Wikileaks and the papal lottery:
How the US misread the 2005 Conclave
by Filippo Di Giacomo
Translated from
Dec. 1, 2010
In mid-April 2005, while the Church was mourning the death of John Paul II, the staff at the American Embassy was taking the easy way out.
Marco Tosatti,
La Stampa's Vatican correspondent, poked fun at the embassy's apparent 'sources' in his blog yesterday, saying he was one of those whose information the embassy sent on to Washington as diplomatic information.
The Americans didn't have to look far, since Marco had published an article on his picks as the leading papabile to succeed the Polish Pope, and Luigi Accattoli, who was chief Vaticanista for
Corriere della Sera at the time, contributed to the US 'intelligence' by writing that Cardinal Ratzinger was unlikely to get beyond the first ballot. "I wrote it," he said on his blog yesterday, 'but with better prose".
In fact, from what has been released of the diplomatic cables from Rome to Washington, it is easy to see passages and summaries, often distorted, from the writings of Giancarlo Zizola and Marco Politi for
Il Sole 24 Ore and
La Repubblica, respectively.
One concludes that when preparing their daily reports to Washington, the embassy staff simply depended on the best-known Vaticanistas.
'Prudent' perhaps, but obviously incomplete.
[And weighted down with all the ideological and political baggage of the individual reporters!]
In fact, it is possible to find online articles by observers without name recognition, but no less sharp, who analyzed the Conclave prospects quite clearly.
I will give just one example. Arnaldo Casali, writing for
Adesso online, a Catholic site that is an offshoot of Reteblu, the radio network of the Italian bishops' conference, observed:
As I start to write this, Joseph Ratzinger has just finished giving his homily at the Mass pro eligendo Pontefice which on this Monday morning, April 18, opens the work of the Conclave.
Joseph Ratzinger is the only one who, if elected Pope, would not spring any surprises. Because we know everything there is to know about his agenda: Rejection of the dominant relativism in the contemporary world - and therefore, a more profound reliance on doctrine and on the Tradition of the Church.
It would not be a conservative Pontificate in the strictest sense - but it would be a reforming Papacy, along the lines of Gregory VII.
His will be a Church that is less powerful from the politico-economic viewpoint, but more 'pure' in moral and doctrinal terms.
The motto for the Pontificate might well be 'Less is better'.... Ratzinger's Church would be much 'smaller' but also stronger. It will be 'another' in the context of the century it belongs to, and it will set itself as the pole star for those who reject the dominant system of values in the world today.
[WOW! Who is Arnaldo Casali, and what is he doing these days? Perhaps the Vatican Press Office should hire him!]
Anyone engaged in religion information knows that in the Vatican, there are at least a couple of things regarding papal succession that are done but never talked about
The first is the 'Totopapa' [in effect, betting in the papal lottery) which in the Wojtyla era had been rampant in the Apostolic Palace since 1993
[aided and abetted by the speculation of the media, of course] - but the American embassy staff should have known that this has never brought good to anyone!
Rereading now the predictions in the media, including the foreign media - all dutifully echoed in the US embassy cables - they included quite a number of candidates who had so many qualities except good health! Names like the English Cardinal Hume, the American Bernardin, the Brazilian Neves Moreira, the French Bille.
[OOOPS! Di Giacomo cannot be referring to the 2005 Conclave here! Cardinal Bernardin died in 1996, Cardinal Hume in 1999, Cardinal Neves in 2002!]
The second thing that one is permitted to think about in the Vatican is how the various voting blocs in the Conclave might look like. If you ask a cardinal which 'party' he belongs to, you might as well cross yourself off from his list of media contacts.
But sometimes their eminences themselves come up with a public manifesto. The most famous would be that of John Quinn, then Archbishop of San Francisco, who in 1996 gave a lecture at Oxford in which he argued for less curial authority.
His thesis was this: Vatican II had not yet taken hold enough to allow a redefinition of the Curia in a new form. Therefore, it remained an inappropriate filter between the bishops and the Pope, and it was a situation which had further worsened because of the physical condition of John Paul II.
The media have always considered the Vatican II progressives among the cardinals as left of the mainstream,only because their nominal leader was the charismatic and well-known progressive Cardinal Martini of Milan.
In fact, in 2005, one could not speak of anything leftist nor sinister [in Italian, it reads better, 'Ne sinistra ne sinistro'] in the College of Cardinals, since already by the 2001 consistory (sixth in the Wojtyla era), sthe progressives, including the four presumably most formidable 'Pope-makers' of their time - the Italians Silvestrini and Laghi, Danneels of Belgium and Lorschneider of Brazil - were unable to get any significant traction among the 156 cardinals for their proposal to revitalize the government of the Church along more collegial lines.
The only colleague of theirs who quietly gave their proposal the close consideration it deserved was Joseph Ratzinger. It was no accident that he was elected Pope four years later.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/12/2010 20:48]