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Dr. Robert Moynihan

 
March 2, 2013, Saturday — The Next and the Last

Since Pope Benedict left the papacy on Thursday evening at 8 p.m., the Catholic Church is in a period in which the chair of Peter is vacant (“sede vacante“).

Cardinals will begin to meet in the Vatican on Monday morning, March 4, in less than 48 hours. A pool of five journalists will be able to attend the meetings, and to report on what occurs there.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of chatting going on in the press about what will happen, what could happen, what should happen.

Lists of “papabili” (the Italian word means simply “Pope-able,” that is, men who are considered qualified to become Pope, or likely to be considered by the other cardinals for election to the papacy) are being prepared and published.

In Italy, there is considerable support for the idea that the new Pope should be an Italian, after two foreign Popes, John Paul II (1978-2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-2013). In their theological outlook, the 28 Italian cardinals range from quite progressive to quite traditional. There is not yet one candidate among them who seems to have garnered a consensus.

If there is no consenus about who the leading Italian candidate is, or should be, there is even less consensus about who a possible non-Italian cardinal who could succeed Joseph Ratzinger might be.

Four cardinals being “mentioned” often.

The four men are Italian Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri and Italian Cardinal Angelo Scola.

But if one goes to the influential La Stampa/Vatican Insider website, one finds a  list of 21 cardinals with large photos and brief summaries about each man. Here is the link: http://cmsmultimedia.lastampa.it/multimedia/vatican-insider/lstp/181465/

(Note: The money behind La Stampa of Turin, Italy, comes from estate of the late Gianni Agnelli, the chief owner of the FIAT automobile company, one of the most influential men in Italy in the last century.)

Here is the list of “papabili” from La Stampa. Note that all four of the names on the list above are also on the list below. Note also the first cardinal mentioned, from Brazil, Odilo Scherer. Many in Rome right now are “mentioning” him, and he may very well be the “front-runner” right now, at least in the “conventional” wisdom. Again, you can see photos of all these men at the link just given.

1. Odilo Pedro Scherer, 63, archbishop of Sao Paolo, Brazil;

2. Marc Ouellet, 67, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops in the Vatican; formerly archbishop of Quebec, Canada;

3. Angelo Scola, 72, archbishop of Milan, Italy;

4. Luis Antonio Tagle, 56, archbishop of Manila, the Philippines;

5. Gianfranco Ravasi, 70, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture and formerly Prefect of the Ambrosian Library in Milan;

6. Angelo Bagnasco, 70, archbishop of Genoa, Italy;

7. Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, 56, head of the Council for Justice and Peace in the Vatican, formerly archbishop of Cape Coast, Ghana;

8. Peter Erdo, 61, archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary;

9. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 77, archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina;

10. Sean Patrick O’Malley, O.F.M.Cap., archbishop Of Boston, Massachusetts, USA;

11. Timothy Dolan, 63, archbishop of New York, New York, USA;

12. Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, 74, archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo;

13. Donald William Wuerl, 73, archbishop of Washington, D.C., USA;

14. Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, 70, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras;

15. Joao Braz de Aviz, 65, Prefect of the Congregation for Religious and the Institutes of Consecrated Life in the Vatican, from Brazil;

16. Francisco Robles Ortega, 63, archbishop of Guadalajara, Mexico;

17. Tarcisio Bertone, 78, Secretary of State in the Vatican, formerly archbishop of Genoa, Italy;

18. Kurt Koch, 62, head of the Vatican’s Council for Christian Unity, formerly archbishop of Basel, Switzerland;

19. Christoph Schoenborn, 68, archbishop of Vienna, Austria;

20. Leonardo Sandri, 70, Prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, born in Argentina;

21. Robert Sarah, 70, President of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” formerly archbishop of Conakry, Guinea.

Now, clearly, if all these candidates receive votes, the Conclave will be split into 21 small groups. Moreover, there are likely to be other candidates not on this list. The result would be dozens of candidates, each with one, two, or a handful of votes.

Running the numbers, if each of these 21 candidates were to receive an equal number of votes from the expected 115 electors, they would each receive either five or six votes. If there were even more candidates, then each would average about four votes, or fewer.

So the real issue becomes: what will “coagulate” four or five votes into 10, then 10 into 20, 20 into 40, and 40 into the needed 77? (Two-thirds of 115 is 77, making 77 the “magic number” to clinch an election.)

One great vehicle of “coagulation” is to make some sort of an “agreement” about the office of Secretary of State, the “Number 2” position in the Roman Curia after the Pope himself.

And many journalists are proposing scenarios in which a foreign candidate agrees to keep an Italian as the Secretary of State, and by making this agreement, gains the additional support of a number of votes.

Looking at the Conclave from the opposite perspective, if 77 votes are needed to elect a Pope, only 39 votes are needed to block the election of any candidate.

The Italians, with 28 votes, together with another 11 cardinals, could theoretically block the election of any candidate not to their liking.

These 28 Italian voters — the largest block of votes from a single country — may try to find some way to stay united. If they break up into seven groups of four votes each, they lose their possible influence over the outcome.

So the strategy of the Italians, presumably, will be to try to agree, in these coming days, on one candidate from the very outset, from the very first vote, in order to immediately project one candidate, with 20 or 22 or 24 votes, into a very powerful position, distancing him from all the others, who will only have four or five or six votes each.

But who will that candidate be?

No one knows.

Still, a lot of people are speculating.

The Rome-based La Repubblica today said the “new hypothesis” is of a Pope older than age 80, a strong man who will “clean up” the Roman Curia but who will not have a long pontificate. “To change the Curia, a veteran is needed,” the headline says. The paper ran the photos of five cardinals over age 80:

—Camillo Ruini, 82, formerly the Pope’s vicar for the diocese of Rome;

—Angelo Sodano, 86, presently the Dean of the College of Cardinals and formerly the Secretary of State;

—Jose Saraiva Martins, 81, emeritus Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, from Portugal;

—Jozef Tomko, 89, emeritus Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, from Slovakia; and

—Julian Herranz, 83, of Spain, the head of the special commission appointed by Pope Benedict to investigate the “Vatileaks” scandal, and formerly the head of the Vatican office for interpreting Church legal texts. He is also a member of the Prelature of Opus Dei. (Herranz was also mentioned as a possible candidate a few days ago in La Repubblica by Concita De Gregorio in the third of her series of articles on the Pope’s decision to resign.)

Clearly, if the cardinals start looking at candidate among the cardinals over age 80, like these five, the possible pool of candidates nearly doubles, making it more difficult still to predict who might emerge as the new Pope.

Salvatore Izzo of AGI yesterday wrote that the fact that a Pope, following Benedict’s example, may possibly resign after just a few years in office is now a factor in the thinking of many cardinals.

This is leading some cardinals to wonder, he writes, whether it may not be possible “to elect a Pope experienced in the ways of the Roman Curia, who might leave office after having realized the reform of the Vatican offices (in the direction of greater efficiency but also of greater morality).” A reform, he adds, “which Pope Benedict, on the evening of February 13, confided in private that he considered urgent, so much so that he called it his ‘principal regret’ that he did not complete the task before the end of his pontificate.”

And Izzo then writes that both Sariava Martins and Herranz would be cardinals who might fit this profile, but also Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, 75, a canonist who is the President of the Pontifical Council for Legistlative Texts, who was the auxiliary bishop of the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in Milan.

Then Izzo adds an interesting hypothesis: that some cardinals think that the whole idea of choosing an “older-than-80 cardinal” is a type of “Trojan horse” to prepare the way for the cardinals to consider the quite old, but still powerful, present Dean of the College, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 86, who will not be among the voters, because over age 80, but, Izzo says, has very close allies in the Conclave, under age 80: Cardinals Sandri, Giovanni Lajolo, and Paolo Romeo. (“Qualcuno ritiene pero’ che queste candidature — oggettivamente deboli in quanto immaginate per un Pontificato breve — benche’ invocate da alcuni cardinali in perfetta buona fede possano rappresentare una sorta di “cavallo di Troia”, per un recupero in Conclave della figura forte e ingombrante dell’attuale decano Angelo Sodano, che restera’ fuori per eta’ ma puo’ contare nella Sistina su alcuni fedelissimi come i cardinali Sandri, Lajolo e Romeo.)

Then Izzo adds that the idea of a Pope resigning is also having a very different effect: it is increasing the chances of several younger cardinals, who once might have appeared “too young” because they would have remained Pope for 25 or 30 years, but now may be considered “just right” because they may become Pope at about age 60, then resign after 15 years, at age 75.

One of those Izzo names in this category is Cardinal Peter Erdo of Budapest, Hungary, 61. (Erdo, a brilliant canon lawyer and legal historian, has a photographic memory, and is, among all the cardinals, one of the very few who speaks fluent Russian; his Italian is also fluent, as is his German, French, Spanish, and English; he grew up during the communist time in Hungary, and was required by law to do service in the Hungarian military as a conscript.) (“Ma il fattore dimissioni favorisce al contempo anche candidati giovani come l’ungherese di 61 anni Peter Erdo, presidente dei vescovi europei e quindi oggettivamente in pol position.”)

Izzo also names the Dutch archbishop of Utrecht, Villem Jacobus Eijk, 59, who is rebuilding a Church nearly destroyed by secularization, and the Philippine, Luis Antonio Tagle, 55, a Church historian (student of the School of Bologna) and a possible bridge toward…China (Tagle’s mother was born in China).
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has told journalists what his plans are as he prepares for the Conclave: “First, gather information on the candidates; second, ask for information from those who know them; third, ask myself what is best for the Church.”

Meanwhile, an observation: Pope Benedict took his decision to step down from the Petrine office after weeks of prayer; in the end, as he said publicly, he felt the Lord was calling him to this decision.

Nevertheless, many, particularly tradition-minded Catholics, feel, and are saying and writing, that Benedict was mistaken, that his hearing of the Lord’s call was, or must have been, in some way wrong, or imperfect, or distorted.

But if Benedict’s hearing was true, and if his act was one of fidelity and courage, then the logical inference is that whatever happens now will be better than what would have happened had the Pope not taken this decision.

And that thought may give Catholics a certain sense of serenity in the midst of the events that are about to occur.

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