‘“Set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium” – yes, I know the ruling. Not perhaps the wisest of St John Paul’s many declarations, but there it is. No, of course I am not proposing female ordination. But there is nothing to stop us bringing women into the Curia at the highest levels. The work is administrative, not sacerdotal. The late Holy Father often spoke of it.’
‘True, but he never actually did it. How can a woman instruct a bishop, let alone select a bishop, when she isn’t even allowed to celebrate Communion? The College will see it as ordination by the back door.’
Bellini prodded his piece of veal a couple of times and then laid down his fork. He rested his elbows on the table, leaned forward and looked at each of them in turn. ‘Listen to me, my brothers, please. Let me be absolutely clear. I do not seek the papacy. I dread it. Therefore I have no intention of concealing my views or pretending to be anything other than I am. I urge you – I plead with you – not to canvass on my behalf. Not a word. Is that understood? Now, I am afraid I have lost my appetite, and if you will excuse me, I shall retire to my room.’
They watched him go, his stork-like figure bobbing stiffly between the tables and across the lobby until he disappeared upstairs. Sabbadin took off his spectacles, breathed on the lenses, polished them with his napkin, and then put them back on. He opened a small black notebook. ‘Well, my friends,’ he said, ‘you heard him. Now I suggest we divide the task. Rocco,’ he said to Dell’Acqua, ‘your English is the best: you talk to the North Americans, and to our colleagues from Britain and Ireland. Which of us has good Spanish?’ Panzavecchia raised his hand. ‘Excellent. The South Americans can be your responsibility. I shall speak to all the Italians who are frightened of Tedesco – that is, most of them. Gianmarco,’ he said to Santini, ‘presumably your work at the Congregation for Education means you know a lot of the Africans – will you deal with them? Needless to say, we avoid all mention of women in the Curia . . .’
Lomeli cut his veal into tiny pieces and ate them one at a time. He listened as Sabbadin went round the table. The Archbishop of Milan’s father had been a prominent Christian Democrat senator; he had learnt how to count votes in the cradle. Lomeli guessed he would be Secretary of State in a Bellini pontificate. When he had finished doling out assignments, he shut his notebook, poured himself a glass of wine and sat back with a satisfied expression.
Lomeli looked up from his plate. ‘I take it then you don’t believe our friend is sincere when he says he doesn’t want to be Pope.’
‘Oh, he’s perfectly sincere – that’s one of the reasons I support him. The men who are dangerous – the men who must be stopped – are the ones who actively desire it.’
*
Lomeli had kept an eye out all evening for Tremblay, but it wasn’t until the end of the meal, when the cardinals were queuing for coffee in the lobby, that he had the chance to approach him. The Canadian was standing in the corner holding a cup and saucer and listening to the Archbishop of Colombo, Asanka Rajapakse, by common consent one of the great bores of the Conclave. Tremblay’s eyes were fixed upon him. He was leaning towards him and nodding intently. Occasionally Lomeli heard him murmur, ‘Absolutely . . . absolutely . . .’ He waited nearby. He sensed that Tremblay was aware of his presence but was ignoring it, hoping he would give up and move away. But Lomeli was determined, and in the end it was Rajapakse, whose eyes kept darting to him, who reluctantly interrupted his own monologue and said, ‘I think the dean wishes to speak with you.’
Tremblay turned and grinned. ‘Jacopo, hello!’ he cried. ‘This has been a lovely evening.’ His teeth were an unnaturally brilliant white. Lomeli suspected he had had them polished for the occasion.
‘I wonder if I might borrow you for a moment, Joe?’ he said.
‘Yes, of course.’ Tremblay turned to Rajapakse. ‘Perhaps we could continue our conversation later?’ The Sri Lankan nodded to both men and moved away. Tremblay seemed sorry to see him go, and when he returned his attention to Lomeli, there was a trace of irritation in his voice. ‘What is this about?’
‘Could we talk somewhere more private? Your room, perhaps?’
Tremblay’s brilliant teeth vanished. His mouth turned down. Lomeli thought he might refuse. ‘Well I suppose so, if we must. But briefly, if you don’t mind. There are still some colleagues I need to speak to.’
His room was on the first floor. He led Lomeli up the stairs and along the passage. He walked quickly, as if anxious to get the thing over with. It was a suite, exactly the same as the Holy Father’s. All the lights – the overhead chandelier, the bedside and desk lamps, even the lights in the bathroom – had been left burning. It seemed antiseptic, gleaming like an operating theatre, entirely bare of possessions, apart from a can of hairspray on the nightstand. Tremblay closed the door. He didn’t invite Lomeli to sit. ‘What is this about?’
‘It concerns your final meeting with the Holy Father.’
‘What about it?’
‘I’ve been told it was difficult. Was it?’
Tremblay rubbed his forehead and frowned, as if making a great effort of memory. ‘No, not that I recall.’
‘Well, to be more specific, I have been told that the Holy Father demanded your resignation from all your offices.’
‘Ah!’ His expression cleared. ‘That piece of nonsense! This has come from Archbishop Woźniak, I presume?’
‘That I can’t say.’
‘Poor Woźniak. You know how it is?’ Tremblay’s hand wobbled an imaginary glass in mid-air. ‘We must make sure he receives proper treatment when all this is over.’
‘So there’s no truth in the allegation that at the meeting you were dismissed?’
‘None whatsoever! How utterly absurd! Ask Monsignor Morales. He was present.’
‘I would if I could, but obviously I can’t at the moment, as we’re sequestered.’
‘I can assure you he’ll only confirm what I’m telling you.’
‘No doubt. But still, it seems rather curious. Can you think of any reason why such a story should be circulating?’
‘I should have thought that was obvious, Dean. My name has been mentioned as a possible future Pope – a ludicrous suggestion, I need hardly add, but you must have heard the same rumours – and someone wants to blacken my name with false slurs.’
‘And you think that person is Woźniak?’
‘Who else could it be? I know for a fact he went to Morales with some story about what the Holy Father was alleged to have said to him – I know that because Morales told me. I might say he’s never dared speak directly to me about it.’
‘And you ascribe this entirely to a malicious plot to discredit you?’
‘I fear that’s what it comes to. It’s very sad.’ Tremblay put his hands together. ‘I shall mention the archbishop in my prayers tonight, and ask God to help him through his difficulties. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I would like to go back downstairs.’
He made a move towards the door. Lomeli blocked his way.
‘Just one last question, if I may, simply to put my mind at rest: could you tell me what it was that you discussed with the Holy Father in that final meeting?’
Outrage came as easily to Tremblay as piety and smiles. His tone became metallic. ‘No, Dean, I cannot. And to be truthful, I am shocked that you should expect me to disclose a private conversation – a very precious and private conversation, given that those were the last words I ever exchanged with the Holy Father.’
Lomeli pressed his hand to his heart and bowed his head slightly in apology. ‘I quite understand. Forgive me.’
The Canadian was lying, of course. They both knew it. Lomeli stood aside. Tremblay opened the door. In silence they walked back together along the corridor and at the staircase went their separate ways, the Canadian down to the lobby to resume his conversations, the dean wearily up another flight to his room and his doubts.
5
Pro eligendo Romano pontifice
THA
T NIGHT HE lay in bed in the darkness with the rosary of the Blessed Virgin around his neck and his arms folded crosswise on his chest. It was a posture he had first adopted in puberty to avoid the temptations of the body. The objective was to maintain it until morning. Now, nearly sixty years later, when such temptations were no longer a danger, he continued out of habit to sleep like this – like an effigy on a tomb.
Celibacy had not made him feel neutered or frustrated, as the secular word generally imagined a priest must be, but rather powerful and fulfilled. He had imagined himself a warrior within a knightly caste: a lonely and untouchable hero, above the common run. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. He was not entirely naïve. He had known what it was to desire, and to be desired, both by women and by men. And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness. It was only when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that he had begun to brood on what he had missed. Because what was he nowadays? No longer a shining knight: just another impotent old fellow, no more heroic than the average patient in a nursing home. Sometimes he wondered what had been the point of it all. The night-time pang was no longer of lust; it was of regret.
In the next-door room, he could hear the African cardinal snoring. The thin partition wall seemed to vibrate like a membrane with each stertorous breath. He was sure it was Adeyemi. No one else could be so loud, even in his sleep. He tried counting the snores in the hope that the repetition would lull him to sleep. When he reached five hundred, he gave up.
He wished he could have opened the shutters for some fresh air. He felt claustrophobic. The great bell of St Peter’s had ceased tolling at midnight. In the sealed chamber, the dark early-morning hours were long and trackless.
He turned on his bedside lamp and read a few pages from Guardini’s Meditations Before Mass.
If someone were to ask me what the liturgical life begins with, I should answer: with learning stillness . . . That attentive stillness in which God’s word can take root. This must be established before the service begins, if possible in the silence on the way to church, still better in a brief period of composure the evening before.
But how was such stillness to be achieved? That was the question to which Guardini offered no answer, and in place of stillness, as the night wore on, the noise in Lomeli’s mind became even shriller than usual. He saved others; himself he cannot save – the jeer of the scribes and elders at the foot of the cross. The paradox at the heart of the Gospel. The priest who celebrates Mass and yet is unable to achieve Communion himself.
He pictured a great shaft of cacophonous darkness, filled with taunting voices thundering down upon him from heaven. A divine revelation of doubt.
At one point in his despair he picked up the Meditations and flung it at the wall. It bounced off it with a thump. The snoring ceased for a minute, and then resumed.
*
At 6.30 a.m., the alarm sounded throughout the Casa Santa Marta – a clanging seminary bell. Lomeli opened his eyes. He was curled up on his side. He felt groggy, raw. He had no idea how long he had been asleep, only that it couldn’t have been for more than an hour or two. The sudden remembrance of all he had to do in the coming day passed over him like a wave of nausea, and for a while he lay unable to move. Normally his waking routine was to meditate for fifteen minutes then rise and say his morning prayers. But on this occasion, when at last he managed to summon the will to put his feet to the floor, he went directly into the bathroom and ran a shower as hot as he could bear. The water scourged his back and shoulders. He twisted and turned beneath it and cried out in pain. Afterwards he rubbed away the moisture on the mirror and surveyed with disgust his raw and scalded skin. My body is clay, my good fame a vapour, my end is ashes.
He felt too tense to breakfast with the others. He stayed in his room, rehearsing his homily and attempting to pray, and left it until the very last minute to go downstairs.
The lobby was a red sea of cardinals robing for the short procession to St Peter’s. The officials of the Conclave, led by Archbishop Mandorff and Monsignor O’Malley, had been allowed back into the hostel to assist; Father Zanetti was waiting at the foot of the stairs to help Lomeli dress. They went into the same waiting room opposite the chapel in which he had met Woźniak the night before. When Zanetti asked him how he had slept, he replied, ‘Very soundly, thank you,’ and hoped the young priest would not notice the dark circles beneath his eyes and the way his hands shook when he handed him his sermon for safe keeping. He ducked his head into the opening of the thick red chasuble that had been worn by successive deans of the College over the past twenty years and held out his arms as Zanetti fussed around him like a tailor, straightening and adjusting it. The mantle felt heavy on his shoulders. He prayed silently: Lord, who hast said, My yoke is easy and My burden is light, grant that I may so bear it as to attain Thy grace. Amen.
Zanetti stood in front of him and reached up to place upon his head the tall mitre of white watered silk. The priest stepped back a pace to check it was correctly aligned, squinted, came forward again and altered it by a millimetre, then walked behind Lomeli and tugged down the ribbons at the back and smoothed them. It felt alarmingly precarious. Finally he gave him the crozier. Lomeli lifted the golden shepherd’s crook a couple of times in his left hand, testing the weight. You are not a shepherd, a familiar voice whispered in his head. You are a manager. He had a sudden urge to give it back, to tear off the vestments, to confess himself a fraud and disappear. He smiled and nodded. ‘It feels good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
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 t
he 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.’