Vatican Intrigue: The Pact that Secured More than Ninety Votes for New Pope - by M.Antonietta Calabrò

But what were the agreements, the groupings and the voting blocks that led to the election of Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis)?

A brief and necessarily blunt summary would be that the new pontiff was the result of an agreement struck by the dean of the college, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Cardinal Giovan Battista Re, the Curia led by the current secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (who supported Cardinal Odilo Scherer but had to back down when Scherer criticised Cardinal Re at the general congregation), and the cardinals from the United States. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York was swift to put an American stamp on the election of a New World pope two hours after Francis appeared on the Loggia of the Blessings. “We are very happy about the result. It is a remarkably emotional experience”, he said, adding in an official statement that it was a “milestone for our Church”.

Italian cardinals presented a united front only in freezing out the cardinal of Milan, Angelo Scola, with even the Lombard cardinals voting against him. At the general congregation over the past few days, the cardinal non-elector and former Vatican representative at the UN for fifteen years, Raffaele Martino, has been picking and unpicking alliances. He knows the American diocese well and as a former president of the pontifical commission Justitia et Pax he has always been involved in the most contentious social issues. At the 2005 conclave, Cardinal Martino opposed Ratzinger and supported Bergoglio.

But according to Catholic theology, isn’t it the Holy Spirit that chooses the Pope? Once many years ago, this question was put to the then Cardinal Ratzinger ( now retired pope), the prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and guardian of orthodoxy. With a certain dose of irony, he replied: “I wouldn’t say that, in the sense that it is the Holy Spirit that does the choosing, His role should be understood in a more flexible sense, probably the only certainty He offers is that the whole business won’t be a total disaster”.

Pope Francis shares that sense of irony. When he accepted, he told the cardinals: “Dear brethren, may God forgive you”.

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