Is China eyeing a friendly pope in the Vatican?

Last Sunday the Vatican released the first photograph of Pope Francis since his ordeal began. He was wearing a stole around his neck, indicating that he had concelebrated mass in the chapel of the Gemelli hospital. Admittedly, all he had to do was raise his hand and whisper a few words of consecration, but it would have been impossible to take such a photo a week earlier, when Vatican-watchers were checking their phones hourly to discover whether the See of Peter had become vacant.

Francis is still very ill, of course, and everyone noticed that the picture was taken from behind, perhaps to hide his oxygen tube. The image was touching but unintentionally symbolic. For the first time during this pontificate, power-hungry curial officials are flexing their muscles behind the back of a severely weakened pope.

One cardinal in particular is pushing his luck: Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, who is both the Vatican’s prime minister and foreign minister. The 70-year-old Italian career diplomat, known for his silky charm, has spent years weaving alliances with rival factions in the Church. Given Francis’s habit of defenestrating top advisors without warning, it’s testimony to Parolin’s political skills that he has held on to his job for 12 years. But it is one thing to cultivate useful friends; it’s quite another to exploit the pontiff’s absence to behave like a deputy pope, which the secretary of state emphatically is not. And it’s most dangerous of all to behave like a pope-in-waiting. Yet that is what Cardinal Parolin is doing.

On February 24, when it looked as though Francis was close to death, he presided over the first prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Square. The tearful crowds assumed that Parolin, the most powerful cardinal in the Church, was the natural choice to lead it. But precedence in the Vatican is a complicated business. Parolin is outranked by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who as dean of the College of Cardinals is responsible for summoning a conclave when a pope dies and preaches the funeral homily. Re is 91 and was due to step down last month. Parolin was preparing to succeed him when Francis renewed Re’s tenure indefinitely. In other words, the Pope blocked his secretary of state from also becoming dean. It was a brutal snub. Nevertheless, it was Parolin, not Re, who led the tearful crowds in the rosary, causing some colleagues to mutter about sharp elbows.

Eyebrows were raised again on March 14, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the Vatican for its support in facilitating the return of children deported by Russia. He did so in a phone conversation with Cardinal Parolin rather than with the Pope’s personal emissary to Ukraine, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, who helped negotiate the prisoner exchange. Friends of Zuppi – who is widely seen as Parolin’s rival among the Italian bishops – felt that the secretary of state was exceeding his brief.

Now we learn that Parolin will preside over the mass in St. Peter’s on April 2 marking the 20th anniversary of “the return to the House of the Father” by St. John Paul II. This, too, has put noses out of joint. John Paul’s signature achievement was his role in the collapse of Soviet communism, made possible by ditching the Church’s naive policy of Ostpolitik. Cardinal Parolin, by contrast, resurrected it when he negotiated the 2018 pact with Beijing that has ceded control over the appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – a deal that could have been agreed only over John Paul’s dead body.

It’s most dangerous of all to behave like a pope-in-waiting. Yet that is what Cardinal Parolin is doing

“These instances of Parolin stealing the limelight may be unremarkable in themselves, but together they demonstrate that he’s the only papabile cardinal who is actually running as a candidate,” says a Vatican observer. “And this won’t have passed unnoticed by the Holy Father, whose apparent recovery was perhaps not anticipated by Parolin.”

The source points out that when the secretary of state was summoned to the Pope’s hospital bedside on March 2 he was accompanied by his Venezuelan deputy, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who acts as papal chief of staff. “Parolin doesn’t get on with Peña Parra, whom the Pope prefers to him. Coming right after Francis blocked Parolin as Dean, inviting his deputy was another snub.”

If Parolin can’t conceal his Machiavellian ambitions, why is he portrayed in the media as an unassuming “moderate” whose supporters among the 137 cardinal electors include liberals and conservatives? There is nothing moderate about the surrender to Beijing. And Parolin’s attitude towards the traditional Latin Mass – increasingly popular with young Catholics – can hardly be described as tolerant. He was one of the Italian bishops who pressed Pope Francis to ban the ancient liturgy.

In contrast, the Secretary of State has picked his way through the minefields of women’s ordination and gay blessings, the two issues that could cost him Asian and African votes. His public line is that the ban on ordained female deacons is “non-negotiable,” but the late Cardinal George Pell recalled that he once tried to persuade him to support the idea. In some ways Parolin resembles Francis (then Cardinal Bergoglio) before the 2013 conclave – a closet liberal who tells conservatives what they want to hear. “He doesn’t give you the impression that he hates the Church,” concedes one of Parolin’s enemies.

A Pope Parolin would sideline the experiment in “synodality” – an Anglican-style talking shop for woke activists – that is trying the patience of bishops the world over. He would continue to embed liberals in the Roman curia but would steer clear of the pro-abortion zealots and trans-rights fanatics whom Francis hosted in order to goad the traditionalists.

The biggest danger is that Parolin’s Chinese allies would increase their grip on Vatican City

The biggest danger is that Parolin’s Chinese allies would increase their grip on Vatican City, whose computers they have already hacked: just last week Meng Anming, a Chinese biologist and CCP loyalist, was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Catholic campaigners for human rights in China also suspect that Beijing, which owned the gay hook-up app Grindr when it was installed on hundreds of clerical smartphones, has vast amounts of Kompromat to play with – a factor, perhaps, in the Vatican’s kowtowing to the CCP.

The Beijing pact is the Secretary of State’s Achilles’ heel. In 2018 Cardinal Joseph Zen, the heroic 93-year-old former bishop of Hong Kong, accused Parolin of having “a poisoned mind. He is very sweet, but I have no trust in this person.” In 2020 he went further, describing his defense of the deal as sickening. “Parolin knows he himself is lying,” said Zen. The Pope was being manipulated by “the Most Eminent Parolin and his henchmen.” For a prominent cardinal to attack a secretary of state using such language was unprecedented. Yet it made few headlines in the secular press.

This brings us to a crucial weapon in Cardinal Parolin’s armory: his cozy relationship with the Vatican left-leaning press corps, which has concealed Francis’s protection of Latin American sex-abusers as doggedly as White House correspondents tried to hide Joe Biden’s mental decline. For more than a decade Parolin has supplied journalists with exclusives in return for their discretion. Questions about disappeared Chinese bishops have not been asked; nor is there curiosity about Parolin’s relationship with the defrocked ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who traveled to China to negotiate the notorious deal long after the Vatican knew he was a serial predator.

And what did Parolin know about Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta? This Francis protégé was jailed for four-and-a-half years for his assaults on Argentinian seminarians – but only after the Pope tried to airlift him to safety by employing him to oversee the Vatican treasury. In 2017 a horrifying account of Zanchetta’s crimes was given to Vincenzo Turturro, deputy nuncio in Buenos Aires. Turturro, formerly Parolin’s private secretary, passed on the details to the secretary of state, who said nothing while Francis covered up for Zanchetta.

Cardinal Parolin’s scandalous failures, which include catastrophic financial losses incurred by his staff in a London property scandal, transcend the question of whether he is liberal or conservative. But, of course, it still matters: if his feline maneuvers succeed – if he persuades the African cardinals that he is fundamentally orthodox – then he is better placed than any of the papabili to become pope.

There may well be a conclave this year: there is speculation that, if Francis does move back to the Casa Santa Marta, he will receive the equivalent of hospice care. One rumor has it that he will appoint a senior official, not necessarily a cardinal, to act as his deputy. Another report suggests that he will meddle with the conclave rules to stop orthodox cardinals comparing notes.

At the moment, the conservatives don’t appear to have a candidate. The scholarly Cardinal Peter Erdo of Esztergom-Budapest is nervous and hesitant; the ex-Protestant Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Stockholm is deeply spiritual, but it doesn’t help that he is a Carmelite – having experienced a Jesuit pope, cardinals are wary of electing another member of an order. The Italian Cardinal Fernando Filoni is a diplomat who risked his life as ambassador in Baghdad – but he’s been accused of keeping quiet about McCarrick. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, made headlines when he offered himself as a hostage in place of Israeli children. He exudes a dignified charisma and doesn’t belong to any faction but is perhaps too young at fifty-nine.

As for the liberals, Francis loyalists are divided between the Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino Mendonca, prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education and an admired poet, and the “bicycling beanpole” Cardinal Zuppi, a kind-hearted socialist fond of the Latin Mass. Both men are gay-friendly, which will make it difficult to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority.

Then there is the exuberant Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle from the Philippines, mysteriously demoted by Francis as head of evangelization but now back in favor. Another liberal possibility, incredibly, is the jargon-spouting Cardinal Mario Grech, the Maltese secretary general of the Synod of Bishops. He’s despised by conservatives, who call him “the bozo from Gozo.”

But none of the above can boast a contacts book, knowledge of secrets or reserves of patronage to compare with those of Cardinal Parolin. On the other hand, none has been branded a poisonous liar by a cardinal regarded by many as a living saint. A great deal depends, therefore, on whether the former leader of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong can attend the pre-conclave meetings at which cardinals ineligible to vote advise the electors – assuming, of course, that the 93-year old cardinal outlives the 88-year-old pontiff. What we do know is that Zen wants to be there and that it is in Parolin’s interests to stop him. Beijing is intensely interested in the outcome of the conclave. Will it intervene?