Pope hunt: the plotting to pick the next pontiff

The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas until November. But judging by the trailer released this summer, its starry cast, crafty plot and spectacular cinematography — jets of smoke scattering cardinals as an explosion shatters the Sistine Chapel — will instantly erase memories of The Two Popes, Netflix’s risible Oscar-nominated fantasy in which Benedict XVI secretly chooses Cardinal Bergoglio as his successor.

Harris’s novel was published in 2016 and diplomatically set some years in the future, since the unnamed Holy Father lying dead of a heart attack in the Casa Santa Marta was clearly meant to be Francis. When he dies, all cardinals under the age of eighty and therefore eligible to vote are locked in the Casa between the rounds of ballots. Their cell phones are confiscated and WiFi turned off. But what happens if, during the election, the Dean of the College of Cardinals — an Italian in the novel, but played by Ralph Fiennes as the English Cardinal Lawrence in the movie — watches one of the front-runners sabotage a rival between ballots? And what if a cardinal created in secret by the old pope turns out not to be what he seems?

Some of the details in the book haven’t worn well. Harris’s deceased Holy Father, humble and principled, is nothing like the vindictive, scandal-haunted Francis of 2024. One of the four leading candidates, the Italian Cardinal Tedesco, is a raging traditionalist with dozens of allies among the electors. No such creature could exist today. Perhaps four cardinal-electors are conservative Latin Mass ritualists, and none stands a chance — unsurprisingly, given that ninety-two of the 120 eligible cardinals were created by Pope Francis.

On the whole, however, the Vatican politics depicted in the novel are convincing. Apart from Tedesco, the other frontrunners are the Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi, played in the film by Lucian Msamati, who would allow tribal dancing in the middle of Mass but not Communion for the divorced; a sophisticated liberal, Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci); and Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), the papal chamberlain, a glad-handing Canadian who keeps tabs on everyone and presses a different set of buttons for each faction. It’s a clever mixture.

When Conclave was being filmed, it looked as if its November release might coincide with an actual conclave. Francis was horribly short of breath and making unscheduled trips to hospital. “Now he’s bounced back, like he always does,” says a Vatican source wearily — not because he wants a funeral but because any renewed energy will be poured into score-settling. For months there have been rumors that the Pope, infuriated by reports that young Catholics are switching to the Traditional Latin Mass, is considering a draconian global ban on the ancient liturgy.

But he knows he’s running out of time. He’s eighty-seven, six years older than Joe Biden, and the oldest pope for more than a century. Although he can enact scorched-earth measures against traditionalists, he’s created too many cardinals with hidden conservative views to ensure an openly progressive successor. If a conclave were held in the next year, it’s likely that three prominent candidates would roughly correspond to Harris’s Adeyemi, Bellini and Tremblay. In that case, conservatives who don’t want an African pope would look for someone inspired by Benedict XVI, insisting on purity of doctrine and the aesthetic renovation of all worship, old and new. They’re already searching, hampered by the difficulty of applying a western template to apparently promising cardinals from East Asia.

Meanwhile, as the Vatican-watcher Nico Spuntoni points out, in Rome only one man is spoken of as an obvious front-runner to succeed Francis — and it isn’t the liberal Cardinal Luis Tagle, who had a rock-star following in Manila but, on moving to the Curia where he became the head of evangelization, saw his career implode amid allegations of incompetence. “If after the next conclave Cardinal Pietro Parolin appears dressed in white, no one would be surprised,” says Spuntoni.

Parolin, a sixty-nine-year-old native of Veneto, is secretary of state — that is, prime minister of the Vatican state and, more prominently, the Pope’s representative on the world stage. For eleven years he has survived Francis’s regular savage reshuffles. He is regarded as a moderate who would be able to repair the damage caused by his boss’s outbursts and vendettas. As Spuntoni notes, he has the knack of commiserating with the victims of Francis’s wrath while never letting a disloyal word cross his lips.

But to understand the true nature of Parolin’s diplomacy, you have to study his most far-reaching initiative as secretary of state. In 2018 he brokered a deal with Beijing, never published, that gives the Chinese Communist Party authority to nominate Catholic bishops for approval by the Pope, thus supposedly ending the rift between the state-controlled Church and the underground one loyal to him. Beijing immediately started appointing bishops without consulting Rome, and the Pope had to rubber-stamp them. Meanwhile the Pope, supported by his secretary of state, says nothing about China’s genocidal attacks on the Uighurs.

How can anyone survive such a squalid disaster? The answer is that Parolin’s virtuoso diplomatic skills are being employed to protect himself.

Likewise, he was in charge of the Secretariat of State when it was drawn into comically inept and corrupt financial investments. They included a scheme to seize control of the luxury development of a former Harrods warehouse in London’s Sloane Avenue. The Holy See claimed it was scammed by Parolin’s deputy, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who along with nine other defendants was convicted by a Vatican court of embezzlement, money laundering, fraud and extortion.

Now the spotlight is on Parolin’s current deputy, Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, who last year admitted that he’d ordered unauthorized electronic spying on the director of the Vatican bank, which had refused to lend his department €150 million to cover its losses in Sloane Avenue. At the beginning of July, Peña Parra was called as a witness in a High Court lawsuit connected to the London deal, in which he admitted signing a “completely fictitious” invoice for €5 million submitted by a businessman allegedly extorting money from the Holy See. Conveniently for Parolin, the media barely noticed.

Like Cardinal Tremblay in Conclave, Parolin subtly adjusts his message for different factions. We can only intuit his real views by looking carefully at his résumé. His mentor was Cardinal Achille Silvestrini (1923-2019), a champion of Ostpolitik, a policy of almost total surrender to socialist regimes. Silvestrini was also part of the so-called St. Gallen Mafia, the group of liberal reformists who lobbied desperately to stop Cardinal Ratzinger being elected pope in 2005.

In the 1990s the wily Silvestrini ran his own parallel unofficial press office; so does Parolin, reliably feeding his favorite Vatican correspondents stories to stop them peering too closely into his department. Meanwhile he moves sinuously among the College of Cardinals, making sure that his more hardline views fall only on sympathetic ears. For example, he’s careful not to advertise his support for the proposed ban on the Traditional Latin Mass, a particular target of the St. Gallen cardinals. In public, he supports Francis’s ruling against women deacons. In private? He once tried to persuade a senior cardinal that they were a good idea. If he’s pope, they’ll be back on the agenda.

In the trailer for Conclave, Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini tells Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence that “no sane man would want the papacy.” Then the camera comes to rest on Tremblay and an unidentified voice says: “The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it.” In the book, the line belongs to Bellini’s ally Cardinal Sabbadin, who describes them as “the ones who must be stopped.”

In the event, disaster is averted because vital information leaks into Casa Santa Marta after the doors are locked and the windows shuttered. That won’t happen in real life. Then again, it doesn’t need to. The cardinal-electors already know enough. It will be their fault if the most powerful cardinal in the Vatican manages to walk away from the torment of Chinese Catholics and the blizzard of money-laundering in the Secretariat of State and on to the balcony of St. Peter’s.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.