Cardinal Vincent Benítez
Cardinal Benítez is 67 years old. He was born in Manila, Philippines. He studied at the San Carlos Seminary and was ordained in 1978 by the Archbishop of Manila, His Eminence Cardinal Jaime Sin. His first ministry was at the church of Santo Niño de Tondo and afterwards at Our Lady of the Abandoned Parish (Santa Ana). Well known for his work in the poorest areas of Manila, he established eight shelters for homeless girls, the Project of the Blessed Santa Margherita de Cortona. In 1996, following the assassination of the former Archbishop of Bukavu, Christopher Munzihirwa, Fr Benítez, at his own request, was transferred to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he undertook missionary work. He subsequently set up a Catholic hospital in Bukavu to assist female victims of the genocidal sexual violence perpetrated during the First and Second Congo Wars. In 2017 he was created monsignor. In 2018 he was appointed Archbishop of Baghdad, Iraq. He was admitted to the College of Cardinals earlier this year by the late Holy Father, in pectore.
Lomeli read it through twice just to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. The Archdiocese of Baghdad was tiny – if he remembered rightly, these days it numbered barely more than two thousand souls – but even so, Benítez appeared to have gone straight from missionary to archbishop with no intervening stage. He had never heard of such a meteoric promotion. He turned to O’Malley’s accompanying handwritten note:
Eminence,
From Cardinal Benítez’s file in the dicastery, it would appear that the late Holy Father first met him during his African tour in 2017. He was sufficiently impressed by his work to create him monsignor. When the Baghdad archdiocese fell vacant, the Holy Father rejected the three suggested nominations put forward by the Congregation for Bishops and insisted on appointing Fr Benítez. In January this year, following minor injuries sustained in a car-bomb attack, Archbishop Benítez offered his resignation on medical grounds, but withdrew it after a private meeting in the Vatican with the Holy Father. Otherwise, the file is remarkably scanty.
RO’M
Lomeli sat back in his chair. He had a habit of biting the side of his right forefinger when he was thinking. So Benítez was in delicate health, or had been, as the result of a terrorist incident in Iraq? Perhaps that accounted for his fragile appearance. All in all, his ministry had been served in some terrible places: such a life was bound to take its toll. What was certain was that the man represented the best that the Christian faith had to offer. Lomeli resolved to keep a discreet eye on him, and to mention him in his prayers.
A bell rang, to announce that dinner was served. It was 8.30 p.m.
‘Let us face facts. We did not do as well as we had hoped.’ The Archbishop of Milan, Sabbadin, his rimless lenses glinting in the light of the chandeliers, looked around the table at the Italian cardinals who formed the core of Bellini’s support. Lomeli was seated opposite him.
This was the night when the real business of the Conclave started to be done. Although in theory the papal constitution forbade the cardinal-electors from entering into ‘any form of pact, agreement, promise or commitment’ on pain of excommunication, this had now become an election, and hence a matter of arithmetic: who could get to seventy-nine votes? Tedesco, his authority enhanced by coming top in the first ballot, was telling a funny story to a table of South American cardinals, and dabbing his eyes with his napkin at his own hilarity. Tremblay was listening earnestly to the views of the South-East Asians. Adeyemi, worryingly for his rivals, had been invited to join the conservative archbishops of Eastern Europe – Wrocław, Riga, Lviv, Zagreb – who wanted to test his views on social issues. Even Bellini seemed to making an effort: he had been parked by Sabbadin on a table of North Americans and was describing his ambition to give greater autonomy to the bishops. The nuns who were serving the food could hardly help overhearing the state of play, and afterwards several of them were to prove useful sources for reporters trying to piece together the inside story of the Conclave: one even preserved a napkin on which a cardinal had jotted the voting figures of the first-round leaders.
‘Does that mean we cannot win?’ continued Sabbadin. Again he sought to look each man in the eye, and Lomeli thought unkindly how rattled he looked: his hopes of becoming Secretary of State under a Bellini papacy had taken a knock. ‘Of course we can still win! All that can be said for certain after today’s vote is that the next Pope will be one of four men: Bellini, Tedesco, Adeyemi or Tremblay.’
Dell’Acqua, the Archbishop of Bologna, interrupted. ‘Aren’t you forgetting our friend the dean here? He received five votes.’
‘With the greatest respect to Jacopo, it would be unprecedented for a candidate with so little support on the first ballot to emerge as a serious contender.’
But Dell’Acqua refused to let the subject drop. ‘What about Wojtyła in the second Conclave of ’78? He received only a scattering of votes in the first round yet went on to be elected on the eighth ballot.’
Sabbadin fluttered his hand irritably. ‘All right, so it’s happened once in a century. But let’s not distract ourselves – our dean does not exactly have the ambition of a Karol Wojtyła. Unless, that is, there’s something he’s not telling us?’
Lomeli looked at his plate. The main course was chicken wrapped in Parma ham. It was overcooked and dry but they were eating it nonetheless. He knew that Sabbadin blamed him for taking votes off Bellini. In the circumstances, he felt he should make an announcement. ‘My position is an embarrassment to me. If I find out who my supporters are, I shall plead with them to vote for someone else. And if they ask me who I’ll be voting for, I shall tell them Bellini.’
Landolfi, the Archbishop of Turin, said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be neutral?’
‘Well, I can’t be seen to campaign for him, if that’s what you’re implying. But if I’m asked my view, I feel I have a right to express it. Bellini is unquestionably the best-qualified man to govern the Universal Church.’
‘Listen to that,’ urged Sabbadin. ‘If the dean’s five votes come to us, that takes us to twenty-three. All those hopeless candidates who have received one or two nominations today will fall away tomorrow. That means another thirty-eight votes are about to become available. We simply have to pick up most of them.’
‘Simply?’ repeated Dell’Acqua. His tone was mocking. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing simple about it, Your Eminence!’
Nobody could say anything to that. Sabbadin flushed pink and they resumed their melancholy chewing in silence.
If that force which the secular call momentum and the religious believe is the Holy Spirit was with any of the candidates that night, it was with Adeyemi. His rivals seemed to sense it. For example, when the cardinals rose for coffee and the Patriarch of Lisbon, Rui Brandão D’Cruz, went out into the enclosed courtyard to smoke his evening cigar, Lomeli noticed how Tremblay immediately hurried after him, presumably to canvass his support. Tedesco and Bellini moved from table to table. But the Nigerian simply went and stood coolly in the corner of the lobby and left it to his supporters to bring over potential voters who wanted to have a word with him. Soon a small queue began to form.
Lomeli, leaning against the reception desk, sipping coffee, watched him as he held court. If he were a white man, he thought, Adeyemi would be condemned by the liberals as more reactionary even than Tedesco. But the fact that he was black made them reluctant to criticise his views. His fulminations against homosexuality, for example, they could excuse as merely an expression of his African cultural heritage. Lomeli was beginning to sense that he had underestimated Adeyemi. Perhaps he was indeed the candidate to unite the Church. He certainly had the largeness of personality required to fill St Peter’s Throne.