discern the signs of the times, which are God’s continuing message to us. Try to discern where we, as the People of God, must repent and change. I remind you that until you elect a new Pontiff, the writ of the old one still runs. There are those who say it should run from here to eternity. Not so! It runs until the wisdom of a later Pontiff and of his collegial bishops change it.
“We have all been shocked by the publication of the diaries stolen from the late Pontiff and sold to the press by his valet. Yet, even here, there is something to be discerned. The Pontiff hims
elf, old and ill, was troubled about certain of his own decisions and policies, and wished he could reverse them. He has already passed beyond our judgment into the merciful hands of God. But we have our judgments still to make and we must make them with sober wisdom. God help us all!”
He sat down in an unreadable silence. The time was exactly twenty minutes to eight when the Master of Ceremonies summoned Luca Rossini to deliver his homily to his peers. The text was already in their hands; but none of them were reading it. It was coming up to dinner time. The Cardinal Electors were hungry. Luca Rossini had the sudden macabre thought that if he bored them or angered them, they might well eat him for dinner. He crossed himself and announced:
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. I did not seek to address you tonight. I was commanded to it; but what I speak to you, I speak from the heart. I ask you a simple question: Whom shall we choose for our Pope?
“In theory, it is any male Christian. In fact, he is now sitting in this room. For good or ill, that is the way it happens in our Church today. It is a measure perhaps of the centralism into which we have lapsed, of the ignorance of our own diversity. Let me put to you the questions I ask myself about our next Pope.
“How old a man? If he is too young, he may last too long, and the arteries of the Church will harden along with his own. If he is too old or infirm, we may have what we have just narrowly escaped, a constitutional crisis in the Church, a crisis of conscience for faithful Christians. Already, we are a deeply wounded community.
“So, next we need a healer, a man of compassion, one who will have compassion on the multitudes as Jesus himself did. Unfortunately, words of compassion and comfort have not been easy to decipher of late in Vatican texts. All too many have been more intent on dogmatic exposition than on the confused but plangent cries of the human heart. Our charge is to spread the good word, the simple word. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow … Many sins are forgiven her because she has loved much. Love your enemies.’
“For this so simple exposition, we need a man calm in his belief in the ultimate good purposes of the Creator: ‘Now there remain these three, faith, hope and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.’ The wisdom of love sees and accepts the whole mystery of creation, bright and dark. Love mediates the mystery with those who live in pain and fear and unknowing.
“Our new Pontiff must be open. He must listen before he pronounces. He must understand that language is an imperfect instrument, that it changes all the time and that it is the most inadequate means we have to express the relations between human creatures and the God who made them. This is the crux of our problems. Our people do not believe us when we propound a morality of sex. They know that we are ignorant of its language and its practice; that we are forbidden to learn either in a marital relationship.
“So, our man will be very careful whom he permits to speak in his name. He will remember the respect he owes his collegial brethren whom, like Peter, he is charged to confirm and strengthen. He will remember that, although the principle of Pettine primacy has been acknowledged down the centuries, he is not and never has been a sole pastor in the Church. Those who, out of mistaken loyalty or partisan interest, have sought to inflate the office or the authority of the occupant, have always done disservice to the Church.
“Finally, secure in his own faith, he will respect the philosophers and theologians. He will encourage open enquiry on difficult questions. In the freedom of family life, he will encourage debate between the sons and daughters of the house. He will put an end forever to secret denunciations and secret inquisitions into the orthodoxy of honest scholars. He will protect them in charity against detractors.
“Charity! Love! It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? ‘Charity is long-suffering and kind. Charity envieth not, charity boasteth not, is not puffed up. Charity bears all things, believes all things. Charity never fails.’ Do you see this man of charity among us? Do you know him? Do you, in the ancient sense of the word, discern him? If you do, elect him boldly and let us all be about God’s business!”
Once again there was a silence, out of which the Master of Ceremonies recited the closing prayer. Then, with a certain relief, he announced:
“There will now be a five-minute toilet break before dinner is served. There are no place cards, please sit where you wish. You are all welcome in Saint Martha’s House. Good appetite!”
Luca Rossini spent a restless night, haunted by a frustrating dream in which he wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, looking for Isabel. All the doors were closed. All his questions were answered in dumb show by faceless people, who pointed him deeper into the labyrinth.
He woke, sweating and gravel-eyed, at four in the morning, and decided, as he often did, to banish the nightmares by an early-morning walk. Then, for the first time, the situation became real to him. There was no place to go. The House of Saint Martha was a prison-house, locked down tight until the inmates had discharged their task.
As he lay musing in the darkness, he asked himself whether his sermon had meant anything to anyone. He doubted very much that it had. These elders in the assembly had heard all the words before. They were armour-plated against eloquence, as sceptical of simplicity as of serpentine cunning. He judged – if a verdict at four in the morning had any validity at all – that Turi Pascarelli’s calm impeachment of secret partisan movements in the Church had shocked many in the audience. Turi was not an augur studying the entrails of birds. He was a man to respect: a diplomat who read the large print and the small in every document, then picked at every loose thread of argument or language, and finally called for the dossiers on the negotiators themselves.
Perhaps Turi had left his intervention too late, or perhaps he had timed it just right. Technically, he was already out of office. All his functions were suspended. Factually, he was still subject to the edicts of a dead man. He had breached none of them, but he had called them all in question. Without doubt, he had made enemies; but he was invulnerable to them. He had no ambition to rule. He was that most powerful of persuaders – the man with nothing to ask and nothing to lose.
As he drifted back into sleep, Luca Rossini asked himself a more radical question: once Isabel was gone from him, who would he be, what could he be with any conviction or certainty? Then, quite inconsequently, he found himself thinking of Angel-Novalis. On the death of his wife, he had opted for the absolute certainty offered by the authoritarian sectaries of Opus Dei. He had served with a single mind and a loyal heart; yet at a crucial moment he had betrayed himself into a professional folly. To defend the memory and the policies of a dead man, he had begun an unauthorised pursuit of the faithless valet who had filched his papers. He had sought the help of his own colleagues, and thus set in motion events which he could no longer control. It was the problem of all intrigues. It was also the tangled fabric of the dream into which Luca Rossini lapsed in the predawn hour. He was a fugitive now in the lanes and alleyways of a sinister city. He was stalked by assassins who laughed softly in the dark and called in mockery: “Who’d like to fuck a priest!”
The ceremonies of election began with a celebration of the Eucharist and an invocation of the Holy Spirit. The Cardinal electors then moved in procession to the Sistine Chapel, where they sat, each in his own stall, under the awesome gaze of Michelangelo’s Christus, renewed and revivified by modern restorers financed by the Nippon Television Corporation.
Each elector was supplied with a small pile of ballot papers inscribed with a preamble in Latin: “I choose as Supreme Pontiff …” The elector would write the name of his candidate in block letters. He would not sign the ballot paper.
The altar of the chapel was set with a gold paten and a large golden chalice. As each elector marked his ballot-paper, he folded it in half. Then, in order of precedence by rank, each man advanced to the altar, knelt for a moment in prayer, and declared: “I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge that my vote
is given to the man who in the sight of God I believe should be elected.” He laid his vote on the paten, tipped it into the chalice and returned to his stall.
When all the votes had been cast, three scrutineers, chosen by lot from the electors, made the count. Their count would be checked by three others, similarly chosen. Luca Rossini was one of the first group of scrutineers.
There was a solemnity in the ceremony, and its setting, which touched everyone; yet there was a paradox as well. The repeated oaths, the duplicated checks, the immediate destruction of paper after each unsuccessful ballot, bespoke a distrust of human beings even when they were acting, as they swore they were, in the Spirit, whose abiding presence had been guaranteed until the end of time.
The first ballot was what everyone expected. It showed a spread of ten candidates, of whom the highest received eighteen votes and the lowest eight. The ballot was significant only in that it floated a raft of possibilities, South American, North American, Spanish, Belgian, Italian and African. There were no middle Europeans, no French, no Orientals. None was within shouting distance of the required majority of two thirds plus one. Two of the South Americans, the Spaniard and the North American had been appointed by the late Pontiff. The African was a long-time Curia member. The two Italian candidates were from Venice and Milan. The name of Luca Rossini was nowhere to be seen.
That afternoon there were two more ballots. By the end of the day, the battle lines were drawn. The number of candidates had been reduced to eight. One of the South Americans had dropped off the list, with the African and the North American. Luca Rossini made his first appearance in the voting.
It had been a long dragging day. By the time he returned to his room at five in the evening, Rossini was convinced that one of the most lethal threats in the life of any Roman Pontiff was the dead weight of ceremony and protocol which he had to carry every day. The thought was prompted by his own unexpected appearance as a candidate, although he knew – or thought he knew – that he was being introduced as a “spoiler”, whose presence would shake out other unlikely pretenders and concentrate the minds of the electors on the strongest possibilities.
