Today the College of Cardinals meets to formally begin the process of picking a new Pope — and it’s coming at a moment none too soon.
In this this 21st Century age of media overkill with its accelerating, constant barrage of information, words and images, it only stands to reason that speculation over who would replace the media savvy Pope John Paul II would be intensely speculative, almost on an unprecedented scale. And, some reports suggest, it has been precisely that.
Just pick your favorite speculation. There have been stories suggesting the final pick might be an Italian Pope (when has that ever happened before?), Nigerian Pope, Colombian Pope, Indian Pope, Latin American Pope, German Pope, etc. About the only speculation we haven’t heard is about an Israeli Pope, but the day is still young…
Speculation and the Vatican version of office politics became so fierce that Canada’s Marc Cardinal Ouellet yesterday used his homily to basically tell Catholic political operatives to cool it in what is shaping up to be a notably bare-knuckles political and rumor campaign:
“The choice the cardinals are making is not a political act based on some human calculation,” Ouellet told parishioners at the Holy Mary in Transpontina church near St. Peter’s Square.
“It’s an act of faith, and profound listening to God’s spirit, to seek the person that God wants to be the bishop of Rome and the head of the universal church,” Ouellet said.
Cardinals are not supposed to campaign, but underground lobbying is rampant in Rome, where Italian newspapers have published accounts of backroom dealing and startling revelations on various frontrunners. Reports have questioned the physical and mental health, political connections and even criminal activity of cardinals.
As rumours spread that frontrunner Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had already locked up 50 of the 77 votes required to win the election, reports of ill health started to dog the 78-year-old German.
One newspaper dredged up details of Ratzinger’s past as a reluctant member of the Hitler Youth. Ratzinger has collected a series of nicknames from unidentified church sources in the past week, including the Panzer Cardinal, God’s Rottweiler and the Enforcer.
As buzz grew surrounding India’s Ivan Cardinal Dias, so did the rumour that he suffers from diabetes. Details of an Italian cardinal’s treatment for depression emerged and another was rumoured to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, like Pope John Paul.
Whisper campaigns involved several Latin American cardinals, accusing them of unseemly connections to drug dealers, former military dictators and, in one case, a kidnapping.
It almost sounds as if they’ve studied American Presidential campaigns…
Meanwhile, there are some favorites, who you can read about here. And one thing is for certain: as the Globe and Mail notes, once the process actually begins it will be a moving spectacle:
Indeed, given that the cardinals pledged unanimously last week not to talk to journalists until after the election is over, it might have been a mystery as to how so much of their human calculations were turning up in the news media. But members of the Vatican’s full-time press corps pointed out that the only cardinals respecting the silence pledge are the boy scouts from Canada and the United States.This morning at 10 o’clock, enveloped in music, incense and prayer, the cardinals were to enter St. Peter’s Basilica to celebrate the Holy Mass for the Election of a Roman Pontiff set down in a 69-page liturgy complete with coloured reproductions from a 14th-century psalter.
Four hours later, they were to lock themselves in the adjoining Sistine Chapel. One by one, beneath a Renaissance fresco depicting the final, fearsome judgment on the souls of the good and the wicked, they were to swear an oath to tell no one about their deliberations.
After that, they were to hear a meditation on electing a pope, instructing them to behave solum Deum prae oculis habentes — “having only God before your eyes” — and then decide whether to go ahead and cast a first ballot that day or retire from the chapel to politick discreetly and get down to voting tomorrow.
But the FUN part is the speculation and the sayings that have been passed down from generation to generation, as the Boston Globe notes:
”Go in a pope, come out a cardinal,” some say.”If the last pope was fat, the next one is skinny,” others like to venture.
And within such banter — from the borgo, or neighborhood, in the shadow of the Vatican’s walls to the broad avenues of the shopping district — is a strongly held belief among Italians that trying to guess who will be the next successor to St. Peter is a fool’s game.
From one generation to the next, Italians have been around the process long enough to know it is a notoriously difficult result to forecast. But that doesn’t stop Italians and many others, from online betting parlors to over-caffeinated media pundits, from rolling the dice in the pope sweepstakes.
Right now perhaps the most speculation (which probably means it’s going to be proven wrong) centers on Germany’s Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a close ally of the late Pope John Paul II. The New York Times notes:
There was never doubt that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s hard-line defender of the faith, would have a strong hand in selecting the next pope. But in the days of prayer and politics before the conclave, which begins on Monday, he has emerged as perhaps the surprise central figure: the man who could become the 265th pope, choose him or be the one other cardinals knock from the running.Any talk of who will become the next pope is guesswork, echoes from cardinals and their staffs sworn to silence about one of the world’s most elite and secretive gatherings.
But one bit of wisdom has emerged in the Italian press as conventional: that Cardinal Ratzinger, a German close to John Paul II, has up to 50 votes among the 115 elector cardinals, or at least that is the strength his supporters claim.
That is short of the two-thirds, or 77 votes, needed in the early stages of voting. Still, he appears to command the largest and most cohesive block, and at a minimum, it seems unlikely that the next pope will be chosen without his
But, the Times notes in what is in effect a big “on the other hand,” many think he’s too old (78), not charismatic enough, and too “rigid.” The Times goes into more detail on the jockeying for position for Pope.
So in the end one old adage does hold when applied to selecting a new Pope: “It ain’t over till it’s over…”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.