In the month since the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes on 11 February, many
colleagues both Italian and foreign have asked me to forecast which cardinal
would be elected to succeed Benedict XVI. Always and without exception, I have
demurred.(...)
The only exception to my self-imposed silence was with Michele
Brambilla, an old friend, fellow journalist and co-author with me of a book on
the Christian faith. Michele, now with La Stampa, earned his spurs at the
Corriere della Sera and is well versed in religious issues.
Asking him to keep
it under his hat until the conclave was over, I offered him the job of notary
and gave him just one name: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires.
My friend phoned me yesterday evening from a rain-lashed St Peter’s Square
where he was waiting for the white smoke. He reminded me about my prediction
and asked whether I confirmed it. I told him I did. Michele reminded me that
Bergoglio was not one of the names that most of his colleagues regarded as a
likely candidate, at least this time, whereas when Joseph Ratzinger was
elected, Bergoglio’s was apparently the second most voted name. But eight years
have passed. Cardinal Bergoglio is now 76 and everyone was expecting a pope at
the height of his powers. Many regarded the upper age limit as 65. In addition,
he would be the first Jesuit to become pope, a role to which the Company of
Jesus has never aspired, on the advice of their founder Ignatius Loyola.
Nevertheless, I still backed the Argentine.
A crystal ball? A whisper from the
Holy Spirit? A hotline to the Sistine Chapel? None of that. Just a little
knowledge of how today’s Church works. As I explained to Michele: “The decision
in the conclave, where the condition of the Church around the world is known,
could go to a geopolitical option, as was the case with Karol Wojtyla. A happy
choice, not just because it was one of the best pontificates of the century but
also because it panicked the hierarchy of the Soviet Union and the entire
Eastern bloc, who expected trouble from a Polish pope. And they were right to
be afraid. There duly followed Walesa, Solidarnosc, the Lenin shipyards at
Gdansk and workers’ strikes that for the first time a communist regime did not
bloodily repress. This was the crack that grew until in the end it brought down
the wall of empire.
None of this would have been possible without a Polish pope
– and one of such spirit and prestige! – watching and advising from the
Vatican”.
To continue this line of argument, a geopolitical choice today could
face in one of two directions. The first would summon to the chair of Peter the
first Chinese ever to take part in a conclave, the archbishop of Hong Kong,
John Tong Hon. That would sow panic not in Moscow or Warsaw but in Beijing, the
capital of the superpower of the future. The Chinese government has been unable
to eradicate persecution-resistant Catholicism and has created a national
church, independent of Rome, even appointing bishops. Believers who remain
faithful to Rome have had to go underground. How can they be confined to
catacombs and prison camps if one of them is pope? But the Church is never in a
hurry, taking the long view, the “longue durée” as Annales school of historians
has it. China’s turn will come at some future conclave when, as in all
totalitarian regimes, the system begins to weaken and declines, waiting for the
coup de grâce.
What about this conclave? It seemed to me that there was room
here for another geopolitical choice, this time a genuinely, extremely, urgent
one even if Europe is unaware of its gravity. The Church of Rome is on the
point of losing what it regarded as the continent of hope, the Catholic
continent par excellence in the popular imagination and the one that has made
Spanish the Church’s most widely spoken language.
Thousands of South American
men and women are turning their back on Catholicism every day, numbers that
torment local dioceses. Since the 1980s, almost a quarter of Latin American
believers have been lost. Where have they gone? They join the communities, sects
and churchlets of the evangelicals, the pentecostals who with money from
influential backers in North America, are realising the long-standing US
protestant dream of rooting out papist superstition in Latin America.
It should
be said that the ample funding those missionaries have at their disposal
attracts the continent’s outcasts, tempting them to join communities where
everyone has economic as well as spiritual support. Another contributing factor
is the political theology preached in recent decades by priests and friars
turned ideological activists, which has driven away from Catholicism the masses
who yearn for a vibrant, colourful, all-singing, all-dancing religion. This is
precisely the key in which Pentecostalism interprets Christianity, drawing in
hordes of deserters from Catholicism.
The conclave must have seen how urgently
intervention was needed with a programme drafted and implemented from Rome, and
so elected a cardinal South America to the chair of Peter. However, the exodus
regards mainly Brazil and the Andean countries.
If the new pope has to be South
American, why pick an Argentinian, an archbishop from a country less affected
by the flight to the sects? What weighed in favour of Cardinal Bergoglio, apart
from his personal qualities, theological background and experience, was
probably the fact that he is both a Spanish American and a European. His family
emigrated recently from the Asti area and Italian is his second native
language.
Since the Church has urgent need of a new broom in the Curia as well
as South America, a man who can address issues in the Vatican was called for.
In other words, I made a deduction, not a prediction. Many more deductions will
be needed, starting with the choice of a name – Francis – for the first time in
the history of the papacy. But it’s getting late and a deadline awaits. There
will be time to come back to this.
Vittorio Messori, 14 marzo 2013
English translation by Giles
Watson. www.watson.it . Article in Italian CORRIERE D S.