Conclave (11 page)

Just before 10 a.m., the cardinals began moving off from the Casa Santa Marta, walking out of the plate-glass doors in pairs, in order of seniority, checked off by O’Malley on his clipboard. Lomeli, resting on the crozier, waited with Zanetti and Mandorff
beside the reception desk. They had been joined by Mandorff’s deputy, the Dean of the Master of Papal Ceremonies, a cheerful, tubby Italian monsignor named Epifano, who would be his chief assistant during the Mass. Lomeli spoke to no one, looked at no one. He was still trying vainly to clear a space in his mind for God.
Eternal Trinity, I intend by Your grace to celebrate Mass to Your glory, and for the benefit of all, both living and dead, for whom Christ died, and to apply the ministerial fruit for the choosing of a new Pope . . .

At last they stepped out into the blank November morning. The double file of scarlet-robed cardinals stretched ahead of him across the cobbles towards the Arch of the Bells, where they disappeared into the basilica. Again the helicopter hovered somewhere nearby; again the faint sounds of demonstrators carried on the cold air. Lomeli tried to shut out all distractions, but it was impossible. Every twenty paces stood security men who bowed their heads as he passed and blessed them. He walked with his supporters beneath the arch, across the piazza dedicated to the early martyrs, along the portico of the basilica, through the massive bronze door and into the brilliant illumination of St Peter’s, lit for the television cameras, where a congregation of twenty thousand was waiting. He could hear the chanting of the choir beneath the dome and the vast echoing rustle of the multitude. The procession halted. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, willing stillness, conscious of the immense throng standing close-packed all around him – nuns and priests and lay clergy, staring at him, whispering, smiling.

Eternal Trinity, I intend by Your grace to celebrate Mass to Your glory . . .

After a couple of minutes, they moved on again, up the wide central aisle of the nave. He glanced from side to side, leaning on the
crozier with his left hand, motioning vaguely with his right, conferring his blessing upon the blur of faces. He glimpsed himself on a giant TV screen – an erect, elaborately costumed, expressionless figure, walking as if in a trance. Who was this puppet, this hollow man? He felt entirely disembodied, as though he were floating alongside himself.

At the end of the aisle, where the apse gave on to the cupola of the dome, they had to pause beside Bernini’s statue of St Longinus, close to where the choir was singing, and wait while the last few pairs of cardinals filed up the steps to kiss the central altar and descended again. Only when this elaborate manoeuvre had been completed was Lomeli himself cleared to walk around to the rear of the altar. He bowed towards it. Epifano stepped forward and took away the crozier and gave it to an altar boy. Then he lifted the mitre from Lomeli’s head, folded it, and handed it to a second acolyte. Out of habit, Lomeli touched his skullcap to check it was in place.

Together he and Epifano climbed the seven wide carpeted steps to the altar. Lomeli bowed again and kissed the white cloth. He straightened and rolled back the sleeves of his chasuble as if he were about to wash his hands. He took the silver thurible of burning coals and incense from its bearer and swung it by its chain over the altar – seven times on this side, and then, walking round, a separate censing on each of the other three. The sweet-smelling smoke evoked feelings beyond memory. Out of the corner of his eye he saw dark-suited figures moving his throne into position. He gave back the thurible, bowed again, and allowed himself to be conducted round to the front of the altar. An altar boy held up the missal, opened to the correct page; another extended a microphone on a pole.

Once, in his youth, Lomeli had enjoyed a modest fame for the
richness of his baritone. But it had become thin with age, like a fine wine left too long. He clasped his hands, closed his eyes for a moment, took a breath, and intoned in a wavering plainsong, amplified around the basilica:

‘
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti . . .’

And from the colossal congregation arose the murmured sung response:

‘
Amen.
’

He raised his hands in benediction and chanted again, extending the three syllables into half a dozen:

‘
Pa-a-x vob-i-is.
’

And they responded:

‘
Et cum spiritu tuo.
’

He had begun.

Afterwards, no one watching a tape of the Mass would have been able to guess at the inner turmoil of its celebrant, or at least not until he came to deliver his homily. True, his hands shook occasionally during the Penitential Act, but no more than was to be expected in a man of seventy-five. True also that once or twice he seemed unsure of what was required of him, for instance before the Evangelium, when he had to spoon incense on to the burning coals inside the thurible. However, for the most part his performance was assured. Jacopo Lomeli of the diocese of Genoa had risen to the highest levels in the councils of the Roman Church for the very qualities he showed that day: impassivity, gravity, coolness, dignity, steadiness.

The first reading was in English, delivered by an American Jesuit priest, and taken from the prophet Isaiah (
The spirit of the Lord has
been given to me
). The second was proclaimed in Spanish by a woman prominent in the Focolare Movement, and came from St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, describing how God created the Church (
The body grows until it has built itself up, in love
). Her voice was monotonous. Lomeli sat on his throne and tried to concentrate by translating the familiar words in his mind.

To some, his gift was that they should be apostles; to some, prophets; to some, evangelists; to some, pastors and teachers . . .

Before him in a semicircle was arrayed the full College of Cardinals: both halves of it – those who were entitled to participate in the Conclave and those, roughly the same number, who were over eighty and therefore no longer eligible to vote. (Pope Paul VI had introduced the age limit fifty years before, and the constant turnover had greatly enhanced the power of the Holy Father to shape the Conclave in his own image.) How bitterly some of these decrepit fellows resented their loss of authority! How jealous they were of the younger men! Lomeli could almost see their scowls from where he sat.

. . .
so that the saints together make a unity in the work of service, building up the body of Christ . . .

His eyes travelled along the four widely spaced rows of seats. Wise faces, bored faces, faces suffused with religious ecstasy; one cardinal asleep. They looked as he imagined the togaed Senate of ancient Rome might have looked in the days of the old republic. Here and there he registered the leading contenders – Bellini, Tedesco, Adeyemi, Tremblay – sitting far apart from one another, each preoccupied with his own thoughts, and it struck him what an imperfect, arbitrary, man-made instrument the Conclave was. It had no basis in Holy Scripture whatsoever. There was nothing in the
reading to say that God had created cardinals. Where did they fit into St Paul’s picture of His Church as a living body?

. . .
If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength . . .

The reading ended. The Gospel was acclaimed. Lomeli sat motionless on his throne. He felt he had just been granted an insight into something, but he was not sure what. The smouldering thurible was produced before him, along with a dish of incense and a tiny silver ladle. Epifano had to prompt him, guiding his hand as he sprinkled the incense on to the coals. After the fuming censer had been taken away, his assistant gestured to him to stand, and as he reached up to remove Lomeli’s mitre, he peered anxiously into his face and whispered, ‘Are you well, Eminence?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘The time has almost come for your homily.’

‘I understand.’

He made an effort to compose himself during the chanting of the Gospel of St John (
I chose you, and I commissioned you to bear fruit
). And then very quickly the Evangelium was over. Epifano took away his crozier. He was supposed to sit while his mitre was replaced. But he forgot, which meant that Epifano, who had short arms, had to stretch awkwardly to put it back on his head. An altar boy handed him the pages of his script, threaded together by a red ribbon in the top left-hand corner. The microphone was thrust in front of him. The acolytes withdrew.

Suddenly he was facing the dead eyes of the television cameras and the great magnitude of the congregation, too huge to take in, roughly arranged in blocks of colour: the black of the nuns and the
laity in the distance, just inside the bronze doors; the white of the priests halfway up the nave; the purple of the bishops at the top of the aisle; the scarlet of the cardinals at his feet, beneath the dome. An anticipatory silence fell over the basilica.

He looked down at his text. He had spent hours that morning going over it. Yet now it appeared entirely unfamiliar to him. He stared at it until he was conscious of a slight stirring of unease around him and realised he had better make a start.

‘Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ . . .’

To begin with he read automatically. ‘At this moment of great responsibility in the history of the Holy Church of Christ . . .’

The words issued from his mouth, went forth into nothingness, and seemed to expire halfway along the nave and drop inert from mid-air. Only when he mentioned the late Holy Father, ‘whose brilliant pontificate was a gift from God’, was there a gradual welling-up of applause that started among the laity at the far end of the basilica and rolled towards the altar until finally it was taken up with diminished enthusiasm by the cardinals. He was obliged to stop until it subsided.

‘Now we must ask our Lord to send us a new Holy Father through the pastoral solicitude of the cardinal fathers. And in this hour we must remember first of all the faith and the promise of Jesus Christ, when He said to the one He had chosen: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

‘To this very day the symbol of papal authority remains a pair of keys. But to whom are these keys to be entrusted? It is the most solemn and sacred responsibility that any of us will ever be called
upon to exercise in our entire lives, and we must pray to God for that loving assistance He always reserves for His Holy Church and ask Him to guide us to the right choice.’

Lomeli turned over to the next page and scanned it briefly. Platitude followed platitude, seamlessly interlocked. He flicked over to the third page, and the fourth. They were no better. On impulse he turned around and placed the homily on the seat of his throne, then turned back to the microphone.

‘But you know all that.’ There was some laughter. Beneath him he could see the cardinals turning to one another in alarm. ‘Let me speak from the heart for a moment.’ He paused to arrange his thoughts. He felt entirely calm.

‘About thirty years after Jesus entrusted the keys of His Church to St Peter, St Paul the Apostle came here to Rome. He had been preaching around the Mediterranean, laying the foundations of our Mother the Church, and when he came to this city he was thrown into prison, because the authorities were frightened of him – as far as they were concerned, he was a revolutionary. And like a revolutionary, he continued to organise, even from his cell. In the year
ad
62 or 63
,
he sent one of his ministers, Tychicus, back to Ephesus, where he’d lived for three years, to deliver that remarkable letter to the faithful, part of which we listened to just now.

‘Let us contemplate what we’ve just heard. Paul tells the Ephesians – who were, let us remember, a mixture of Gentiles and Jews – that God’s gift to the Church is its variety: some are created by Him to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and others teachers, who “together make a unity in the work of service, building up the body of Christ”. They
make a unity in the work of service.
These are different people – one may suppose strong people, with forceful personalities, unafraid of
persecution – serving the Church in their different ways: it is the work of service that brings them together and makes the Church. God could, after all, have created a single archetype to serve Him. Instead, He created what a naturalist might call a whole ecosystem of mystics and dreamers and practical builders – managers, even – with different strengths and impulses, and from these He fashioned the body of Christ.’

The basilica was entirely still apart from a lone cameraman circling the base of the altar, filming him. Lomeli’s mind was fully engaged. Never had he been more sure of exactly what he wanted to say.

‘In the second part of the reading, we heard Paul reinforcing this image of the Church as a living body. “If we live by the truth and in love,” he says, “we shall grow
in all ways
into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole body is joined and fitted together.” Hands are hands, just as feet are feet, and they serve the Lord in their different ways. In other words, we should have no fear of diversity, because it is this variety that gives our Church its strength. And then, says Paul, when we have achieved completeness in truth and love, “we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in deceit”.

‘I take this idea of the body and the head to be a beautiful metaphor for collective wisdom: of a religious community working together to grow into Christ. To work together, and grow together, we must be tolerant, because all of the body’s limbs are needed. No one person or faction should seek to dominate another. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” Paul urges the faithful elsewhere in that same letter.