Conclave by Robert Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

There was the Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Courtemarche, Archbishop of Bordeaux, once excommunicated as a follower of the heretic Marcel-François Lefebvre, and who had been secretly taped claiming that the Holocaust had never occurred. There was the Spanish Archbishop of Toledo, Modesto Villanueva – at fifty-four the youngest member of the Conclave – an organiser of Catholic Youth, who maintained that the way to God was through the beauty of culture . . .
    And finally – and broadly speaking it
was
finally – there came that separate and most rarefied species of cardinal, the two dozen members of the Curia, who lived permanently in Rome and who ran the big departments of the Church. They formed in effect their own chapter inside the College, the Order of Cardinal-Deacons. Many, like Lomeli, had grace-and-favour apartments within the walls of the Vatican. Most were Italian. For them it was an easy matter to stroll across the Piazza Santa Marta carrying their suitcases. As a result, they had lingered over their lunches and were among the last to arrive. And although Lomeli greeted them just as warmly as he did the others – they were his neighbours, after all – he couldn’t helpnoticing that they lacked the precious gift of
awe
he had detected in those who had travelled from across the world. Good men though they were, they were somehow knowing; they were blasé. Lomeli had recognised this spiritual disfigurement in himself. He had prayed for the strength to fight it. The late Pope used to rail against it to their faces: ‘Be on your guard, my brothers, against developing the vices of all courtiers down the ages – the sins of vanity and intrigue and of malice and gossip.’ When Bellini had confided on the day of the Holy Father’s death that the Pope had lost his faith in the Church – a revelation so shocking to Lomeli that he had tried ever since to banish it from his mind – it was surely these bureaucrats he had meant.
    Yet it was the Pope who had appointed them all. Nobody had made him pick them. For example, there was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Simo Guttuso. The liberals had had such high hopes for the genial Archbishop of Florence. ‘A second Pope John XXIII,’ they had called him. But far from granting more autonomy to the bishops, which he had proclaimed as his great cause before he entered the Curia, once installed Guttuso had slowly revealed himself to be every bit as authoritarian as his predecessors, merely lazier. He had become very stout, like a figure from the Renaissance, and walked with difficulty the short distance from his huge apartment in the Palazzo San Carlo to the Casa Santa Marta, which was almost next door. His personal chaplain struggled behind him with his three suitcases.
    Lomeli, eyeing the suitcases, said, ‘My dear Simo, are you trying to smuggle in your personal chef?’
    ‘Well, Dean, one never knows quite when one will be able to go home, does one?’ Guttuso grasped Lomeli’s hand in his two fat damp paws and added hoarsely, ‘Or even, for that matter, if one
will
be going home.’ The phrase hung in the air for several seconds, and Lomeli thought: dear God, he actually believes he might be elected; but then Guttuso winked. ‘Ah, Lomeli! Your face! Don’t worry, I’m joking. I am one man who is aware of his limitations. Unlike certain of our colleagues . . .’ He kissed Lomeli on either cheek and waddled past him. Lomeli watched him pause in the doorway to recover his breath and then disappear into the Casa Santa Marta.
    He guessed it had been lucky for Guttuso that the Holy Father had died when he did. Another few months and Lomeli was sure he would have been asked to resign. ‘I want a Church that is poor,’ the Pope had complained more than once in Lomeli’s hearing. ‘I want a Church that is closer to the people. Guttuso has a good soul but he has forgotten where he came from.’ He had quoted Matthew: ‘If