Conclave means “locked by keys” because for centuries the election of the pope should be done behind closed doors to avoid interference. It is an important tradition, I would say fundamental, and not only for the Catholic Church, because a new pope is matter of uncertainty that can influence world politics, everyone has understood this by now, especially those superpowers that in the past snubbed or ridiculed the rites seen as folkloristic of the smallest, most insignificant and most inconsequential state, albeit rich, and followed in the world.
A famous rhetorical question was asked by the dictator of Soviet Russia Mr. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and reported in the memoirs of his interpreter Mr. Valentin Berezhkov, who, when Sir. Winston Churchill in Yalta pointed out to him that the pope should not be bothered by touching the interests of a Catholic country like Poland, asked him in return how many military divisions the Vatican had. The Vatican did not have any divisions and does not have even now, however, despite this, the moral power that according to Sir Churchill should not be disturbed, the Soviet Russia of Mr. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev – not Mr. Stalin who had already passed to eternal rest – was able to experience when Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, i.e. John Paul II triggered, without even possessing a single division, the collapse of the Soviet Empire!
Sir Churchill was right to intelligently touch on this concept, which Mr. Stalin’s crudeness did not even have the capacity to conceive. We had proof of this with the recent funeral of Pope Jorge Bergoglio, Francis: no head of state, especially if equipped with so many divisions and enormous military arsenals, has ever been remembered at his funeral by more than 160 delegations of states from all over the globe, with 14 reigning sovereigns and hereditary princes, 66 heads of state and government, etc., and last but not least almost half a million ordinary people from all over the world. Because the moral power held by the papacy of Rome is unique in the world and has often been capable of determining epochal political changes.
Without going too far back, from the simple election in 1846 of an unknown pope, namely Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pius IX, who had announced insignificant reforms, but who was wrongly considered “liberal” – at least at the beginning – previously latent demands received such an impetus that in 1848 they triggered a sequence of social and national revolutions throughout Europe that led to the birth of states and political movements that were previously unimaginable. From the election of Pope Gioacchino Pecci, Leo XIII, in 1891, a political movement arose in society that would later lead to the growth in various countries of popular parties of Christian and democratic inspiration, attentive to that social dimension, which today lead Europe in opposition to socialist and right-wing movements. In short, without giving too many examples, even Mr. Adolph Hitler who set fire to half of Europe was careful not to invade the Vatican of Pope Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, despite knowing of his diplomatic hostility towards the Third Reich and towards Hitler himself, and of the thousands of opponents and Jews that he directly or indirectly protected and favored. A caution, that which dictated the concept of non-interference with the moral power of the Pope, which the powerful figures of the earth still honor.
A concept that, whether we like it or not, we must always keep in mind, because once it was not like this: the Popes for centuries had claimed, held tight and defended tooth and claw, perhaps others, their double dominion over heaven and earth, and they had never wanted to give up the latter, despite the advice of enlightened men of the church such as, for example, Father Alessandro Gavazzi, which also and especially happened in 1849 with the Republic of Mr. Mazzini, at the cost of thousands of Roman and French deaths, the latter having come to restore the earthly power of the Pope. Because it is precisely the absence of military power, the absence of that temporal power, of those divisions evoked by Mr. Stalin, that makes today’s papacy great. A power that the popes already possessed before, but that today is increased tenfold by the moral and spiritual depth of the last pontiffs, beyond what lay people, agnostics or atheists like myself may think of religion.
The election of Pope Bergoglio, Francesco, with that revolutionary name, as revolutionary as the poor man of Assisi had been in his simple harmlessness, has brought forward Christian theses diametrically opposed both to those of the popes of the ancient past and to those of the Protestants, and also to the so-called “evangelicals” of the United States. Nonetheless, we have seen the exponents of these confessions once considered “heretical” by Catholics, come to Rome to pay homage to that head of the hierarchy of the Church once, with irreverent allusion, defined as “scarlet;” that same Rome that some of them, belonging to the reformed churches, defined, and perhaps still defines, the new Babylon.
No one doubts anymore the moral power that the Roman Pontiff holds today and the series of matters on which this power can influence, and it is for this reason that the next process of electing the successor of Pope Bergoglio, the Conclave, is so important, especially for those who pro tempore hold in their earthly hands (or believe they do) the fate of the world. Because the election of the right or wrong person could overnight strengthen or jeopardize their own power. An event external to them, on which they can have little influence. But is it really so?
In no nation in the world is the choice of the head of state in the hands of voters coming from outside, from as many as 66 different countries, belonging to all 5 continents: a worldwide, universal, global delegation never seen in history! Whoever is elected will have a weight that no other man in the world, political or religious, has ever had on the world stage. Not even when the popes of the Middle Ages and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were competing for world power, both feeling directly invested by God. This is why the residences of the cardinal electors and the Sistine Chapel where the elections will take place have been carefully inspected and “swept clean” of electronic interference. Because in those rooms the game between two opposing factions will take place: “continuity,” represented by the uncomfortable and disruptive autonomous politics of Francis, and the “restoration” of a traditional papal power that stops influencing the political decisions of the great of the earth, or that is submitted to them.
What could a “pope of continuity” do in carrying forward the ideas and practices of Pope Bergoglio (which in turn were the continuation of those of Pope Angelo Roncalli, John XXIII, Pope Giovanni Battista Montini, Paul VI, Pope Enrico Luciani, John-Paul I, and Pope Wojtyła?) For example, he could ask the United States to lift its veto in the United Nations Security Council and ensure that Israel withdraws from all Palestinian territories directly or indirectly occupied, effectively allowing the implementation of the “two peoples – two states” policy that many countries have been talking about for a long time without doing anything concrete to implement it. He could ask these countries, while they make their inane and hypocritical declarations, to stop the supply of weapons to Israel on the one hand and to Hamas on the other.
What could a “pope of continuity” do, for example, about “tormented Ukraine”? He could ask the Russian Federation to lift its veto in the Security Council and ensure that the lands it has occupied are liberated and subjected to real international control, with the blue helmets of the willing countries to protect them, that is, to put the Minsk protocols, which Russia and Ukraine have always ignored, back into operation (especially by the first one).
These are just two of the most striking examples. But there are hundreds of conflicts in the world, many of which in Africa, that require attention. A pope with a planetary moral force such as the one we mentioned above would certainly have the moral suasion necessary to ensure that not only the countries directly involved, but also the other interested and non-interested, do not settle for simple promises and move from words to deeds.
It is obvious, on the contrary, that with a “restoration pope” everything would return to before the election of Pope Bergoglio, to a time similar to that of Pope Pacelli, in which everything remained under the radar. Immobile. Or of Pope Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI in which the center of interest was the fine philosophical study and learned meditation. The Church has now gone much further, the problems of the world to be solved are too important to distance oneself, stop and go back, it is necessary to act. A restoration would no longer be acceptable.
