It’s Conclave week. If everything goes as planned, in seven days we will be here commenting on the new pope.
We have already read everything and the opposite of everything, we have read simplifications from political talk, and learned vaticanists as authoritative but obscure as bad economic journalists when they speak with abstruse formulas about the most concrete thing in the world, namely the money in our pockets.
Here popular involvement, polls in hand on the appeal of the Church and the Faith, is a bit more complex, despite the exciting journey of Pope Francis’ coffin on the popemobile from the Vatican to Santa Maria Maggiore among the people, his people. And this is where we need to start again, without making a tototo nome that I understand fascinates readers, in an age of collective perception fed on games and reality TV.
The Sistine Chapel will not be the home of Big Brother, although there will be no shortage of drama of relationships in closed places, alliances, dis-alliances, conflicts, poisons, calculations, techniques for victory. Conclave, cum clave, an invention of my ancestors from Viterbo, who tired of the length of time the cardinal electors (a good 33 months) locked them up and uncovered the roof of the papal palace.
This time there are 133 cardinals from 71 different countries, as many as 108 were appointed by Pope Francis, who among his many gifts also knew how to do politics and created, let’s say, a substantial electoral package for himself. The European bunch is the largest (53) but the sum of the other continents exceeds Europe, which even here seems to have lost its centrality.
The quorum to enter cardinal and exit pope is set at 90 voters, but there are many, and history teaches , who already enter popes and exit cardinals, that is how they entered. Some names have to be made now: Parolin ( other Italians in the running include Pizzaballa, Zuppi and Filoni) seems to already have 40 votes, the result of the dense dialogues of these days in the so-called congregations.
If I were Francis’ secretary of state, I would not be quiet. There is the troop of Americans, and Trump’s role on the day of the funeral was no small one. One name above all, Prevost, born in Chicago but with long experience in Latin America, in that South of the world that no longer coincides with the limited West in crisis of values. And so there are the chances of Asians, of Africans.
A complex puzzle, but Francis’ legacy is in that journey and in that Basilica in a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Rome. A Church that speaks to everyone, that knows how to read history and society, rights, the poor, social justice. And then internal reform. And then geopolitics, wars, peace always invoked and always impossible. A great, and vital, bet.
The article Conclave week comes from TheNewyorker.
