Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is the Pope a Protestant?

The Pontiff’s leadership has been catastrophic for Catholicism

When Pope Francis was asked last month how he was doing after surgery on his colon in July, he replied: ‘Still alive, even though some people wanted me to die. I know there were even meetings between prelates who thought the Pope’s condition was more serious than the official version. They were preparing for the conclave. Patience!’

It was such a ferocious outburst that few people realised that Francis was talking about two separate things. He’s 84, which is old even for a pope. The medical reports said that he didn’t have cancer, but he did stay in hospital longer than expected and Italian doctors don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about an elderly pontiff’s state of health.

There’s no obvious front-runner to succeed Francis, and his policy of creating cardinals from ‘the peripheries’ (e.g. Tonga, with just 16,000 Catholics) means that many of them are complete outsiders in Rome. So of course when the Pope went into surgery there were ‘meetings between prelates’ about the next papal conclave. It’s how Francis got elected in 2013: little groups of liberal cardinals had been plotting to install him for years. It’s not sinister.

But who would actually want the Pope to die? Surely that was just paranoia or black humour on Francis’s part. How many Catholics would have been happy, or at least not distressed, to see the Holy Father leave the Gemelli hospital in a coffin?

The answer is: more than the general public realises. Few of them put it into words, and most of those say something along the lines of ‘it might not be a bad thing if this Jesuit Pope were gathered to his heavenly reward’. But others let rip.I remember a recent lunch with two priests, one of whom used the ‘heavenly reward’ formula.

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