The small intrigues of the last three conclaves
It would be fallacious to write that the election of the Pope would only be the fruit of low political intrigue. A conclave is not an election like any other. No other ballot leaves so much room for prayer, discernment and the call of the Holy Spirit.
But it would be just as inaccurate to assert that the intrigues would be absent from their progress, when so many ecclesial sensitivities collide to draw the future of the Church. And even if the secret surrounds exchanges, the confidences which then filter reveal a more human, sometimes hectic reality.
2013: the doubts sown on the health of Bergoglio
Pope Francis, during his lifetime, was undoubtedly one of the most transparent behind the scenes of his election. In his autobiography Vivre (2024), he evoked a scene that occurred just a few hours before the decisive vote on March 13, 2013. While everything seemed to be playing, a cardinal, Mgr Santos Abril y Castelló, comes to question him about his health, suggesting that he would miss a lung. A subtle way of sowing doubt about his physical ability to exercise the pontifical charge. The cardinal in question, obviously annoyed, concludes by speaking of “last -minute maneuvers”.
This episode reveals that, until the last hours, some have tried to broadcast biased information to divert votes. In this case, I was missing in Jorge Bergoglio only a pulmonary lobe, removed in his youth. But the suspicion had been launched. And in such a tight election, every detail can count.
2005: Tactical Alliance for Ratzinger
Eight years earlier, Jorge Bergoglio had already emerged as a serious candidate against Joseph Ratzinger. During the 2005 conclave, his name had grown in power over the votes. However, it was Ratzinger who prevailed. According to Italian historian Alberto Melloni, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, an influential figure of the reforming and Jesuit current like Bergoglio, would have discreetly worked against the latter’s candidacy.
At the breakfast break, Martini would have gone around the tables to encourage his colleagues not to vote for the Argentinian bishop, saying that he knew him well, and that this choice would be a mistake. “Do not vote Bergoglio because you don’t know him, but we, yes,” he said. A surprising position, because Martini shared many of his convictions with Bergoglio. But the characters of the two men diverged deeply. According to his friend Andrea Riccardi, Martini did not carry the future Pope Francis in his heart.
It even seems that, faced with the risk of seeing an even more conservative candidacy emerge, Martini preferred to support that of Ratzinger, deemed more predictable. In his book Vatican secretsthe Vaticanist Bernard Lecomte also believes that an agreement could have been concluded between the two men, around some guarantees on the main orientations of the future pontificate. A tactical alliance, dictated by realism more than by spiritual affinity.
1978: a mischievously published interview
The October 1978 conclave seemed promised to two Italian cardinals. The conservative cardinal Giuseppe Siri, or the Cardinal Reformer Giovanni Benelli. The two obtain the greatest number of votes during the first laps. But the situation gets bogged down. Neither camps seem willing to give up their candidate. It must be said that mutual tensions had already been well attracted before the election. A few hours before the start of the conclave, the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo publishes an offensive interview with Cardinal Siri, who attacks the reforms proposed by the ephemeral Jean-Paul I, such as episcopal collegiality. Cardinal Siri had however asked the journalist to publish the interview only when the cardinals were cut off from the world, in the middle of a conclave. According to the Italian Vaticanist Giancarlo Zizola (1), it would be Cardinal Benelli himself who would have had the idea of anticipating the publication of the interview, informed of his content by the journalist, who was his friend. In the event of a manifest goal of weakening its competitor.
While the cardinals would locate themselves in a dead end-to-face face, the Archbishop of Vienna, Franz König, proposed an alternative: a candidate of compromise, who came from the East. Karol Wojtyla, cardinal of Krakow, embodied a new breath. He was gradually adopted by all, until elected Pope under the name of John Paul II.
Cardinal König did not come out that name of his hat. Two years earlier, in 1976, he had already expressed his conviction: the renewal of faith in Europe would come from the East, where state atheism had not stifled the thirst for transcendence, and where young people woke up to a personal, more interior faith. John Paul II, by his career and his charisma, proved him right.
(1) He conclaves, storia e segretiRoma, Newton & Compton, 1997
