The search for the next pope is turning ugly

The Portuguese poet José Tolentino Mendonça is a handsome man in his fifties with a shaved head and meticulously trimmed beard. In one photograph he’s wearing an ultramarine blue polo shirt; in another, a lovely beige cashmere sweater that matches his tan. His poems depict emotional pain in cryptic language. In ‘The Last Day of Summer,’ unable to ‘choose attention or choose forgetfulness’, he recalls ‘your impatient and inconceivable eyes/ here with me now/ as I dance alone/ in the empty city’.

But then Mendonça has no choice but to dance alone. He is a cardinal of the Catholic Church – and just possibly the next pope.

Pope Francis has been in office for ten years and he’s spending more and more time in hospital. Last week he was admitted to the Gemelli for emergency abdominal surgery, at which point leaders of the Church’s factions geared up for an imminent conclave to elect a successor. The surgeons spoke out, providing an unusual amount of clinical detail. It was a hernia operation, they said; blood tests revealed no cancer, no heart disease, nothing to stop Francis travelling to Mongolia if he wants to (which he does, bizarrely, though he still hasn’t set foot in his native Argentina as pontiff).

On the other hand, he’s 86, two years older than John Paul II was when he died. Also, papal doctors have been known to dissemble. At any rate, we can be sure that from now until the next conclave, not a day will pass without senior prelates revising their calculations between mouthfuls of saltimbocca. ‘It’s like Wolves in the City,’ says one veteran commentator, referring to Paul Henissart’s book about the last days of French Algeria. ‘Regime change is coming – whether in a conservative or liberal direction we don’t know, but the machinery of the Francis pontificate will be dismantled.