The search for the next pope is turning ugly

The Portuguese poet José Tolentino Mendonça is a handsome man in his fifties with a shaved head and meticulously trimmed beard. In one photograph he’s wearing an ultramarine blue polo shirt; in another, a lovely beige cashmere sweater that matches his tan. His poems depict emotional pain in cryptic language. In “The Last Day of Summer,” unable to “choose attention or choose forgetfulness,” he recalls “your impatient and inconceivable eyes/ here with me now/ as I dance alone/ in the empty city.”

But then Mendonça has no choice but to dance alone. He is a cardinal of the Catholic Church — and just possibly the next pope.

Pope Francis has been in office for ten years and he’s spending more and more time in hospital. Last week he was admitted to the Gemelli for emergency abdominal surgery, at which point leaders of the Church’s factions geared up for an imminent conclave to elect a successor. The surgeons spoke out, providing an unusual amount of clinical detail. It was a hernia operation, they said; blood tests revealed no cancer, no heart disease, nothing to stop Francis traveling to Mongolia if he wants to (which he does, bizarrely, though he still hasn’t set foot in his native Argentina as pontiff).

On the other hand, he’s eighty-six, two years older than John Paul II was when he died. Also, papal doctors have been known to dissemble. At any rate, we can be sure that from now until the next conclave, not a day will pass without senior prelates revising their calculations between mouthfuls of saltimbocca. “It’s like Wolves in the City,” says one veteran commentator, referring to Paul Henissart’s book about the last days of French Algeria. “Regime change is coming — whether in a conservative or liberal direction we don’t know, but the machinery of the Francis pontificate will be dismantled. Until then, like pieds noirs in Algiers, we sit around in restaurants listening for the next muffled explosion.”

That’s rather melodramatic imagery, but you hear variants of it all the time. It’s “drive-by season” in Rome, we’re told — during which one prominent cardinal after another wakes up to read on social media that some blunder or character weakness, often unspecified, has taken him out of the running for the papacy. (An exception is the former favorite Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, whose mishandling of financial scandals has been so egregious that he’s no longer worth briefing against.)

Ed Condon, editor of the Pillar website, the leading English-language Catholic news source, reported last month that the attacks on big beasts have become so savage that a Brazilian archbishop, Ilson de Jesus Montanari, turned down Francis’s offer of the Prefecture of the Dicastery for Bishops, a job most curial officials would kill for. “Sources close to the archbishop said he feared becoming a ‘tall poppy’ in the Vatican field,” wrote Condon.

And with good reason. Look what happened to Cardinal Luis Tagle, former archbishop of Manila. In 2019, Tagle was brought to Rome to run the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples; he was already head of Caritas, the Church’s largest humanitarian charity. The Pope has demoted him from one post and sacked him from the other. Nobody is sure what he did wrong, but we do know there was a flurry of briefings about his lack of “managerial effectiveness.” For the past decade, Tagle — a charismatic crowd-puller in the Philippines — has been known as “the Asian Francis.” He still is, but now it’s said with a smirk. Was he really a lousy administrator or did his rivals take him down? Did the rumors influence Francis or did they originate from him?

In the past year, prominent cardinals from across the theological spectrum — liberal, conservative and middle-of-the-road — have all received the drive-by treatment. And, strangely, the attacks originate from Team Francis, the name given to a group of hardcore papal sycophants in the media and their curial patrons.

One of their recent targets was Cardinal Peter Erdo, who as the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest helped organize the papal trip to Hungary in April. It was a success, so Erdo must have been puzzled to read snarky attacks on him from papal apparatchiks for traveling to Budapest airport in a limousine, provided for the occasion by the government, while the Pope chose a white Fiat — one of those ostentatiously modest gestures of Francis’s that actually costs a fortune. Erdo is described by the Vatican-watcher John Allen as “reserved, buttoned-down… with an almost genetic predisposition for staying out of the spotlight.” The idea that he regularly swanks around in limos is preposterous. He’s a brilliant canon lawyer who could repair the holes in Catholic teaching created by Francis’s mid-flight doctrinal improvisations. That’s why many conservatives are hoping he’ll be elected pope — which would explain the comically ineffective hit job by Team Francis.

But, since the latter are all liberals, why were they equally keen to go after the pro-Francis Tagle? And why have they now turned on the center-left Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, who was briefly their flavor of the month after Tagle’s defenestration? The amiable, rake-thin “bicycling cardinal” is currently the tallest of the remaining poppies, but already he can hear the swish of the scythe.

Zuppi is apparently in high favor with Francis, who sent him as his peace envoy to Ukraine. But the Pope’s approval is always more apparent than reliable, and the briefings against Zuppi have already begun. Papal courtiers are already using the dreaded phrase “too big for his boots.”

What lies behind this scorched-earth policy? The next conclave will be more liberal than the one that elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio ten years ago, and the conservatives have only one obvious contender, Erdo, about whom they’re lukewarm. So why do Team Francis keep kneecapping anyone hailed as Francis Mark Two?

The simplest answer is that they’re desperate. Plenty of cardinal-electors are broadly liberal on the subject of women and LGBT people. But they’re damned if they’re going to be bounced into ordaining female deacons or hosting gay blessings by the forthcoming “Synod on Synodality,” whose agenda has been hijacked by activists chosen by Team Francis. The electors are also troubled by another of Team Francis’s pet causes: the attempt to snuff out the Latin Mass, which is being supervised with Cromwellian zeal by the Yorkshire-born Arthur Roche, the Vatican’s liturgy chief.

Put simply, the odds are stacked against any prominent liberal candidate who’s invested too heavily in the synod, overstepped the mark on homosexuality or joined the march against traditionalists. That may be why Zuppi claimed — unconvincingly — that he knew nothing about a same-sex blessing in his diocese, and why he took the huge risk of presiding over Old Rite vespers last year. Was that a signal that he wouldn’t be a continuity candidate? Shortly after those vespers the briefings started. But whether they will damage him is another matter, such is the unpopularity of the “Bergoglian bunny-boilers,” as one Vatican source calls them.

A bigger problem for him is his relationship with the Sant’Egidio community, an association of liberal Catholic networkers with a reputation for opportunistic arm-twisting. Cardinals who are prepared to overlook — or who even agree with — his evasive stance on gay blessings won’t vote for a candidate who might farm out the Secretariat of State to Sant’Egidio.

So who do the ultra-liberals favor as the next pope? It’s complicated because the shrewder members of Team Francis know that their endorsement is the kiss of death. If they want a pope who is in favor of gay blessings and women’s ordination — causes that Francis has toyed with in a spirit of bloody-mindedness rather than solidarity — then he needs to enter the conclave unobtrusively, with minimum baggage, and then “emerge,” rather as Karol Wojtyla did in 1978.

That’s why, from their point of view, the less said about José Mendonça the better. The fifty-seven-year-old cardinal is Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. It’s a sweet job for him, allowing him to reflect on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and “what Bruce Springsteen does with the Bible.” He is urbane, charming and photogenic. His poems, I’m assured by a Portuguese-speaking friend, are beautifully crafted, though you have to wonder about their autobiographical subtext. That’s a subject best avoided; likewise Mendonça’s opinions on homosexuality and abortion, which are the least orthodox of any prefect of a Roman dicastery. Therefore Team Francis will keep a judicious distance, blowing him secret kisses, calculating that if he can avoid alienating electors by growing into a tall poppy then maybe they’ll be rewarded by the sight of him dancing alone on to the balcony of St Peter’s.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.