The 133 cardinal electors who will process into the Sistine Chapel tomorrow are feeling battered and confused by the prospect of choosing a new pope in a ruthless digital age. Many of them show it in the faces, flinching at the sight of the press.
The cardinal-electors must elect a man of shining moral integrity. It doesn’t take a cynic to work out which of the candidates don’t fit that description
But the journalists are struggling, too. For centuries, the interregnum between a pope’s death and the vote has been a season of mud-slinging – an opportunity for supporters of various cardinals to kick their rivals. But nothing in recent history compares to the damaging online stories now appearing several times a day.
A week ago, there was a consensus. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Pope’s Francis’s wily Secretary of State, was the frontrunner. Even his enemies conceded that he probably had 40 of the required 89 votes in the bag; his supporters claimed 50 or more.
To some commentators, this seemed a dereliction of moral duty by the cardinals. Parolin blundered into the infamous Vatican-Beijing pact of 2018. This allowed the Communist Party to seize control of the Chinese Church, forcing worshippers to submit to apparatchiks who formerly disguised themselves as Catholic bishops but now don’t have to bother because they are recognised as such by the Vatican.
Also, under Parolin the Secretariat of State squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on questionable investments. But Parolin had spent years schmoozing new cardinals who barely knew anyone in Rome. He told everyone what they wanted to hear – and, while Francis was too ill to govern, lost no opportunity to present himself as a pontiff in waiting, ready to preserve certain liberal ‘reforms’ without the bullying and nasty surprises associated with the Argentinian pontiff.
By last weekend, the anti-Parolin forces were sufficiently alarmed by talk of 50 votes to unleash a last-minute offensive against the Secretary of State – or, rather, a series of offensives.
Many Vatican correspondents had assumed that Parolin would be the liberal candidate in the conclave, reluctantly endorsed by hardline leftists who were too keen on women’s ordination and gay blessings to get anywhere near a two thirds majority of votes. But when the bombs started raining down this week, it was obvious that Parolin had serious enemies among progressive cardinals. Their media cheerleaders started spreading the same damaging claims being put about by traditionalists.
On Thursday, multiple sources reported that, the day before, 70-year-old Cardinal Parolin had suffered a health scare during the cardinals’ meetings. He supposedly fainted and doctors spent an hour treating his blood pressure. ‘Parolin’s health upends papal succession race,’ read one headline. The last thing the cardinals wanted was a repeat of 1978, when John Paul I died of a pulmonary embolism after 33 days and they had to fly straight back to Rome.
The Vatican press office – never renowned for its truthfulness – denied the reports so ferociously that several media outlets withdrew the claim. Yet inconvenient stories about Parolin have been squashed before. Perhaps the health scare was exaggerated rather than fabricated. At any rate, it did not ‘upend’ the succession race, though it proved that there were people working flat out to do so.
The next bomb was dropped by left-wing Italian journalists. They reported the claims of campaigners that Cardinal Parolin’s office blocked the investigation of alleged sex crimes by Benedictine monks in Britain and hundreds of priests in Australia, while refusing to allow Chilean magistrates access to the Holy See’s report into child abuse in the country.
Then the Italian newspaper Il Tempo devoted its front page to a leaked 2018 document meticulously describing the Vatican’s investment in a London property that cost the Church 40 million euros (£33 million). The Vatican had always claimed to know little of the details – but there, at the bottom of the memo, was Parolin’s signature and a comment in his handwriting appearing to endorse the deal.
A journalist who spoke to Parolin’s office this week reports that the cardinal ‘is very nervous and in distress’. That’s understandable. His manner may be low-key, but his ambitions are stratospheric. How many of those 40 votes will have dribbled away by the time the doors of the Sistine Chapel are slammed shut for the first vote tomorrow?
It doesn’t help that the Chinese diocese of Xinxiang has just ‘elected’ a new bishop, despite the fact that there is no pope to rubber-stamp the appointment under the terms of the Vatican deal. So Beijing is not even pretending to follow the rules – thus reminding the cardinals of Parolin’s role in selling Chinese Catholics down the river.
One theory is that Beijing is deliberately sabotaging Parolin, reckoning that it has a more useful stooge in the half-Chinese Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the other leading ‘Francis-lite’ candidate. But Tagle’s all-singing, all-dancing charisma, which plays well in Manila, makes him seem a slightly comic figure in the West. Cardinals will not have forgotten that Pope Francis sacked him without explanation from his role as head of the giant Catholic charity Caritas.
What about conservative candidates? Cardinal Peter Erdo, the scholarly, reserved and somewhat thin-skinned primate of Hungary, appears to command a solid bloc of votes. No one knows how many, but it’s interesting that Parolin’s supporters were rumoured to be trying to broker a deal with Erdo – evidence of their anxiety, perhaps, rather than of any actual negotiation. Erdo is adamant that there have been no discussions.
The last few days before a conclave always produce a mass of thinly-sourced speculation, as journalists extend the list of papabili to cover their bases. Most of the names on the shortlist have been there for months, if not years – Parolin, Erdo, Tagle, Eijk, Pizzaballa – so it’s noteworthy when there is suddenly a new star in the firmament.
Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was Francis’s powerful Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, is the first American papabile in living memory – although he has spent most of his career working in Peru. According to the veteran Vatican correspondent John Allen, Prevost is a ‘moderate, balanced figure, known for solid judgment and a keen capacity to listen, and someone who doesn’t need to pound his chest to be heard’. His fellow prelates ‘like what they see’.
But it depends what they choose to see. A report this week by the investigative Catholic website the Pillar repeated the disturbing claim that in 2022 Prevost, then bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, failed to open an investigation into claims by women that they were abused by two local priests. The alleged victims ‘also charge that any documentation that may have been sent to Rome was purposely designed to look inadequate so as to prevent action on the case’.
The last few days before a conclave always produce a mass of thinly-sourced speculation
Cardinal Prevost’s response has been to point to a defence by his diocese maintaining that he ‘took the necessary canonical steps’. And, according to the Pillar, he has declined to comment at all on a much older allegation – that in 2000 he ‘allowed a Chicago archdiocesan priest who sexually abused minors to live in an Augustinian rectory around the corner from a Catholic school’.
The Pillar makes the important point that the Peruvian case is a complex one – and that in itself is reason to be worried as the conclave begins. Abuse cases are usually complicated: there are contradictory narratives and overlapping jurisdictions. Cardinals who proclaim glibly that the first qualification for a pope is that he should be a ‘holy man’ are rarely prepared to put in the depressing work of checking allegations of negligence or worse by the papabili. It’s easier to brush aside the details – either secret or virtually impenetrable – of canonical procedures and money-laundering as being far above their pay grade.
In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was able to obscure several strange controversies in his past – including a brazen attempt to keep the child molester Father Julio Grassi out of jail – with a winning smile, judicious flattery and extravagant promises of reform.
Such was the cult of Pope Francis, and the complicity of friendly media, that the leader of the Catholic Church was able to spend the next 12 years covering up the crimes of his sex abuser allies.
But it’s unlikely that the next pope will enjoy anything like that degree of immunity from investigation. The cardinal-electors must therefore elect a man of shining moral integrity, and it doesn’t take a cynic to work out which of the candidates don’t fit that description. Otherwise there’s a real possibility that, within hours of giving his blessing to the crowds in St Peter’s Square, the reputation of the new Vicar of Christ will lie in ruins.
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