THE FINAL CONCLAVE

 

THE  

BEGINNING  ~~

Up on the flat rock perched between Mount Hermon's three  peaks, Jesus :md the "Prince of this World," as Jesus  sometimes called him, had met head-on some years before.  Mount Hermon's 9,232-foot head is forever lifted above  everything, visible to the naked eye from everywhere  around this land: southward from Syria, eastward from  the Mediterranean, northward from the tip of the Dead  Sea. And, so the Bedouins say, westward from the middle  of the Great Desert.  

"All you can see from this rock," the Prince had cajoled,  grandiosely sweeping in the vast horizon of kingdoms and  sea lanes at their feet, "all these will I give you, if you  will kneel down and adore me-be my servant!" Power  for power. That was the deal. Between Satan and Jesus it  has always been a dispute about power. The Prince had  lost that round.  

Now, near Hermon again, and some three years later,  Jesus rubs salt into the wound of that defeat. It is not hard  to picture. The scene is somewhere outside the Syrian  town that is today called Baniyas, at the foot of the triple 

peaked, snow-capped mountain of Hermon. Close by, the  River Jordan springs up and flows down the length of  Palestine, filling village wells, giving life to olive planta tions, vegetable gardens, to fields of melons, to orchards  full of oranges, figs, apples, pomegranates, and to fields  enameled with wild flowers. The blue skies above the im mobile face of Hermon host the brilliant noonday sun shine; even the slate-grays and browns and yellows of sand  and stone force eyes to squint against reflected glare. The  wind ruffles hair and clothes. The Jordan waters chatter  behind the voices of the small band of men making their  way up toward Hermon.  

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4 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Jesus, in the lead as usual, flings an apparently innocent  question over his shoulder, as he sometimes does about  local gossip: "Who do you say I am?"  

The impetuous Simon blurts out the first sentiment he  feels: "You are Christ, the Son of the living God."  Jesus stops abruptly. One imagines his eyes riveting  Simon's gaze. "You are blessed, Simon! No mere human  told you that. It is my father in Heaven who revealed it  to you. Now I tell you solemnly, alta kefa: You are rock!  Upon you, as on a rock, I will so build my Church that  all Satan's force will not destroy it. I will give you the  Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid on  earth will be what Heaven forbids. Whatever you allow on  earth will be what Heaven allows."  

These are the words that reveal the endless course of  God's power among human beings, and the endless struggle  joined against it by "all Satan's force." Jesus reassures Peter  and all that belong to him that they will finally enjoy a  special Triumph and Blessing. The Triumph will be Jesus'  triumph and that of his Church over Satan. The Blessing  will be the universality: All men and women will accept  Jesus' salvation and believe in him. But neither the  Triumph nor the Blessing will be won by Jesus alone. He  binds himself to Peter, to his Church, to all Peter's suc 

cessors, and to all men and women.  

John and James and Judas and the others respond to  Jesus' symbolism immediately, glancing up at the rock of  Hermon, then back to Jesus' face. They know him well  enough! He is saying and doing something significant. But  they do not understand. "It was hidden from us," Mark  would write years after the event, "and we were afraid to  ask him about it all."  

Of all the choices Jesus might have made for the first  leader of his Church, Simon had to be the least likely.  In his betrayal of Jesus by public perjury, Simon would  be second only to Judas Iscariot who would actually sell  Jesus to his enemies for money. At the first onrush of  difficulty, this "rock" would run for cover like a scared  rabbit. Yet, years later, he would be martyred and would  not flinch in his love or devotion.  

Even on that day near Hermon, Jesus knows of what  Simon is capable, as clearly as he knows the sneering con tempt of the Prince for this "rock" of a man. For it is  within his unique memory that Jesus speaks to Simon as 

The Beginning 5  

head of the Church, about the Church, about Satan's end less, tireless threat. And it is within that all-encompassing  memory of Jesus that what he says to Simon, he says as  

well to Pope Paul 6 as to every Pope who will come after.  The very key to understanding here is Jesus' memory.  For this is not memory in the puny way we understand it:  

"... The Board of Ed. has abolished memory lessons  as a waste of the pupils' potential. ..."  

"Scratch your memory, dear: Where did you put  my cufflinks? ..."  

"Forget I ever gave you this money, pal. ..."  

"For a simple fee of $500, we guarantee you a photo graphic memory at the end of our five-week  course...."  

"The IBM 3033 carries eight megabytes in its capa cious memory...."  

In the reduced state of our twentieth-century thinking, we  see memory merely as a miniaturized electronic computer,  singsonging facts and figures along nerves and synaptic  joints. Yet, in some way, most of us still realize that when  we give rein to our hates, our fears, our loyalties, our  hopes-feeling areas where our total selves are involved 

we exercise memory in some greater sense. Facts and  figures perhaps. The past as well. Also, the future. All  made present within our conscious selves. Only sleep,  weariness, the close presence of evil, or our own choice,  seem to make that full memory opaque, dormant.  

In Jesus, that memory is an ever-awake consciousness  of spirit that never sleeps because never tired, because  never only mortal. Nothing past. Nothing simply in the  future. All present.  

So, at this moment, near Hermon, the ordinary dimen sions of existence are transcended. Time past is as if it  never expired. Time to come is already accomplished. All  for this instant. Simon, now ke/a, Petros, Peter, the rock,  is the current head of the Church-in every age. The 11  others are multiplied into the millions and billions of all  other men and women and children. And the narrow piece  of desert scrubland where these 13 men stand is a kaleido scope not only of the earth, but of the universe-the planet 

6 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Earth as well as the stars and endless galaxies. And Judas  is there. And the Prince.  

Everything about this occasion is symbol as well as  reality. The mountain called Hermon. The Jordan. Rock.  Water. Permanence and life. The rock on which the  Prince dared to tempt Jesus, Jesus has taken as the symbol  of his own power and of his own constancy in the world  forever. Above all, the choice of Simon: always, victory  over Satan through the weakest elements. "God has chosen  the weak and the foolish to confuse the wise of this world,"  Paul would write some 40 years later. And so Simon with  his dull mind and weak determination is God's answer to  the Prince whose brilliance of intelligence and unbreak able will is thus diametrically opposed. Humanly, we can  almost hear God answering Satan's defiance:  

You say that your wisdom and strength entitles you  to pride of place? Very well, then. Your humiliation  will be complete. I will beat you down and destroy you  ultimately and forever precisely through what is  weakest, what is almost stupid, what is .despicable in  your eyes.  

As if the rabbit killed the snake. As if the starving  prisoners of Gulag overthrew the Red Army. As if a  trainload of whipped Jews on the way to Auschwitz  brought Hitler and all his power to nothing.  

But there is more. The affront to the Prince at Hermon  is magnified. In the face of this Enemy, Jesus is relentless.  Puny Simon is not only the rock for Jesus' Church. Puny  Simon will personally have the power to represent Jesus.  Personally! This pygmy will have greater power than the  fallen Archangel ever had. Concrete power. The Keys to  the Kingdom. The secret of eternal bliss. Whatever this  Simon allows is what Jesus allows. Whatever this Simon  forbids, Jesus forbids. Jesus can and will make sure that  in all matters concerning entry into Heaven Simon cannot  err. Puny Simon. "I will be with you all days, right up to  the end of the universe." Simon will be Jesus' personal  representative and the source of guidance for all subse quent believers.  

That day in Jesus' memory up on Mount Hermon all  those believers hear his words, "You are Peter." And he  hears those believers centuries later as they coin the re­

The Begin(ring 7  

sponding phrase: "Where Peter is, there is the Church of  Jesus."  

That day, Simon does not understand. But even that will  not destroy the course Jesus has set. Looking into Simon's  eyes squinting back at him in the brilliance of the sunlight,  Jesus sees it all. All the mistakes and the blundering  adaptations Simon would try to fashion from Jesus' message  of universal salvation. And as with Simon's gifts, so with  his mistakes: They would be shared down the centuries.  

First: the mistake of political domination. Simon would  understand the peculiar power of Jesus in terms of con quest and empire. "Isn't it just now, Lord?" S;mon will ask  crassly, even after Jesus rises from death. "Isn't it just now  that you are going to restore the Kingdom of Israel?"  Most of Simon's successors in Rome for nearly 2,000  years would make the same mistake. It is an idea whose  attraction dies hard. The Triumph of Jesus translated into  imperial" triumph.  

Then: ethnic domination. Simon would fail to under stand the universal nature of Jesus' intention. Even shortly  after he receives the Holy Spirit, Simon will insist that  Christianity is an ethnic privilege. He will stubbornly re fuse Baptism to non-Jews. When Jesus must send Simon  a special message to make him bend on this point, even  then Simon will tell the others-Paul and people like  him-to baptize non-Jews. But he will not.  

And a third: geographical domination. Toward the end  of his life, as a prisoner in Rome, Simon would tie Jesus'  salvation to one place. He would remain a Palestinian. In  his own persistent hatred of Rome, his hard-headed idea  would exclude the love and the reality of Jesus. Jesus would  come back soon at Armageddon near the Plain of Sharon  in Palestine, Peter believed and taught. He would take  Jerusalem and destroy Rome and its empire.  

In that destruction would lie the Triumph of Jesus and  of all who believe in him. In the survival of the believers,  according to this view, would be the Blessing of Jesus. But  if that were so, that Blessing would be translated into a  temporal blessing of an elitist people; and the Triumph  would merely be the setting up of a special heartland. How  many would seem to be excluded by these mistakes re 

peated down the centuries!  

Still, Jesus will work even with these limitations of  Simon's. As he will work with the limitations of each one 

8 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

of Simon's successors. As he will work through all the  complaints and wars and strifes and schisms that will cen ter upon the lack of understanding of and by these weak  men through the painful centuries.  

Peter did not understand things any better, perhaps,  than the throngs who deserted Jesus in bitter disillusion ment, when Jesus did not, as they expected, restore politi cal power to Israel upon his triumphant entry into Jerusa lem three days before his death. But in all his confusion,  Simon would never finally desert Jesus, never forgo his  love for Jesus. And, in the end, what matters to Jesus is  that a man not renounce love. No Peter would. And Jesus  would never desert Peter.  

Late one night, a few months after that dazzling day  on Mount Hermon, Jesus walks with a much smaller  group in the darkness toward the Garden of Gethsemane.  Again, Simon walks behind Jesus. Again, he hears Jesus  speaking to him. "Simon, Satan has claimed power over  you and intends to make you his plaything and instru 

ment." So, Simon is warned again: He will be fair game  for Satan.  

But then, in that power-based assertiveness, that com manding supremacy that was unique to him, Jesus goes on:  "But I have prayed for you so that your faith does not  fail or falter. When, therefore, you fail ..." the insistent  realism of those words must have cut at the heart of the  emotional Simon, "... when, therefore, you fail, you will  be able to repent your error. And you will be able to give  all associated with you fresh grounds for continuing be lief."  

That is all Simon is told. Jesus maintains the mystery of  his ultimate intentions and deep purposes. It is only his  methods he reveals. For the rest, Simon must make do  with the limitations of his own character. As must each  of his successors. Until one last moment for each..••  

On another night some thirty years later in Rome, Simon  Peter at last sees it all as Jesus saw it all from the begin ningl Even then, Simon sees it from a topsy-turvy angle.  He and some two thousand other Christians have been tied  to crosses stuck upside down on the grassy embankment  around the Imperial Gardens on Vatican Hill. They have  been daubed with pitch. Tonight, they are to be living, 

The Beginning 9  

screaming, dying torches. -Emperor Nero, his lovely con cubine Poppaea, and their guests will have light to eat  by and sights to joke about. Each Christian will die in the  

classical sign of Satan-the upside-down cross.  Down the Vatican Hill and across the River Tiber, a  slave called Linus stands silent, watching. Simon Peter had  once baptized him. And then, this morning when they  came to take Simon Peter to die in the Gardens, he had  called Linus and appointed him as his successor. "You are  the rock now, Linus." Simon Peter told Linus this in the  presence of all Christian leaders. "You are Peter. . . .  Lead them, as I have led them. In the name of Jesus. My  death doesn't matter. The Lord is coming soon." From  where he stands now, Linus can see slaves running among  the crosses setting the bodies on fire with quick jabs of  blazing torches to each head.  

Out of Linus's hearing, Simon Peter keeps mumbling the  last words he had said to Jesus: "Lord, I love you. You  know I love you. I love you." Through the smell and the  smoke and the Roman laughter. "You know I love you,  Lord." Simon Peter awaits his turn.  

Then, through the haze, Simon Peter can make out the  bulky figure of a centurion standing in front of him, legs  wide apart, red cloak hanging down the left side. In the  light of the flames, Simon Peter catches the flash of the  short sword held in the right hand, motionless, but at the  ready for thrusting.  

"By the grace of Afranus Burrus, Jew," the centurion  mutters quietly and dutifully, as he tenses for the strike.  Simon Peter is not for burning. Burrus, a Christian convert  with influence in high places, has obtained as last favor  for Simon Peter that he die by the sword.  

Amid all the horror, the fire and smoke, the screams of  the dying, the music, the laughter of the guests, there is an  instant of light for Simon. All is clear. The cold smile of  that blade. The tightening of the centuriQn's fingers around  the haft. The muscles stiffening in the wrist and arm. The  bracing of those two legs. The right side of the body  drawing back measuredly. Simon Peter's consciousness is  flooded with memories. Forgive them. ... Bless them. ..•  Pray for them. ... Love them. ... Do good to them. .••  Whatever you allow on this earth will be what Heaven  allows. ... Whatever you forbid on earth will be what  Heaven forbids. ..• You are Peter. ... He sees the face 

10 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

of his beloved Jesus once again, as every Pope does at  death's hour, and now for the first time he enters Jesus'  memory where all is achieved-the full Triumph of Jesus,  the full Blessing of Jesus-all in a flash as the blade bites  between his ribs and goes through lung and heart. All men  and women. No Jews. No Gentiles. All one. Not Palestine  alone. Not Rome merely. But all lands. The earth. The  skies. The beginning. The end. The sin. The Prince oj the  world sneering. Jesus on Calvary. Jesus in glory. ...  

As the sword comes out, it draws blood after it like a  waving crimson ribbon. A clean cut done by an expert.  The centurion sees a wasting mask of agony and terror fall  momentarily like a pinching claw over Simon Peter's face,  drawing every feature together in a knot of suffering. A  moment when the body grows rigid, stiff, straight, as taut  as the pole bolding it, vibrating within itself from the toes  down to the head in a last inner effort. Then it collapses,  twitching, eyes rolling, the face relaxing in that expression less resignation and helplessness only death confers, blood  and phlegm pouring out from the mouth in the low groan  of one last breath, urine and excrement dropping to the  ground.  

In the following week, the body of Simon Peter is re covered by Linus and the other Christians. In the dark ness of night, they hurriedly dig his grave in a spot to ward the north end of Vatican Hill. Among Christians the  

spot over Simon Peter's grave will be known as the  "memory" of Peter.  

The word goes out via the Christian grapevine to the  small Christian communities in Milan, in Marseilles, in the  Greek cities, in Syria and Palestine and Africa: "Peter is  dead. Linus is his choice."  

Today, on that same north side of Vatican Hill, the "mem ory" of Peter is now in the central crypt of a huge Basilica,  Saint Peter's, built around the spot where Peter died dur ing Nero's banquet. Beside the Basilica, there is an elab 

orate 1,000-room building, the Apostolic Palace.  On the fourth floor of one wing of that Palace, about  400 yards from Peter's "memory," the death of Pope Paul  takes place. Paul's waning hours and days are assiduously 

The Beginning 11  

watched by the powerful Vatican bureaucracy and followed  over radio and television by hundreds of millions of peo ple in every land on this earth.  

Paul has some comfort. He, like all Popes, has made his  adaptations of Jesus' message. And, now, with de"th  closing in on him, the vision of Jesus is also his lot. Paul's  entry into the memory of Jesus, his moment of utter, time 

less clarity.  

As far as the memory of Jesus goes, it is the same for  Simon's death and Linus's appointment as it is for the  death of Paul 6 and the appointment of Paul's successor.  Only for us, as once for Simon Peter, the details are con 

fusing.  

About 600 yards from the "memory" of Simon Peter, the  successor to the dying Paul 6 and to Simon Petcr will be  appointed by the votes cast in a special meeting called a  Conclave. Up to 120 Cardinals of the Roman Catholic  Church, each one over fifty and under eighty years of  age, will meet on Vatican Hill in thc Hall called "Nervi."  Not in the Sistine, whose walls enclose centuries of Roman  history, whose frescoes speak in silent tints of past genius  and eternal faith. Not in the Sistine. In the Nervi, its  cement pourcd into place not 15 years ago, its four wails  bare, its undulating ceiling and sloping floor opening like  a maw ready to receive thousands as though they were  few. No frescoes. No oil canvasses speaking of God, Heav en, Christ, eternity. Only embedded in one wall the eyeless  booths for TV and radio crews. The Nervi. Just outside the  colonnade surrounding Saint Peter's Square. It flanks-but  does not touch-the 1400-year-old Leonine wall surround 

ing Vatican City. It does not touch Saint Peter's. Or the  Apostolic Palace.  

The Nervi. So Paul 6 decreed before his death. This  sudden break with the tradition of the Sistine is no quirk  of chance, no trick of time out of kilter. The entrance of  these Cardinal Electors into this hall, with no roots and  no parallel in time past, makes visible the break with his 

tory that these Cardinals, and all the people on earth, are  living and cannot escape.  

When some historian comes later to write an account of  this Conclave, it will surely be called the Book of the Bet.  But, unless he is Christian, he may not undcrst<\',d that  what these men did, they did in spite of their worldly 

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power and personal ambitions, and because of their trust  in the promise of Jesus that "all Satan's force will not  destroy my Church," and because they heard Jesus saying  "You are Peter." In terms of worldly wisdom and practical  politics, they bet on the impossible. In terms of their faith,  they could do nothing else.  

When the next Pope is elected here in the Nervi, he will  know that he will rule over a Church, once unified and  monolithic, but now split from top to bottom and sideways  in a zigzag fashion on issues of fundamental beliefs, reli 

gious practice, and personal morals. The Church he will  head finds itself already in a world totally changed from  the world his predecessors knew.  

When the next Pope is elected here, he must know by  then that he can no longer expect to live permanently in  Rome. He and each of his successors will always claim to  be the Bishop of Rome, the successor to Peter, and the  personal Vicar of Jesus among humans. But his role will  take on the aspect of a journey, a pilgrimage in part freely  chosen, in part forced upon him.  

The break with the long past is already complete. And  he will know it.  

He will dwell in places no Pope ever saw. He will take  steps no predecessor ever contemplated. He will decide  on issues and acute problems no Pope before him even  dreamed of ever. For in no other way will he be able to  be Pope. And he will end up understanding his Papal role  in a manner so different from past Popes, and so discon 

certing to believers, that many will cease to believe. On  his pilgrimage, the weakest will never start with him. The  weaker will never make it. Only the strong will go along  with him to the end.  

Put jn simple terms, it is now recognized that the  Roman Church, its Vatican and its hierarchy throughout  the world, has accumulated a political, diplomatic, and  financial baggage that must be discarded: its financial  investments, which amount to some billions of dollars; its  wealth in real estate and concrete valuables, which provide  collateral that rises well into the hundreds of billions; its  tenacious and effective stance in the world of diplomacy,  establishment politics, and corporate power; and finally 

most poignantly, indeed-its working concept of "Church,"  Church government and authority and power over the  salvation of all human beings. 

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Only a few times in the history of 263 Popes has such a  moment arisen; perhaps never has so bold a choice been  imminent. Those few Roman Popes who might have taken  such a leap refused this choice as blindly as Simon Peter  refused to baptize non-Jews. Each clung to the idea of  temporal power as stubbornly as Simon Peter expected  Jesus to establish a political kingdom in Palestine. But,  unlike Peter who received a special message from Jesus  to admit non-Jews to Baptism and to salvation, there was  no special message for those Popes.  

Only today has there been another kind of message from  Jesus to his Church: It has come in the irresistible force  of a revolution now unmistakably visible to Vatican realists.  On the basis of that revolution they are making new plans.  

This revolution they see already well on its way is not  political in nature, but it will affect the politics of all  nations. It has nothing directly to do with Marxism or  Western democracy, except that it appears to spell the  end of both as we have known them. The revolution, in  Vatican thinking, has its origins on that level of life and  value where Jesus and Satan battle and have battled for  all the ages of man and for the soul of humanity.  

This sort of Conclave and this kind of thinking is the  direct legacy of Paul 6. Despite his shortcomings and  earlier failures, he finally understood the revolution; and,  in his last days, he did his best to prepare his Church for it.  

Not everyone will agree that he came down on the right  side. Indeed, by the end of his life Paul 6 became unac ceptable to all four factions among the Cardinal Electors  of his Church, the 118 or so men who would set the  policies and elect the Pope after Paul's death.  

All the problems in the closing days of Paul 6 stemmed  from these factions that make up a pretty spectacular  array of thought and opinion from far Left to far Right.  Neither of the two farthest extremes among th~se groups  represents a majority in Church thinking. But even so, one  extreme seriously threatens schism, while the other  threatens revolution-even violent revolution. These fac 

tions that faced Paul will be the factions in Conclave.  The Progressivist faction is made up of three groups:  Christian Marxists; the "new theologians"; and a goodly  number of Charismatics.  

The Christian Marxists advocate a close alliance, polit ical and otherwise, between Christians and Communists. 

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Between them and Pope Paul 6 there burned always an  undying enmity.  

The "new theologians" and intellectuals hold that prac tically everything in the Roman Church-from Papal  authority, male priesthood, the ban on homosexuality and  abortion, the idea of God, the belief in Jesus' resurrection  and divinity, down to the idea of a parish church and  infant Baptism-all is out of date and must be revamped.  These "new theologians" think that only with a fresh.  minded, Progressivist Pope can the Church be saved from  total disintegration.  

The Charismatics, going on a fresh interpretation of the  Bible, and relying on the exercise of new gifts-called the  gifts .of the Holy Spirit-insist that only by the exercise of  those gifts can the faith be saved. They WOUld. therefore  introduce Charismatic practice into every phase of church  life. But this in itself would be a disruptive force. For a  central persuasion of Charismatics is that the Holy Spirit  communicates directly and personally with each one. The  overall authority and teaching power of Bishop and Pope  is bypassed. Charismatics, of course, claim that they repre 

sent the spirit of the primitive and early Christian Church.  The Traditionalist faction is at the opposite extreme  from the Progressivists. Traditionalists protest that the  Roman Church has been corrupted in the last twelve  years, mainly by the Christian Marxists and the "new theo logians." They denounce Paul 6 as a heretic. They insist  on reversing all the changes effected in the Church since  the sixties under Paul's direction. They regard Paul, at his  worst, as a traitor and, at his best, as misguided and de ceived by the wiles of Satan. There are powerful men in  this camp and it is from this quarter that the serious threat  of schism has menaced Paul and the Church for over a  decade.  

The Conservative faction in Rome and throughout the  Church decries the Progressivists-whether they are Chris tian Marxists or the "new theologians"-and they also  decry the Traditionalists. The Conservatives wish to steer  a steady course with some gradual adaptations, but with  no profound change in the basic structure of Roman  Catholic government and belief. The Conservatives do not  think Paul erred in allowing change, but they think that  Paul went too far and too fast.  

Finally, the Radical faction believes that the Roman 

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Church must take one step in one specific direction: to  divest itself of all sociopolitical and financial interests, and  actively to take up and use solely the weapons of spiritual  power. The Radicals blame Paul for not taking bold, imag 

inative steps to free the Church of all entanglements with  political and financial interests whatever their color or  stripe. Their being called "Radical" recalls the saying of  a sixteenth-century Pope, Alexander 6, who should have  known what he was talking about. "The root (radix) of  all the trouble besetting the Throne of Peter today is our  temporal power together with our wealth and our inter 

national prestige."  

It is a considered judgment on the past 263 Popes to  say that, although most of them filtered the power and  the teaching of Jesus through the prevalent mentality of  their times, none of them finally identified the salvation  of Jesus with territorial sovereignty and political influence.  Their fault has lain in allying the two. But even in the  perfumed garden of worldly success, the tradition of Peter  that is the legacy of every Pope has enabled them to hear  the slightest click of barbarity sharpening its knives. And,  when all around them has become a howling parliament  of pain, men have usually found the chief citizen of Rome  already standing at some as yet unopened door, his hand on  the knob. "When, therefore, you fail," Jesus said to Peter,  "you will be able to repent your error, and you will give all  associated with you fresh ground for continuing belief."  

So it has been with Paul 6. And he communicated his  judgment and feeling for the future to the principal Car dinal Electors who gather behind the locked doors of  Conclave 82-a Conclave that would be like none before it.  

For the Electors themselves, as for us who picture them  in Conclave, there is required a special effort. To under stand in belief. To believe with understanding. Jesus will not  reveal his ultimate purposes, not even the details of our  near-future history to these Electors. He did not reveal  the near-future to Simon Peter and his companions near  Hermon. Yet we, as children of a much later generation  than Peter, know something more than he did at Hermon.  We know, for instance, that Jesus saw far beyond Pales 

tine, beyond Judaism, beyond Imperial Rome, and beyond  what we see even now, when he said: "You are Peter."  We realize that now. Even so, today it takes humility  and faith for Electors and for the rest of us to see, as 

16 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Jesus does, far beyond even the extremes of the vast  mixtum-gatherum of Catholicism and Christianity: beyond  Greek monks on Mount Athos; Benedictine monks in  England; Mexicans on their knees before our Lady of  Guadalupe; Polish Blessed Bread; Australian aborigines  singing Mass; Irish shamrocks; Arab golden domes; beyond  Eskimos scratching the Ave Maria on whalebones and  Chinese gongs sounding the Angelus; beyond German Ad 

vent wreaths; African tomtoms tolling a Requiem; Russian  ikons in Mrs. Gromyko's luggage; Scandinavian girls wear ing Saint Lucy's crown; Japanese Zen-like Catholic chapels;  Maltese Crusader Crosses; Dutch. Girl Guides catechizing  Amsterdam prostitutes; California nuns cleaning lepers in  Seoul; Cardinals signing checks in Rome for the gnomes  in Zurich; nuns dying as guerrillas in Guatemala; and,  beyond, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Adventists,  Methodists, and the thousand and one other Christian sects.  It takes humility and faith to see beyond all this delirium  and chaos-and to move beyond all this, even as Jesus  contains it all in his memory and transcends it all.  

For these Electors, it is the evening of the Conclave, as  indeed it is a certain evening for the institutional Church  of Conclave, for Rome and its Vatican. The sunlight of  human glory and power that lit its former days has ceased.  Great frescoes do not look down on this Conclave from  Sistine walls and ceiling. Many of the ancient songs are,  like the Latin it once imposed on all, muted and no longer  heard. In our modern world, there is a feeling of disquiet,  of life narrowing down, of grace being eroded from every  day's hours, of charm disappearing, of sensations being  bleached in the glare of modernity with modernity's shame 

lessness. All Christians experience this today. But through out the Church of Jesus there is audible the voice of  Jesus' salvation speaking of his love for all human things  and his irrevocable decision and promise that nothing would  undo that salvation or quench that love.  

With the authority of Jesus, these Cardinals will choose  one of their own number as the 264th successor of Simon  Peter. And, as at Simon Peter's appointment near Hermon,  the same principals will be present: Jesus repeating:  "You are Peter"; the Prince, watchful always, bent on  making the Cardinals and their particular choice of Pope  "a mere plaything and an instrument."  

The battle goes on. 

THE FIRST  

OF THE  

PILGRIM POPES  ~~

The men and women of the twenty-first century will be  fascinated by the figure of Giovanni Battista Montini who  became Pope Paul 6 in June of 1963. Our faces are flat tened against the glass and we see but darkly. They will  

be at a sufficient distance to judge what he has done.  They will look back to see what sort of men were his  intimates, his trusted helpers; what his driving motives  were; whether his theology was as wise as his piety was  genuine; whether he played secular power-politics using  the authority of Jesus; whether he compromised fatally  with those he considered lesser enemies of his faith in  order to outwit those he thought greater ones; whether he  allowed personal friendship for a few to interfere with  his judgment on life-and-death issues that involved be lieving millions.  

They will see, as we cannot, whether Pope Paul's vision  of the twenty-first century was correct-so brilliantly cor rect that they, our descendants, will marvel at his fore sight-or so dismally incorrect that his name and his  Pontificate and his ideas will be hated and cast in infamy.  It will be either one or the other. Because it was Montini,  with two or three other individual men of our age, whose  stubborn will swung his 715-million member Roman  Church around officially to face in a direction the vast  majority did not want and did not understand.  

For our descendants he may well be seen as an innova tor as gigantic as Peter the Great of Russia or Mao Tse tung of China. They may say of him: He saw over every body's head, he saw beyond their limited horizons, and he  

was a great among the pygmies. And he may be the fourth  Pope in history to be dubbed "great." Paul the Great, like  19 

20 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, and Nicholas the  Great.  

Those twenty-first-century people, not we, will under stand the double role we have seen Pope Paul playing.  They will see him as the last of the old-time Popes firmly  rooted in the 1800-year-old Papal tradition, as querulously  imperative and as insistently monarchic as any Pope who  came before him. And they will see him as the first of  the Pilgrim Popes, men who acted as if their Church had  been exiled from human society and they wished to do  the ancient penance of pilgrimage-in the name of all  Christians-in order that once more Jesus, his Vicar and  his salvation, be accepted within the human regime.  

Paul was never really welcomed by the Romans, by that  Vatican bureaucracy that an irritated Pope Pius 12 once  described as "like the Bourbons who learned little and  forgot nothing." Paul was a northern Italian who had  made his name as a churchman in Milan for nine years.  As far as the Romans were concerned, the man born and  baptized in northern Concessio as Giovanni Battista Enri 

co Antonio Maria Montini could just as well have re mained up north with the other barbarians where Pope  Pius 12 had exiled him from the Vatican.  

But Montini returned as Pope Paul on June 21, 1963,  and he brought with him a whole train of northerners;  architects, financiers, clerics of various callings, publishers,  designers, art people, and the hangers-on whom every suc 

cessful Cardinal acquires. The "Milan Mafia" according  to Roman clerics, adulterated the exclusively Roman char acter of the Vatican which Pacelli (Pius 12) fomented  during the almost 20 years of his reign.  

During the Milan years and then in Rome, outsiders  remarked on the reverence, almost awe, in which members  of the "Milan Mafia" held Montini. There had always been  a special camaraderie among them and the hostility they  met in Rome only united them more.  

A notable fact about Paul's Papal court and the Vatican  administration in his time is that it shared the "horizontal"  character of most modern governments. The personnel  was mediocre. No giants jutted up above the level of the  general mass.  

Yet Montini had around him men as colorful and as 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 21  

clever as any Pope in history. Secretary Don Pasquale  Macchi, not always wise in his choice of friends, but  loyal to Paul throughout; the Stakhanovite Benelli, brusque  in his faith, avid in his zeal for supernatural immaterial 

ism; the hard-smoking Cardinal Villot who had developed  a bureaucratic competence through a lifetime of petty  bargaining; the stolid, retiring Willebrands, man of peace,  perpetually surprised by his own success, afraid to move  in any direction, and who, as the Romans joked, got  anxious only about German Lutheran reaction to anything  Roman-even a breakdown in Vatican plumbing; the  quick-witted, sure-footed Cardinal Vagnozzi whom Paul  always felt had "said 'Good Morning!' to the Devil and  got away with it"; veteran Cardinal Ottaviani, gnomic as  though conserving energy, hoarding old truths, always  warning Paul of dangers; Cardinal Wright, of torrential  egocentrism, ubiquitous, gourmand, eloquent, who in the  hope of inheFiting the earth had declared himself meek,  but who eventually rose to heights of faith his contempo raries never thought possible in him; Archbishop Casaroli,  Paul's traveling salesman of Vatican Ostpolitik, the man  of the future who knew everyone's secrets.  

The key to the character of the Papacy of Paul 6 lies  in Paul's reaction to, and his decision about, the vision  Pope John 23 had of the Church. In the minds and accord ing to the policy of the Cardinal Electors who made  Giovanni Battista Montini Pope in Conclave 81 in June  1963, Montini was supposed to implement that vision.  

The newness and peculiarity of John's vision lay in its  superiority to anything we find before him in the Popes.  In fact, in one sense, no Pope ever had John's vision.  

John's immediate predecessor, Pius 12, came nearest to  it. After his earlier mistakes and fantasies about Romani ta-the power of Rome as the center of the Church and about the continuing power of the ancient Roman  Catholic "heartland" in southern Europe, Pius 12 did come  to a vision of the chessboard of history. He final!y tran 

scended petty details of geography and local histories, so  that his gaze locked into the basic struggle between Jesus  and Satan. But he too readily identified the enemy as  Marxism. Thus far, Pius's vision. And at that point, he  died.  

Angelo Roncalli, as John 23, did not suffer from that  narrow focus. Opposed as fiercely as Pius 12 ever had 

22 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

been to Marxism, Roncalli's focus was wider. Although he  did believe in the Satanic origin of Marxism, John did not  accept Pius's view that implied that an outside and oppos ing force--Marxism-was trying to change society, and  Jesus' Church. John's main contribution was his simple  intuition that a change had taken place already, and that  only the surface of previous things remained, like shells of  buildings ready to collapse. John saw that the world of  Pius 12, of Pius 9, of Clement 7, of all past Popes was  dead and gone. The struggle against Marxism John classi fied as one minor skirmish, soon to be over, in a much  more profound and cosmic struggle.  

The essence of the change John saw was this: All the  • social, political, ideological, ethnic, and intellectual bound aries that had divided human beings for centuries had lost  their validity. No one could explain it, but it was certain  that gone from the human scene was some root persuasion,  some deep conviction. Because of that conviction, men had  preserved those boundaries up to John 23's very moment  in history. But now a new unheard-of and frightening  human unity was emerging. And all the old boundaries,  all the things men and women had understood and lived  by, were disappearing.  

For John, as for Pius 12 and Paul 6, the essence of the  cosmic struggle lay in the plans and counterplans of two  personages: Jesus and Satan. It was a deadly game played  on the chessboard of the human universe. The chessboard  was cosmic. The issues were cosmic. The players were  cosmic.  

The intuition of John told him that in the wake of the  vast change that had taken place, religion in general and  Christianity in particular were in danger of being bypassed;  that Satan had made his move to nullify all that God had  accomplished. And, in fact, it was plain to see that Chris 

tianity was being bypassed, that it was increasingly isolated  and cut off from the political, civil, intellectual, and cul turallife of men and women.  

As his intuition was simple, so was John's practical solu tion: open windows and doors; knock down barriers; let  the spirit, already here, fly out across tbe face of humanity.  Hence, his Council-Vatican Council II. Hence his pater nal and loving attitude. And hence the spontaneous and  universal feeling that this 77-year-old Roman Pope, John,  created within a span of only three years and six months: 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 23  

a feeling that no good was impossible any more, and that  no evil could not be overcome; a feeling that, somehow and  unexpectedly, grace had been poured out, that all hate  could be melted by that grace, and that the best of things  could be hoped for. "All has been changed," John told his  generation. "Come to our Council and celebrate and make  plans together with us." And then John died.  

When Paul 6 stepped into the Pope's sandals, he trans lated John's cosmic vision of change, and developed his own  new policies, according to his own abilities and his own  vision.  

As far back as the 1930s Giovanni Montini as a young  ecclesiastic had been profoundly influenced by a single at titude that would, thirty years later, go a long way toward  making him a Pope unlike any Pope before him. It was an  attitude first made popular and then repudiated by a  French philosopher of great popular appeal, Jacques Mari tain. Montini, in fact, willingly wrote an introduction for  the Italian edition of Maritain's Integral Humanism.  

"Be a witness by service," runs the idea, "but do not  think that any other initiative is possible, practical or called  for." In practical terms, what integral humanism has to say  is that all men and women are naturally good; they will  respond to the good and reject the evil if they are shown  the difference. The function of Jesus' Church at this stage  in human history is merely to bear witness to that differ 

ence, not to make superhuman efforts at Catholicizing  politics, economics, literature, science, education, social  life, or any of the other aspects of human society. Only to  witness by service to men and women-without any dis 

tinction of creed or race-this is the task of the Church in  today's world where a new unity among human beings has  emerged; a world which of itself excludes Christianity and  the central authority of the Pope as the Vicar of Jesus and  the center of world unity.  

So, in Paul's view, the Papacy and the Church had to  set out once more to attract men and women to the faith,  but in a different way. They had to break out of their isola tion; an isolation that was, in large part, owing to their  own deficiencies. There must be a new effort to find men  and women again, to be with them and become acceptable  to them.  

When Paul spoke of himself as a pilgrim and of his  Papal reign as a pilgrimage, he was referring to this effort. 

24 TIlE FINAL CONCLAVE  

He saw it as part penance for the failures of past Church men, and part search for those human beings who did not  yet know Jesus, Jesus' Church, and Jesus' salvation.  

This integral humanism of Paul 6 permeated the entire  policy of his Pontificate. How far Paul has been able to  direct his Church on to that pilgrim path remains for a  subsequent generation to judge. In the meanwhile, we can  take our own measure of his success by examining how  Paul acted on three occasions of capital importance that  intimately concerned Church diplomacy, Church finance,  and Church belief.  

October 4, 1965.  

Paul's Alitalia Flight #2800 touched down at Kennedy  International Airport carrying Pope Paul 6, seven Car dinals, ten Vatican aides, sixty newsmen, commentators,  light and sound technicians, and 200,000 covers bearing  new Vatican commemorative stamps.  

Paul motorcaded at about 12 m.p.h. in a black, bubble topped, flag-flying, fluorescent-lighted, leather-upholstered,  seven-passenger, 1964 Lincoln convertible. He was watched  by a hundred TV cameras and more than two million New  Yorkers who lined the 24-mile route to Saint Patrick's  Cathedral in Manhattan.  

The way was guarded, prepared, and facilitated by  15,000 New York City policemen, the Fire Department,  the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, plain clothes detec tives, 5,000 barricades, 40 bullhorns, 27 tow-trucks, 13  ambulances, 1 bomb truck, 2 motor-launches on the East  River and 2 helicopters overhead.  

He spoke to 11 Cardinals, to Archbishops and Bishops,  and 4,000 people in the Cathedral. He met and talked with  President Johnson and, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, had  Mrs. Johnson and teen-age daughter Luci presented to him,  lunched with Cardinal Spellman and his associates, and  conferred with a score of visitors, officials, and well 

wishers.  

Finally, Pope Paul proceeded to the United Nations.  That was the reason for his pilgrimage. "It offers the oc casion to further the cause of peace, so close to Our heart,  and at the same time to promote a greater understanding  among the nations of the world," Paul had written to U  Thant on March 1, 1965. "It would," U Thant replied.to 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 25  

Paul on April 16, 1965, "give a new and vigorous impetus  to endeavors of men of good will everywhere to safeguard  and strengthen world peace . . . bringing humanity closer  to the fulfillment of its legitimate aspirations."  

U Thant greeted Paul at 3: 13 in the afternoon that day  in October 1965. He led Paul first to the Meditation Room:  a windowless, unfurnished, trapezoidal chamber, 3.0 by 18  feet, its symmetrical walls blank but for a fresco by Swed 

ish artist Bo Beskow, depicting geometric patterns in blue,  yellow, gray, brown, white. In the center of the room, a  waist-high solid block of stone and iron ore. The only  illumination, a shaft of dim, yellow light striking the shim 

mering surface of rock.  

Then U Thant led Paul to the General Assembly for its  1,374th meeting.  

A color photograph of the General Assembly was taken  during Paul's address at 3:45 P.M.: The Assembly Hall is  a sloping whirlpool of 11 ordered eddies arrested for one  still photographic instant in inevitable movement down 

ward to the place where Paul, white-clad Priest, stands.  The weight of the Hall bears down on his diminutive figure  as on a fulcrum. Three thousand listeners, necks craned,  are watching him. There is no apparent movement except  Paul's head and shoulders. It is a moment of electric at 

tention, a vigil of nations.  

"We have a message to deliver to each one of you."  Paul has the ears of the world. His message has willing  translators into over 35 languages, is heard-even seen literally all over our planet. One almost expected to hear  Paul address the human race: "Children of men! Nations  of the Earth! Peoples of every land! This is now the way  

of your salvation...." In this almost universal attention  Paul could have stated blandly without unduly surprising  anyone: "On the 29th of June, Feast of the Apostles Peter  and Paul, the Lord Jesus Christ told Us personally that this  is what men must do to solve their problems ..."; or, "We  propose to solve the continuing deadlock of East and West,  of haves and have-nots, of black and white, in the follow 

ing manner ..."; or, "We men can now arrest the lethal  arms race, reconcile Arabs and Jews, bring China to reason  with the family of nations, dispel the clouds of nuclear  holocaust, feed, educate, and console the world's billions  by ..."  

But there was none of all this. Paul as Pope, as Apostle, 

26 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

had no alternatives to offer. He did not preach or announce  the Gospel message as Peter and Paul had done 1900 years  before to Roman, Greek, and Semite. Christ either cruci 

fied or resurrected was not the burden of his words.  Paul said, "We wish Our message to be a moral and  solemn ratification of this high institution ... as an expert  in humanity We bring to this organization the voices of  Our late predecessors, those of the whole Catholic episco pate, and Our Own, convinced as We are that this Organi zation represents the obligatory road of modern civilization  and of world peace."  

The motionless silence of a few seconds ago is ended.  The magic moment is over. Now, the rest of Paul's words  will be, all feel, a benign testimony endorsing their exis tence, acknowledging their difficulties.  

All the principal participants and protagonists of mutual  hate and predictable wars are sitting in semicircular rows  before Paul. Webs of intrigue and opposition and self interest clothe them as surely as do their dark suits and  national costumes.  

To them Paul says, "You give sanction to the great  principle that relations between the peoples should be  regulated by reason, by justice, by negotiation; not by  lorce, fear, or fraud."  

In the coming year of 1966 alone, for causes foreseen  and excluded by the United Nations Charter, there will be  suppression of human lijJerties in Haiti (2nd row) and  South Africa (6th row); civil and guerrilla warfare and  strife in both Congos (lOth row), India (2nd row), the  Dominican Republic (l1th row), Guatemala (lst row),  and Indonesia (2nd row). Blacks will riot in 43 American  cities protesting discrimination. Refugees from war and  oppression will be many: 12,000 Cubans in Spain and  200,000 in the United States; 15,000 refugees from Portu 

guese Guinea in Senegal; 700,000 in Western Europe from  the Iron Curtain countries; 50,000 Tibetans in Nepal and  India; 1,100,000 Chinese from the Communist Mainland  in Hong Kong and 80,000 in Macao; 800,000 Arab ref 

ugees in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan; 12,000 South  Vietnamese in Cambodia; 575,000 Africans displaced by  civil wars and rebellions. By September 1966, 300,000 will  have been killed in the Indonesian civil war. By December,  6,644 Americans alone will have died in the Vietnam War. 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 27  

Yet Paul says, "there is no need of long speeches to pro claim the finality of this institution."  

Before Paul sit the representatives of nations that will  bring the accumulation of armaments, with a view to  future violence and death, to new levels. In fiscal 1966,  the United Kingdom (7th row) will have a defense budget  of $6.081 billion; France (1st row) $4.465 billion; Japan  (3rd row) $946 million; U.S.S.R. (7th row) $14.208 bil 

lion; U.S.A. (8th row) $57.718 bilIion. Both the latter  will supply Arab nations and Israel with the material that  would make possible the War of June 1967. Pakistan (5th  row) will accept arms from Communist China to fight  India.  

Paul continues, "Suffice it to recall that the blood of  millions of men, that countless and unheard-of sufferings,  that useless massacres and fearful ruins have sealed the  pact uniting you, with a vow which must change the future  history of the world: Never again War! War, never again!"  

After his address, Paul stood at the head of a 300-man  receiving line in the north end of the delegates' lounge  facing a huge chocolate-colored map of the world. All  walked up to him willingly, greeted him pleasantly, some  reverently: the Great Powers; Nationalist China; Soviet  allies and satellites; the uncommitted Third World. For all  of them, Paul had a word. Observers noted the extra mo 

ment he spent with Gromyko; the reverence of Mrs.  Gromyko; Paul's affectionate, two-handed clasp for Arthur  Goldberg; the Africans and Asians who kissed Paul's ring;  his gentleness with Jacqueline Kennedy.  

FinaIly, Paul gave a last glance at the assembled guests.  More non-Europeans than Europeans. More non-Chris tians than Christians. That was the lesson in his memory.  

When the plane carrying Paul with his entourage and  his gifts and 52 reporters arched through the sky over  Manhattan and the United Nations, Paul was barely over  two years into his reign. Yet at the heart of the lesson he  had learned was the eerie intuition of the finality of the  new condition of his Church that Popes had resisted for a  thousand years. Paul would speak about the intuition to  many in the years to come.  

A new mentality of humankind was in the making, as  yet barely appearing in the motley United Nations crowd.  And the sooner the Church prepared to divest itself of all 

28 TIlE FINAL CONCLAVE  

it had acquired by way of regionalism, nationalism, and  culture, the more ready and adapted it would be to sur vive, to flourish, and finally to prevail among humans as  the unique portal of divine revelation.  

But to the casual observer the fundamental message of  Paul's visit was not very grand: "We the Church, are on  the sidelines," his visit seemed to say. "As an organization  we know we have no say in your business. We want to  remind you, however, that we are here."  

This was the first concrete and hard-headed expres~on of Paul's integral humanism.  

Spring 1969.  

It is late at night in the Papal study on the third floor of  the Apostolic Palace. No more secluded and secure and  private time and place has been found by any previous  Popes for ultra-secret meetings.  

The meeting concerned Vatican finances. Such meetings  have been part of Papal business for over a thousand years.  Pope Paul is alone with the financier, Michele Sindona.  Popes, more often than not, have preferred to conduct  such high-level affairs alone.  

There is no official entry about the meeting in Paul's  appointment book, and there never was. In each week of  each year in the history of Popes, just as in the history of  premiers, presidents, kings, and corporation heads, we  know there have been such "nonmeetings."  

Paul comes to an agreement, affixing his signature as  Pope to a contractual, bilateral document. Vatican archives  are full of such documents.  

In virtue of that signature, Paul binds and obliges a  goodly part of Vatican finance and Papal monies. Popes  have always-and rightly-considered themselves the solely  responsible stewards of what has always been called in  Rome "the patrimony of Peter."  

The scene is unique only in one respect. By his signature,  Pope Paul authorized the financier to sell the Vatican's  controlling interest ($350 million) in the huge conglomer ate, Societa Generale lmmobiliare. By that signature Paul  also allowed Sindona access to other Vatican funds for  further investment.  

The money centers of Europe and the United States will  be filled for years with half-finished stories, garbled ac­

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 29  

counts, wild reports, and incomplete versions of what  turned out to be a financial loss of apparently huge propor tions for the Vatican. II crack Sindona-the Sindona catas trophe-is not a simple affair. That the signing took place  in those circumstances between Pope Paul and Michele  Sindona is now an admitted fact. Initially, the Vatican  denied it, stating that the signing was between Sindona and  Cardinal Guerri, a senior Vatican member.  

Paul's memories of Sindona reached back well before the  spring of 1969 to his own first few years as Archbishop of  Milan. His preoccupation with Vatican financial admin istration and general policies went back even further.  

As pro-Secretary of Vatican State for Pius 12, Montini  had already agitated for reform in Vatican financial admin istration. He knew firsthand the abuses and the abusers.  In lQ54, he drew up a report citing the names and activ ities of Pius 12's own nephews (Carlo, GiuHo, Marcanto nio Pacelli) whom Pius had put at the head of Vatican  finances. Pius's reaction to the report was violent and swift.  Montini found himself on a train for Milan, for exile, and  for disfavor. One of Paul's bitterest memories on that long,  one-way train journey was of a day shortly after the end  of World War II when he had listened to Pacelli speaking  from the public balcony of Saint Peter's in Rome, denounc ing a certain Dalmatian priest, Ernesto Cippico, as having  "brought scandal in the Church." Cippico had embezzled  some thousands of dollars from the funds of Eastern Euro pean refugee groups. Even as he listened to those words,  Montini had known that over on the Quirinal, out in the  magnificent country villas, and within the Vatican behind  Pacelli's back, there were men and women who dealt  every day in millions of Church dollars-the "patrimony  of Peter"-buying war, selling peace down the river, cyn ically, scandalously. Cippico lacked only protectors in high  places. Montini could almost see a Satanic rictus behind  the whole affair.  

Later, as Pope, one of Paul's first major pronounce ments, in 1967, was Populorum Progressio in which he at tacked laissez-faire capitalism and castigated the "interna tional imperialism of money" whereby in the end "the poor  

always remain poor and the rich become ever richer." The  Vatican, as an international trading partner, was included  in his attack. In his heart, Paul wished to take radical  action, to give back to those poor what was theirs. When 

30 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

"we do help the poor," he stated (quoting St. Ambrose),  "we never give to the poor what is ours; we merely return  to them what belongs to them." Paul's Papacy lost many  friends in high places in the Vatican, in Europe, and in  the Americas, when Populorum was published.  

By the time of that publication, nevertheless, Paul had  decided on the broad lines of a reform in Vatican finances  and on an ultimate goal: divesting the Church of its finan cial clout, thereby expelling that element of the "Prince  of this world."  

In the late sixties, according to the most reliable re ports, the annual budget of the Vatican lay between $25  and $40 million. Its investments ran to more than $4.8 bil lion. Managing these huge investment sums were two main  financial administration departments.  

The first, the Institute for Religious Works (lRW) , at  that time under the direction of venerable Cardinal di  Jorio, had been set up during World War 1. It paid the  salaries of the Vatican bureaucracy and held Vatican ac 

counts and investments for other Catholic institutions, for  about 1,000 Vatican citizens, and for "a few limited and  chosen friends (Italian and non-Italian) of the Church,"  as one official states. Its assets were estimated conservative 

ly to be upward of $3 billion. Paul found, however, that  no balance sheet was ever produced. The IRW moved huge  sums around the world money markets, operating free  of any national exchange control regulations. It had even  transferred monies back and forth between the belligerents  during World War II. Obviously the IRW had built up  considerable foreign exchange dealings and confidence.  Whenever Paul needed money to cover Vatican expenses,  di Jorio simply drew it from Paul's account ( # 16/ 16) .  

The Special Administration of Holy See Property (SA)  dated from 1929, the year Mussolini's government paid  $2.4 million in 'reparation for the Italian Papal states seized  by the Italian Republic in 1870. It was run by some com 

petent lay bankers (with cleric assistants by their sides),  and was advised by J. P. Morgan of New York, Hambros  Bros. of London, and Rothschilds of Paris.  

By the late sixties, monies from both IRW and SA were  invested in every sector of Italian industry and commerce.  On the boards of directors of companies in which the Vati can had an interest, there always sat a Vatican "family"  man, somebody like Massimo Spada or Luigi Mennini. 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 31  

One business venture in which the Vatican developed a  controlling interest was the giant, multinational Societa  Generale lmmobiliare (SOl). Its president was Count Oal leazzi, former governor of Vatican City and relative of  Pacelli's personal doctor, and four of its key Board mem bers were Vatican "family" men. SOl was highly diversi fied, holding property such as office buildings, construction  companies, real estate, residential areas, etc., on both sides  of the Atlantic-the Rome Hilton, the Pan Am building  on the Champs Elysees in Paris, the Watergate complex in  Washington, D.C., and the Stock Exchange in Montreal,  Canada, figured among the real property.  

Paul, persuaded that Europe was heading for a total  eclipse of its autonomy, decided that it was time for a  change. Apart from geopolitical considerations, there were  other reasons: he was advised of a coming recession and  inflation period; the running expenses of the Vatican had  increased enormously since the Vatican council, mainly be 

cause of new Secretariats and Commissions with large ex pense accounts; some Vatican-controlled companies were  losing heavily (the flour and pasta company, Pantanella,  lost $2.5 million and required refinancing of $4.8 million);  the Vatican work force had risen by one-third since 1963  and had tripled since 1948; Vatican pensioners ran to about  1,000. And to cap this picture, the Vatican was engaged in  a losing battle with Italian fiscal authorities over the Vati can's claim to be tax exempt for its 1962 dividends by  

virtue of the 1929 Concordat with the government.  As in the situation when Paul visited the United Nations,  the reasons for action were there.  

Paul's first overt move in the major financial areas of the  V.aticait was to establish a new administrative arm in 1968.  The Prefecture of Economic Affairs, PECA as it is known,  was set up to coordinate investment policies, check on ex 

penditures, and prepare the hitherto unheard-of Vatican  balance sheet. And, sure enough, by the seventies, PECA  produced budget estimates and a consolidated balance  sheet.  

For a short time PECA was governed by Cardinal  Angelo Dell'Acqua. Then Paul confided PECA to the care  of a career diplomat, the 62-year-old Cardinal Egidio  Vagnozzi, back from nine years as Vatican representative  in Washington. Vagnozzi was an arch-conservative and ally  of such powerful old-time hands as Cardinals Ottaviani 

32 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

and Siri. Assisting Vagnozzi were Cardinals Cody of Chi cago and Martin Hoffner of Cologne, Germany.  Paul also installed a new head of the IRW, Father Paul  Marcinkus, a priest of the Chicago archdiocese. A native  of Cicero, Illinois, born of a second generation Lithuanian  family, ordained in 1947, postgraduate student in Rome's  North American College, subsequent member of the En glish language section of the Vatican's Secretariat of State,  six-foot-three (the Italians nicknamed him il gorilla), and  very personable, Marcinkus became a friend of Macchi,  Paul's secretary. He accompanied Paul on his trips around  the world. Marcinkus became a bishop with basic salary of  $6,400 as head of IRW.  

The first aim of Paul and his adviso~s was to extinguish  the Vatican's system of controlling interests in Italian  companies, to pull out of Italian money markets, and to  go "foreign" into the promising world of Eurodollar blue  chips and offshore profits.  

Among all the men available to make such a vast shift  of such vast sums, no one seemed so suitable and so  adapted as a man already known to Paul: Michele Sindona.  

Michele Sindona had, indeed, made himself adaptable  for such a major job. Ever since he had bought a truck  and with it had begun a lucrative trading business with the  United States armed forces in wartime Sicily, he had spent  a little over 20 years preparing for that triumphal, nocturnal  signing. Born in 1917, in the town of Patti near Messina,  Sicily, educated by the Jesuits, successful law student at  Messina University, Sindona left Sicily in 1947 carrying  with him glowing recommendations from the Bishop of  Messina (who only knew Sindona's generous donations to  the Church) for the archdiocesan authorities in Milan.  There he opened an office specializing in tax consultancy  in relation to the dollar market.  

By 1959, Sindona was well on his way, with signal suc cesses already behind him. To date he had acquired the  Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF) and a steel foundry  (which he sold to the American Crucible Company); he  had established a holding company, Fasco AG, in the tax haven of Liechtenstein; through Fasco he had obtained  controlling share in Finabank Geneva; he had founded a  foreign exchange brokerage, Moneyrex, headed by Carlo  Bordoni; had knit close relationships with Luigi Mennini,  top official in the Vatican's IRW, with Massimo Spada, 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 33  

Vatican "family" man (who became a director of Sindona's  BPF), and with Don Pasquale Macchi, Archbishop Mon tini's personal secretary and confidant.  

By the time he came to Montini's close attention, Sin dona was already legal counsellor to the textile group,  SNIA-Viscoa (Spada was one of its directors), president  of Keyes Italiana, Me,diterranean Holidays, Philips Carbon  Black Italiana, managing director of Cheseborough-Ponds,  and board member of Remington Rand Italiana.  

What cemented Montini's esteem of Sindona as early as  1959, was the $2.4 million Sindona raised for Montini  from Milanese business circles in order to finance an Old  People's Home (the Casa Madonnina).  

In 1968, the Vatican lost its 6-year battle with the Italian  fiscal authorities and it was penalized. The time had come  to take the jump. And Sindona was ready to help the Vati can jump.  

Within those seconds toward midnight in the spring of  1969, when Sindona, and then Paul, bent over and signed  their names to the agreement, Sindona was given control  over vast foreign exchange resources. In all foreign money  markets he now carried the Vatican imprimatur on all his  dealings.  

As Sindona bowed to kiss Paul's ring and depart into  the dark Roman morning with as much financial power as  many a nation on earth, for one moment Paul saw him, as  it were, transfigured-his dark suit, black tie, white shirt,  urbane manner, smiling deference, obvious satisfaction all the details seemed to mirror another power alien to the  power Paul wielded because of that Fisherman's Ring  Sindona had just kissed with so much ease. It was not so  much that Sindona reportedly belonged to the Freemasons.  It was, rather, that Paul felt Sindona was an instrument in  the hands of unknown powers. From then until 1977, the  impression was to grow as news filtered back to Paul.  

Sindona quickly moved on several fronts. He transferred  $40 million to the Luxembourg Bank, Paribas Transcon tinental (subsidiary of Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas);  $15 million of this was acquired by California-based Gulf  and Western (Paul shuddered a little when he learned that  Gulf and Western owned Paramount Pictures Corporation)  whose 44-year-old president, Charles Bludhorn joined the  board of SGI. Under Marcinkus, the IRW to.ok a large  block of shares of Sindona's Finabank. The Vatican r~

34 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

tained 5 percent control over SGI, but it proceeded to  divest itself of Italian companies like the Condotte d'Acqua  (in 1969), Pantanella (in 1970), and Serono (in 1970; a  maker of contraceptive pills). It also diversified into foreign  companies: General Motors, General Electric, Shell, Gulf,  IBM, and some airlines.  

Sindona became president of seven Italian companies,  vice-president in three banks, and bought a controlling  block of shares in the Vatican-linked Banca Union (BU),  thereby at least tripling his Roman banking operation. He  was later to fuse his old BFP and the BU into Banca Pri 

vata Italiana (BPI). Through Sindona's maneuvering of  funds, the Vatican acquired a participation in BPI (20  percent), thus enabling Sindona to forge links with Ham bros (25 percent) and the Continental Bank of Illinois (15  percent). Continental's chairman, David Kennedy, who was  Secretary of the United States Treasury under President  Nixon, later became a board member of Sindona's Fasco  AG.  

Everyone was surprised when, in 1972, Sindona suddenly  transferred himself and his family to the United States  where he had taken a cooperative apartment at the Pierre  Hotel in New York in the name of his wife, Katerina. He  bought controlling interests in the 20th largest United  States bank, the Franklin National. He offered $1 million  as an anonymous election contribution for the reelection  of President Nixon, but Maurice Stans refused it.  

Barely one year later, the first crack in Sindona's em pire became apparent to all. The American Securities and  Exchange Commission (SEC) halted all trading on Vetco  Offshore Trading Industries when it found out that Irving  Eisenberger, a Los Angeles investment counsellor, had ac quired 25 percent of outstanding shares in Vetco (in viola tion of Federal Security regulations). It also came to light  that 20 percent of Vetco's shares and options were acquired  by Eisenberger on behalf of theIRW through the Liechten stein-based Fiduciary Investment Services (FIS) which had  an office in Sindona's Roman office complex. The IRW  had many shares and options in FIS. In mid-March 1973,  IRW had acquired 454,000 Vetco shares which were part  of 714,000 Vetco shares sold by FIS, the largest block ever  traded on the American Stock Exchange.  

The Vatican paid $320,000 in penalty compensation for  that illegal transaction, and the Italian authorities started 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 35  

a long inquiry into Sindona's dealings. Another crack in  Sindona's empire.  

When Villot informed Paul of the inquiry, and he  learned from Vagnozzi about the penalty, Paul's Papal  memory stirred with the age-old unease: Had he left the  Church defenseless? Had he involved the Church more  than ever with the power of this world?  

In 1973, and for two agonizing years, Villot and other  officials brought Paul news of disaster after disaster in the  Sindona affair. Sindona's BPI sustained foreign exchange  losses of $48 million in 1973, and another $150 million in  1974. Then it was discovered that the Franklin National  Bank had a minimal $43 million in losses hidden as "phony  profits" in foreign exchange dealings with Sindona-con 

trolled Swiss banks.  

Other Sindona-controlled or Sindona-linked banks  started to collapse-Wolff, Herz, Herstatt, Aminot-with  consequent Vatican losses. By October 1974, Italian author ities were ready to move against Sindona, Spada, Men nini, and other unnamed persons involved in the crack.  The charge: falsification of BU accounts in 1960. The pos sible penalty: 15-year jail terms for each of them.  

On January 9, 1975, Swiss authorities closed Sindona's  Finabank. It had sustained foreign exchange losses of at  least $82 million. Sindona made a last fruitless attempt to  raise capital (about $300 million) by offering for sale new  capital shares in a small holding company, Finambro. But  Guido Carli, Governor of the Bank of Italy, scotched that  idea.  

Vatican losses were huge. In January 1975, Spada de clared that the Vatican had by then lost 10 percent of its  total worth. Swiss banking sources speak of something in  the region of $240 million. Despite Vagnozzi's public state ments in April 1975 that Vatican investments in the affair  amounted to $500 million (he did confirm a heavy Vatican  shift of investments from Italy to the United States), and  that Vatican losses in il crack Sindona were minimal, re ports persist that those losses may have gone well over the  billion-dollar mark.  

Paul's memory of the Sindona affair continued to be  bittersweet all his remaining years. It showed him more  clearly than ever the extent to which the institutional and  hieratic Church was chained to an international monetary  system that belonged in principle and in practice to the 

36 mE FINAL CONCLAVE  

spirit of the "Prince of the world." But with all its disasters,  the entire Sindona venture had not served to rend those  chains.  

Two things are certain about Paul's venture with Michele  Sindona. He wished to align Vatican and Church finances  with United States interests. He also wished to detach his  Church in Europe from its involvement in the ancient  heartland where it had occupied a predominant position  and played the role of chief potentate ever since the Roman  Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th  century and, by his enormous gifts and benefices to the  then-Pope, Silvester 1, set the footsteps of all succeeding  Popes on the path of political and economic power. Sil 

vester had been the "first rich father" of Christianity. In  Paul's mind, he himself would like to have become the  first poor Pope in a long time.  

But in Paul's lifetime this was not to be. "Perhaps,"  Paul remarked in February of ] 977, "perhaps only the  hand of an oppressor can free Us and the Church from it  all. Satan may overleap himself. The dowry of Constantine  is too much to carry in today's world." Paul, 'the well-read  humanist, knew his Dante too well not to recollect the lines  that end the Tn/erno:  

"Ahi! Constantin, di quanta mal /ll matre,  

Non la tlW conversion, ma quella dote  

Che da te prese il primo ricco patrel"  

"Alas! Constantine, how much misfortune you caused,  Not by becoming Christian, but by that dowry  which the first rich father accepted from you!"  

December 8, ]965, was the closing day of the four-year  Ecumenical Vatican Council. In a cafe near Saint Peter's a  French Archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, was seated with two  of his own priests and some guests. Lefebvre was explain 

ing to them the legal grounds on which he considered the  decisions of the Council to be invalid and nonobligatory.  Nowhere, Lefebvre observed, did any Council document  state that to disobey the decisions would bring on anathe 

ma (the ecclesiastical condemnation par excellence for a  breach of the true faith). Besides, Lefebvre argued, the 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 37  

council had erred ... it had embraced "neo-Modernism  and neo-Protestantism."  

Lefebvre was convinced that the Council had been hi jacked by Bishops and theologians who were acting in a  spirit of Protestantism and neo-Modernism. At the turn of  the century neo-Modernism had been a movement among  theologians and intellectuals who declared that belief and  dogma had to change with the changing nature of mankind.  But the neo-Modernist Bishops and theologians at the  Council in 1965 were out for something else: a new kind  of Reformation. "We are not going to have another Ref ormation" was a frequent phrase on the lips of the Pro gressivist theologians of the Council. Paul and others had  always understood this to be a repudiation of Luther's  revolt in the sixteenth century. But Lefebvre insisted there  was another interpretation. Luther, Lefebvre said, had de cided to revolt, to leave the Church of Rome, to go out  and found his own church. But the new theologians were  really saying, according to Lefebvre, "We have no inten tion of doing the foolish thing Luther did-to try to found  another church. We are going to stay and burrow deep  within the Church and change it into the image we have  of what it should be."  

Son of a textile manufacturer from Tourcoing, France,  a scholarly priest, member of the Holy Spirit Missionary  Order, former Bishop of Dakar, Senegal, a former Superior  General of the Holy Spirit Missionary Order, then Arch 

bishop of Tulle, France, the 60-year-old Lefebvre had been  one of the more powerful and active Conservatives during  the Vatican Council. As the Conservatives lost ground, and  the Progressivists gained victory after victory, a hardline  resistant mood set in among the Conservatives. "We," said  Cardinal Siri of Genoa to a friend, as they came out of  one Session of the Council where Progressivist views had  triumphed, "are not going to be bound by all those de 

crees."  

But Siri kept his revulsion under control. He did not act  as he had threatened. It was Lefebvre who would translate  Siri's defiance into a public campaign that would finally  present Paul's Church with its first threat of real schism in  over a century.  

The first eruption of pro-Lefebvre sentiment occurred  four years after the Council. It was 1969. Paul pro mulgated a new official text for celebrating Mass-the 

38 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Mass Ordinal. Paul's Ordinal consisted of an Introduction  followed by the new text of the Mass and ceremonial in structions to replace the ones that had been published and  authorized by Pope Pius 5 in the year 1570 and had been  used ever since.  

Two Italian priests, both Lefebvre's followers, wrote a  critique of Paul's new Ordinal, condemning its Introduc tion as opposed to traditional Catholic belief. The critique  was leaked, of course, to the Italian and French press, so  the fight became public. People began to range themselves  on the two opposing sides: those for Paul's Mass and those  for the old Mass of Pius 5. Pressured by the powerful  Cardinal Ottaviani and others, Paul did the only thing he  could: He asked his Congregation for the Faith (formerly  the Holy Office) to examine the Introduction. The Con gregation's answer: Everything is all right, except certain  elements of Article 7 in the Introduction. Ottaviani, at least  publicly, declared himself satisfied.  

But Lefebvre was not satisfied. He obtained permission  for his own Institute and Seminary at Bcane in Switzer land. It was from here that, from 1974 onward, he launched  devastating attacks on the established Church in Europe  and the United States. On November 21, 1974, came  Lefebvre's first public manifesto declaring the Vatican  Council false, the Pauline Mass illegal, and the teaching of  the Bishops erroneous.  

By autumn 1976, still operating out of Ecane, Lefebvre  had become an international figure not only in reputation,  but in holdings. He had acquired five chateaux in France  which he used as new seminaries to train over 100 new  recruits in what he characterized as the true Catholic  doctrine. He published a biannual newsletter and his book,  ]'Accuse Le Concile. He founded more seminaries in other  countries, including the United States. Everybody involved  in the affair became progressively bloodied.  

It was Villot, to his credit, who warned Paul early in  1975. Lefebvre must be suppressed, Villot insisted, and his  movement discredited and liquidated. The Church had an  extreme Right that had been successfully contained. There  was an extreme Left-in all Latin American countries, in  the United States, and in most European countries-that  the Church authorities had hitherto contained successfully.  It had been decided upon long ago as official policy that  both extremes were necessary so that the Church might 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 39  

move the majority at the center in the direction judged  best for the Church's future existence.  

Paul's treatment of Lefebvre and the Lefebvre mentality  was dictated primarily by the basic premise of Paul's in tegral humanness: Present the face of your Church to all  men with as little emphasis as possible on what separates  the Church from other groups. The principle was one of  openness, of seeking similarities and correspondences, of  eliminating what really repelled outsiders. A majority in his  Church may be Traditionalist in tendency. But in Paul's  estimation, the vast majority outside it were Progressivist  and could not accept a Traditionalist Church.  

Hence Paul encouraged the Third World group. He  sided with imprisoned terrorists. He allowed the most ex traordinary aberrations in doctrine and behavior to go  unpunished and even uncorrected. He abolished-against  the will of the majority of the Bishops in the Second Vati can Council-the Latin Mass. He allowed a Lefebvre, a  man of the Right, to be attacked, condemned, ostracized,  and ridiculed, while not doing anything to restrain those  men of the Left who published and lectured on Catholic  doctrine in a way diametrically opposed to Paul's own  teaching. He made no attempt to prevent the disappearance  of the intricate network of Catholic devotions to the saints,  to Christ, to the Papacy as such. He went more than the  symbolic extra mile in accommodating Communist regimes  in Eastern Europe.  

Without any real opposition from Paul's Vatican ad ministration and Paul's Rome, the Rosary, the devotion to  the Eucharist, the Stations of the Cross, devotion to the  Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Virgin Mary, the value  of pilgrimages to the holy places of Christendom, fidelity  to the Pope, conformity to Canon laws, the Catholic inter pretation of the Bible, the sacrosanct character of the  priesthood, the vocation of nuns, the practice of religious  meditation and asceticism-and all the other visible sources  of enthusiasm and initiative in the Catholic Church-were  snuffed out as officially approved and propagated elements  of Roman Catholic life. There can be no doubt about it:  Paul's policy was to favor the Left and extinguish-not  even tolerate-the Right.  

For Paul, the danger was that the Church as the official  presence of Jesus had once more become relatively un known and comparatively insignificant in the ever more 

40 mE FINAL CONCLAVE  

complicated affairs of the human race, which in the fore seeable future would increase to six or seven billion. The  Vicar of Jesus-no longer a fixed and accepted resident in  a central, venerated shrine, but a peripatetic pilgrim in a  new order of human things-would have to seek through 

out that world a fresh mode of representing Jesus.  In that case, the salvation Jesus won in his battle with  the "Prince" would once again have to start with humble  beginnings, to create a new civilization among humans of  many generations later than Paul's own; a race for whom  humanness will have ceased to carry any connotation of  genetic characteristics, of geographical origin, of skin pig ment, of social status, of linguistic difference, of foreign  economic trade, of past historical associations, even of  earthly birth.  

Now, if Lefebvre were allowed to continue, he would  draw heavily on the extreme Right and on the center  where a majority of Catholics stood, thus disrupting Paul's  policy by emphasizing the differences between Catholics  and non-Catholics. Lefebvre spelled catastrophe for Pauline  policy. He must be stopped.  

So, Paul pressed on. A commission made up of Cardinals  Garrone, Tabera, and Wright interviewed Lefebvre early  in 1975. Garrone, alas, treated Lefebvre as if he were a  dangerous and negligible madman. Tabera vented his full  fury on him: "What you are doing is worse than what all  the Progressivists are doing." Finally, under Villot's in 

structions, they issued a condemnation of Lefebvre on May  6. Further, they instructed Monsignore Mamie, Swiss  Bishop in whose diocese Lefebvre's Ecane Seminary lay,  to withdraw canonical approval from the seminary and to  order Lefebvre to surrender it to the Church. Lefebvre  turned to the Vatican Court of Appeals, but its Prefect,  Cardinal Staffa, under instructions from Villot, refused to  review Lefebvre's case.  

From spring 1976 the battle went public, and nastily  so. Major newspapers and many magazines in Europe and  the United States began to carry headlines and articles  about the Archbishop and his cause. By March, Lefebvre  was the object of a continual stream of demands, threats,  and orders from the Roman Ministries. The general mes 

sage: submit or else.  

Of course, Lefebvre did not submit. In May he toured  the new Society of St. Pius 5 Institutes in the United 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 41  

States-at Houston, Texas; San Jose, California; Armada,  Michigan; and elsewhere in Oklahoma, Virginia, Min nesota, and Arizona-conferring the Sacrament of Con firmation on children, preaching against the Ecumenical  Council.  

On the same Lake Albano where the Pope's summer re treat, Castel Gandolfo, stands, Lefebvre's sister founded a  novitiate where new sisters (five Americans, five French,  and one Austrian) went into training.  

Once back in Europe, Lefebvre announced that he would  ordain 26 young men at Econe on June 29, 1976. On May  24, at the suggestion of Cardinal Villot, Pope Paul spoke  openly, at a public Consistory, of Lefebvre's revolt. Paul  appealed for unity. It was the first time in over 217 years  that a Pope had publicly attacked a prelate of his Church.  For Paul was now faced with a real danger: Lefebvre  might consecrate a whole series of bishops, establish his  own dioceses in competition with existent dioceses. He was  already ordaining priests. And those priests were real  priests!  

Between June 22 and 28, 1976, Jesuit Father Dhanis,  sent from Rome by Villot, had several interviews with the  Archbishop, trying to stop him from going through with  the proposed Ordinations. Dhanis' message: Yeu face  suspension (that is, he would be forbidden to say Mass or  exercise any of his priestly functions) and possible excom 

munication. Still Lefebvre would not yield.  

On June 28, Cardinal Thiandoum went as Paul's special  . emissary. His message: If you go through with this, they  will strip you of everything. Pause and reconsider.  On the morrow of that conversation, June 29, Lefebvre  ordained his 26 priests and deacons, and preached a bitter  sermon against "the traitors of our faith." Nobody present  doubted that he was referring to Pope Paul as well as to  Villot and others.  

On July 10, Villot sent Archbishop Ambrogio Marchioni  to Econe with a letter demanding Lefebvre's submission.  Lefebvre again refused. On July 22, Villot had Lefebvre  "suspended." Lefebvre dismissed the suspension as a baga 

telle and preached a sermon on the "confusion through  bastardization" that the Vatican was creating. We have, he  said, "a bastard rite (the Pauline Mass), bastard sacra ments, bastard priests." And he added: "If the Pope is in  error, he ceases to be Pope." At that point, Lefebvre had 

42 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

stepped over the line. He was on his way to open schism  and to excommunication.  

All churches were now barred to Lefebvre. On August  20, in an abandoned hall formerly used for wrestling, he  celebrated his Saint Pius 5 Mass. He preached to his con gregation of over 6,000 people: "The Council has bastard ized the Faith with neo-Protestantism and neo-Modernism."  The same day, at Castel Gandolfo, Paul himself spoke  sorrowfully to 7,000 gathered in the courtyard beneath his  study window: "Help Us to prevent a schism in the Church.  Our brother prelate has challenged the Keys (of authority)  placed in Our hands by Christ." He also stated: "We will  not answer the Archbishop in the tone he uses with Us."  

But the battle continued. On September 5, in the pres ence of 2,000 people in Besan<;on, France, Lefebvre said  his Mass of Saint Pius 5, and preached: "Catholics who  want to keep the tradition of their ancestors and who want  to die in the Catholic Faith will flock to us."  

But the counter-attacks came at him. Cardinal Garrone  condemned Lefebvre's mixture of "liturgical rigor and re actionary policies" (Lefebvre praised the military regime  of Argentina), and said "Change is necessary. False steps  during that change are damaging. But immobility is lethal."  

Five bishops-German, Austrian, and Swiss-appealed  to their Catholics not to have anything to do with Lefeb vre. French theologian Yves Congar appealed to both sides:  "Let us have a moratorium on mutual injury. Over 28  percent of French Catholics support the Archbishop's  views." Both Lefebvre and Paul would have liked to see a  moratorium on the entire matter. But only at the begin ning of fall was any real effort made to call a halt.  

Earlier in the year, Lefebvre had twice asked Villot's  office, as protocol requires, to arrange an audience for him  with Paul in the Vatican. Each time Villot refused. Paul  heard about it all only much later. Paul did agree to a  request made on Lefebvre's behalf by Cardinal Bernardin  Gantin, a black African, that Lefebvre have an interview  with Paul. But Villot would not allow the meeting. "The  Pope will not see Lefebvre," he told Gantin. "He (the  Pope) might change his mind, and that would only create  confusion."  

On September 8 Paul sent another letter to Lefebvre.  Lefebvre replied through mutual friends: "I want to work  under your authority : . . but I must speak to you per­

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 43  

sonally...." Archbishop Benelli sent a message to Lefeb vre which said summarily: Come to Castel Gandolfo with  a letter petitioning an interview with His Holiness. On  September 11, Lefebvre did just that. The Osservatore  Romano would report, tongue in cheek, that the Arch bishop "unexpectedly presented himself at the Pope's villa."  And he talked with Paul for over an hour.  

When Paul came down that day to see Lefebvre in the  Reception Hall, he was surprised: He remembered the  Archbishop's appearance: the long, slightly aquiline nose,  the thin lips in the wide mouth, the determined chin, the  wary look in his almost-almond eyes. But it was now  Lefebvre's attitude that struck Paul, or, more accurately,  the vibrating atmosphere that surrounded his diminutive  figure. Not arrogant. Not resentful. Not servile. Not sulky.  Lefebvre, in short, seemed possessed by some devouring  idea that haunted his face, his words, his gestures, even his  dutiful act of kneeling and kissing Paul's ring.  

Paul let Lefebvre pour out all his complaints and ex press all his fears. And when Lefebvre had finished, Paul  returned to his basic position: "As you are now going, you  will be destroyed. And all your work will be for nothing."  

Lefebvre's words were clear to Paul. "Holiness! I am  willing to do anything for the good of the Church."  "Without obedience to the See of Peter, without our  unity in Christ, the Church cannot exist," was Paul's an swer to Lefebvre.  

The Archbishop went on to ask for his "rights": the  right to celebrate Mass in the old way; the right to train  his priests in his own seminaries. He was ready to do any thing for the Church of Christ, Lefebvre went on to say,  but the faithful who feel threatened should have an alter native to the newfangled practices and teachings launched  by the "new theologians." At present false teachings are  given them, and their Faith is in danger of being destroyed.  

"Does the Archbishop intend to consecrate new bishops?"  Paul asked. This was a nightmare thought; Lefebvre could  validly consecrate new bishops. That would be a classical  schism, another splinter church, more disunity.  

If good bishops were needed, he would do his duty, was  Lefebvre's answer. He also said that His Holiness had been  misinformed about the faithful. A big minority in every  Catholic population yearned for the old Mass and for the  old teachings. 

44 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Paul was well aware of the trouble. Many found it hard  to go along with his changes. In a sense, Paul's pilgrimage  had begun; and not all the faithful could begin it with  him. There was serious unrest in the Church. There was  disobedience among Catholic Leftists as well as among  Catholic Rightists who followed Lefebvre. Already a Bish 

op Dozier of Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States,  wanted to hold irregular "Confession and Absolution"  mass meetings. On August 20, 1976, Paul had had to con sent to release an entire Convent of Dominican nuns from  their religious vows: They, like Lefebvre, abhorred Paul's  new Mass form. Father Gommer DePouw in Long Island,  New York, celebrated only the old Mass, and had devel oped a congregation of over 10,000, some of whom came  from miles away each Sunday. DePouw probably had a  couple of million secret sympathizers.  

To his recollection Paul lost his temper only at one point  in the conversation. Lefebvre was asked why he personally  attacked and condemned Paul. His answer was maddening:  "Someone must keep the truth before the eyes of the faith 

ful."  

"What am I supposed to do when you condemn me?"  Paul turned on him. "Resign? Is that what you want? Is  it my post you want?"  

But Lefebvre calmed him down. "You have the solution  at arm's reach," continued Lefebvre. "One word from you  to the Bishops and they will allow us Traditionalists to use  their churches for worship. Isn't that our right?"  

Paul had done his best to win Lefebvre to his own point  of view. He had explained that he, more than the Arch bishop, was extremely troubled by the zigzag split that ran  from the College of Cardinals down through the Bishops,  through the priests, and into the people all over the Roman  Catholic population in Europe and elsewhere. There is an  actual de facto schism in the Church, Paul explained to  Lefebvre. But nobody has been condemned. And it should  stay like that. The losses would be irreparable for genera tions to come if Rome had to condemn thousands of  Catholics.  

Paul had gone on to explain how he saw his owI1 func tion: to preside over his divided Church; to bring the mass  of Catholics to a central position and attitude; to admonish  all and sundry when they erred; and to launch a series of  statements over a period of time in which the traditional 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 45  

doctrine concerning basics-the Eucharist, priestly Ordina tion, Papal infallibility, the ethics of abortion and sexuality,  and so on-would be echoed. Thus there would ring out  in his Pontificate, and beyond into the dark age facing  Christianity, a clear bell-like voice stating and restating  agairist all opposition within and without the Church the  traditional doctrine in its barest outline.  

All his attempts, however, to convince Lefebvre had  been in vain. "What can be wrong with at least having a  trial-run with forming priests the way you and I were  formed? In the traditional way? What can be wrong with  it?" Lefebvre pleaded.  

One part of Paul's brain told him: Nothing. Nothing at  all. Another part said: Too dangerous! Lefebvre will at tract a large minority-perhaps a majority!  

Still, the interview had not ended too badly. As they  walked to the separation point, Lefebvre made one last  try: "But can't you do something to protect us, to ease  the pressure on us, Holy Father?"  

"I can't answer you now. The Curia must be consulted.  We will see.... We will think about the whole thing."  Then, with his usual gentle smile: "We should end our  conversation now. But let's pray a little together." They  said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and the traditional prayer  to the Holy Spirit, the Veni Sancte Spiritus. Both of them  spontaneously recited the prayers in Latin. It was more  natural and had a greater savor for them than any other  tongue.  

For Lefebvre, it was not as bad as he had expected, so  he explained to the press. "The Pope spoke to me like a  father ... he opened his arms to me.... It is the begin ning of dialogue...." Nor had it been as good as he had  wished. "We reached no conclusion...."  

But for Paul, it was disturbing. Lefebvre could not be  stopped by threats nor by entreaties. Pushed mercilessly  by Villot's downright treatment, the least Lefebvre might  do would be to cause an ecclesiastical schism. He might  (the thought caused Paul to shudder) set himself up as  anti-Pope....  

In the end no good result came from the interview. Paul  could not relent and allow an alternative style of worship  and belief. That, too, could end up in schism and doubt  among the faithful. He could not approve of Lefebvre,  because his authority was at stake. And he could not al­

46 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

low the Traditionalists in his own Papal Curia that sort of  a triumph. The struggle would go on.  

Lefebvre received a long private letter from Paul dated  October 11, 1976, in which Paul again demanded Lefeb vre's submission. Early in 1977, Villot published Paul's  October 11 letter to Lefebvre. It was an attempt to dis credit Lefebvre. But the Archbishop was still not to be  stopped; and his movement continued. In January of the  same year, 31 French intellectuals signed a manifesto in  support of Lefebvre and asked the Church to return to the  "authentic tradition" which Lefebvre represented. Still ex cluded from local churches, he and his followers continued  to celebrate their Mass in make-do locales: a garage in  Indianapolis; a rented VFW Hall in Hicksville, Long Is land; a barn in Surrey, England; a disused dance-hall in  Bonn, Germany. Then, taking another step toward schism,  Lefebvre and his followers, growing in number each day,  started their own churches in Europe, North America, and  Latin America.  

Lefebvre publicly denied that he was "anti-Vatican" or  unfaithful to the Pope. He kept on saying meekly but firm ly that he had no intention of creating a "Tridentine Vati- .'  can "-that, he insisted, was just another lie spread about  him. He denied any desire or intention to become an anti Pope or to build a basilica "to rival St. Peter's in Rome"­ another calumny. All I want, Lefebvre kept saying, is to  "keep options open for bewildered but faithful Roman  Catholics."  

When Paul is dead, Lefebvre's followers will still be active,  and the Traditionalist movement will have a new status in  the Roman Church. And it will be up to Paul's successor  -the man elected Pope in Conclave 82-to decide what  to do about the Traditionalist movement which now can 

not be snuffed out.  

Paurs decision about Lefebvre, his speech and attitude at  the United Nations, and his venture with Michele Sindona,  were each part of his more basic decision about his  Church. Nothing, Paul maintained, but a complete change  in Church attitudes could assure the Church's future.  

And this basic .conclusion came to Paul from a lifetime  spent in Vatican service, all wreathed in a complicated 

The First of the Pilgrim Popes 47  

web of recollections, lessons, regrets, joys, successes, fail ures, speculations, theories, and interpretations about men  and women and children, about cities and nations and com munities and continents, and-very late in his life-about  Planet Earth in relation to other planets and other galaxies.  The miracle of Paul 6 is that, given his background, he did  reach such openness of mind. The fateful question about  him is: Did he go too far?  

What outsiders saw as contradictory in his decision making was, in fact, the result of his scrupulous caution  against losing all balance in the nerve-wracking tightrope  walk that he was called upon to perform almost from the  day he became Pope, between the Traditionalist majority  and the Progressivist minority. The world into which Paul  was born was the world of Croce's "infinite absolutes." It  had been formed by a long list of geniuses unknown today  to a majority of men and women-Aquinas, Bonaventure,  Dante, Petrarch, Giotto and Signorelli, Raphael and Titian,  Michelangelo and Bramante, da Vinci and Galileo, Vico  and Manzoni, Vivaldi and Verdi, the warrior Pope Julius  2, the feisty Pio Nono, the intransigent Pius 10, and that  incarnation of Romanita, Pacelli. Paul came all the way  from that dead world to where he could envision an end  to the civilization and culture and Church structures made  possible by such a litany of past geniuses. This is the true  measure of Paul. Pius 12 did not achieve that, nor even  beloved Pope John 23, much less any previous Pontiff.  Most of today's leaders have not achieved it. Paul saw the  end. He acted accordingly. In doing so was he wise? Only  time will tell.  

Where Paul certainly failed and where he left an un enviable inheritance to the Cardinal Electors of Conclave  82 was on a capital point. Within Paul's policy framework,  the Church had no alternative to the forces let loose around  it. The Ship of Peter was, in Paul's view, simply supposed  to flow with the tides and currents. Opening his Church to  all outside influences, he created no initiative within his  Church. In all this he allowed, sometimes caused, the  traditional sources of Church initiative to be quenched so  that at the end of his rt::ign it was the semidarkness of twi light time.  

And so the Cardinal Electors of Conclave 82 must ask  themselves first, not who of their number shall be Pope;  but whether there is any initiative left them in the modern 

48 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

world. Must they now just flow with the tide? Should they  adopt a new policy for an active and an actively Roman  Catholic Pope? Or is it their duty to opt for a holding  policy and a caretaker Pope, a Pope of transition?  

Whatever they decide, Paul's admonition to them has  been clear. He sometimes called himself the Pilgrim. He  did see himself poised on the threshold of the ancient  Roman Catholic dwelling that would shortly be aban 

doned as incompatible with the changing world scene.  There he beckoned to the faithful, and to those he prayed  would come to have faith. And he called on "men of  thought, men of power, men of labor and fatigue . . .  once again to find meaning for their efforts in Jesus and  in His Sacrifice."  

In the twenty-first century, whether men and women  remember Paul as great or ignoble, they will look back  and remember him on the rainy Easter morning of 1977,  a slight, slow-moving, limping figure in white, carrying a  wooden cross through Roman streets, standing under an  umbrella to speak his message again in the deep, un 

faltering tones of an old man who believed with all his  heart. 

THE TIME  

BEFORE CONCLAVB:  THE PRE..CONCLAVB  BULLETINS,  

1970-1977  

~~

Series One-1970  

FIRST RUMORS POPE PAUL WILL RESIGN  

Rumors of Pope Paul's resignation fill the air by 1970. As  early as 1966, visiting the grave of Pope Celestine 5-one  of the last Popes to resign (in 1294)-Paul spoke of abdi cation. By then, he was already embroiled in troubles: a  bitter clash with the Jesuits; looming problems with Vatican  investments; difficulties in post-Vatican Council develop ments; Vatican involvement in the United States' interven':  tion in Southeast Asia. Paul spoke of "having been deceived  by those around me."  

In 1967, he ruled that all Bishops in the Church, on  reaching their 75th birthday, must offer to resign and be  prepared to have their resignation accepted. By 1972  Paul himself would be 75. Cardinal Parente, in fact, spoke  in his rancor over Paul's new ruling: "... if a 75-year-old  Bishop is not capable of ruling a diocese, please tell me  how can a 75-year-old Pope be capable of governing the  universal Church!" Parente had a point. And, indeed,  Paul considered resignation.  

POPE PAUL FORESEES END OF AMERICAN  AND EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY-MAKES FIRST  MOVES TOWARD RADICAL CHANGES IN  CHURCH GOVERNMENT AND PAPACY  

"We bear the responsibility of ruling the Church of  Christ because we hold the office of Bishop of Rome and  consequently the office of successor to the Blessed Apostle  Peter, the bearer of the master keys to the Kingdom of  God, Vicar of the same Christ who made of him the su 

51 

52 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

preme shepherd of his world-wide flock." So Paul said in  one of his first encyclical Letters, * on August 6, 1964.  But by the opening of the seventies, Paul's thinking  has changed radically. He· is thinking of a more open  Church, another mode of Papal government, and a differ ent kind of Papacy.  

He wants to abolish Conclave altogether. That is the  only way he sees to break the hold of the all-powerful  "club" of Vatican officials and their lay supporters around  the world who have, for centuries, decided who will be  Pope-frequently before the Conclave took place. Of  course, the Pope was no less Pope, flO less Bishop of  Rome and Vicar of Christ, for the way he was elected.  But he was less effective. Paul sees Conclave as a product  of the Middle Ages, of Southern Europe, of the old Eu 

ropean establishment, the ancient regime. That is past.  Finished. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century style democ racy as it exists in the United States and some Western  European countries also is finished, in Paul's view. The  future, he thinks, lies in the Third World of Asia, Africa,  and Latin America.  

He begins to prepare an encyclical Letter to point out aU  this, and to open new paths of thought-to plough the  ground for extreme change. He is willing to resign by 1972  provided that he will have achieved two goals. First: Total  revamping of the method of electing a Pope. Second:  The election of the man he chooses for next Pope; a man  who can be trusted to follow through with all of Paul's  changes, and with whom Paul will be able to work.  

Paul, by means of conversations and correspondence,  begins a discreet probing of opinions about changing the  Conclave system, about his own abdication, and about the  identity of his successor. Word of his attitudes and plans  spreads through the main chanceries, to the Cardinals and  to the Pope-makers among the bishops, all over the world.  

Meanwhile, Paul begins to key other major actions to  his plans. He has to make a huge transfer of Vatican  finances. And, through the Commissions set up by the  Second Vatican Council, he has to try to change the  attitude of the mass of Catholics. That mass is Tradition 

alist by habit and not open to vast change, at least not  • Ecclesiam Suam (His Church) was the title of this Letter. 

The Time Before Conclave 53  

to the vast changes that Paul judges necessary in this day  and age.  

LIST OF CANDIDATES FOR NEXT POPE  BEING FORMED  

As of now, the majority of papabili are Italian: Cardi nals Dina Staffa, Antonio SamonS, Sebastiana Baggio,  Paolo Bertoli (all Vatican-based), Giuseppe Siri of Genoa,  Corrado Ursi of Naples. Jan Willebrands is Dutch, but  he too is Vatican-based. The only black African whose  name is mentioned now and again is Lauren Rugambwa  of Dar-es-Salaam.  

But these names will change according as death and  disfavor overtake the Cardinals in question, and according  as other more ambitious and/or more promising candi dates come to the fore. Paul intends to create more  Cardinals anyway. There is some talk of seeking a non Italian, but still European, candidate in order to make a  transition from the custom of electing an Italian. The  second-next Pope could then conceivably be a non-Euro pean. 

Series Two-1971  

DECLINE OF RELIGION IN THE UNITED  STATES  

The surveys of pollsters George Gallup, Jr., John O.  Davies, Jr., and the American Institute of Public Opinion  have sent shock waves through Paul's entourage. The re sults indicate that 89 percent of Protestant ministers, 61  percent of Roman Catholic priests, and 63 percent of  rabbis think that religion on the whole is losing its influ ence in the United States. And they should know. When  the newly-born Jesus movement is cited as counter-indica tion, it is dismissed by Paul and his advisers as transitory  and "faddish."  

PRIESTLY CELIBACY ATTACKED  

Another factor against Paul's ideas of an early resigna tion is the nascent anti-celibacy opinion. Already, 40 per cent of priests in Italy favor abolition of celibacy. In  Spain, 33 percent of priests have voted for optional  celibacy. The Conference of Latin American Bishops  (CELAM) has called for optional celibacy.  

PAUL'S PROPOSED UNIVERSAL LAW FOR  THE CHURCH AND HIS OWN INFALLIBILITY  ATTACKED  

To cap all this, the first savage attack by a Roman  Catholic in modern times on Paul's Papal infallibility is  54 

The Time Be/ore Conclave 55  

published. It is a book by Hans Kling, the German-born  theologian. of whom the world will hear much.  When Paul has a draft law for the whole Church drawn  up by a secret group of bis own Canon lawyers, over 220  theologians from German-speaking lands condemn it un reservedly. Cardinal Leo Josef Suenens of Belgium at tacks, ridicules. and condemns it in a public interview. The  Canon Law Society of the United States does the same.  Thus Paul has some preliminary sign of what the "new  theologians" of Progressivist views wish to do with Church  doctrine. If he can only guide all these eruptions and  rebellions, he may bring his Church to a more open  position and thus attract non-Catholics. His policy will  be to restrain, not condemn, these attacks.  

PAUL ADOPTS POliCY OF CONCIliATING  THE LEFT-WING AND MARXIST  

MOVEMENTS  

Paul's openness to the Left becomes evident in a series  of moves all over the globe. Paul receives President Tito  of Yugoslavia on a state visit. The Hungarian Minister of  Foreign Affairs also pays a visit to Paul. Paul sends Cardi 

nal Konig of Vienna to Budapest and has him persuade  Cardinal Mindszenty to leave bis asylum in the United  States Embassy. Paul's promise to Mindszenty: "We will  never, as long as you are alive, appoint another Cardinal  Primate in Hungary." Mindszenty's removal from Budapest  and his exile to Vienna, where he is to live in the old  Austro-Hungarian Seminary, is a boon for the Commu nist Government of Janos Kadar. Mindszenty has been a  thorn in the living flesh of the Marxist state. Paul also sends  Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, an official of the Vatican  Secretariat of State. and Fatber Pedro Arrupe, General of  the Jesuits. to Moscow for talks. He arranges for talks  with the Communist Government of Czechoslovakia.  

Paul is criticized for the one-sidedness of his policy.  While Marxist !!overnments get concessions from the Pope,  those governments do not ease up on their own ferocious  anti-Catholic and antireligious attitude. And this goes as  much for Tito's Yugoslavia as for Russia and elsewhere.  Paul is further attacked for his removal of Cardinal Angelo  Rossi from his post as Archbishop of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 

56 TIlE FINAL CONCLAVE  

because Rossi supports the right-wing government in its  strong-arm measures against left-wing terrorists, Marxist  guerillas, and propagandists; and for his, Paul's, support  for the bishops and priests who revolt and riot against  the right-wing government of President Stroessner in Para guay.  

Paul does not disapprove of the friendship and associa tion of Cardinal Silva Henriquez with the Chilean Marxist  dictator, Salvador Allende. Silva joins Allende on the pub lic platform at a mammoth meeting of socialist and Marxist  cadres at May Day celebrations. And when the White  Fathers Missionary Congregation decides to withdraw all  its personnel from Mozambique in protest against the  colonial rule of the Portuguese, Paul approves of their  action.  

Paul reveals his mind most significantly in his Apostolic  Letter published in May. In it he calls for a new regime  in the near future. The Letter echoes the theme of libera tion theology; no progress by religion can be made unless  a ,new economic regimen is installed, a regimen which  transparently will mean the transformation-really the  termination--of classical capitalism.  

HUGE NEW AUDIENCE HALL INAUGURATED  BY POPE PAUL  

Pier Luigi Nervi is one of the most famous twentieth century engineer-architects who specialize in what re viewers of avant-garde architecture call "the Atlantic  style," or the "Atlantean style." Nervi was the master  architect of the Roman Catholic Cathedral in San Fran cisco.  

Atlantean buildings are not symbolic of anything, nor  blueprints of any sacramental presence of Divinity within  this human universe. They do not evoke the supernatural  or the trans-human, or echo in their stark lines any  traditional grace and beauty.  

Atlantean buildings are masses of undulating architec ture that express the engineering dynamism of their own  creation, not any goal or aim or ideal outside or above  them. They always seem about to erupt, or take off as  gigantic wingless things driven by their own self-contained  strength. But their thrust is horizontal, not vertical. 

The Time Before Conclave 57  

At Pope Paul's request, Nervi completed plans for such  a hall. In 1964, he presented the plans to the Pope, and  Paul approved them. On May 2, 1966, workmen began  demolishing the buildings that stood in an area east of  Saint Peter's Square, between the Holy Office Building  and the Leonine Wall of the Vatican. This would be the  site of Nervi's huge Hall of Audiences.  

On June 30, 1971, the "Nervi," as it has come to be  called familiarly, is inaugurated and blessed by Pope Paul  in a public ceremony. Here Paul will hold his Papal  Audiences. Here future Synods of the Bishops of the  Church will he held.  

The Nervi is a long, more or less trapezoidal, building.  Its main doors face eastward, as do the doors of Saint  Peter's Basilica. Its roof is undulating. On eacb of the  two walls of the trapezoid, there is one oval, stained 

glass window. set like eyes in this protean mass. The  windows are by Giovanni Haynal. Marc Chagall was first  asked to propose designs for them, but Chagall's art with  its note of confusion and incivility was finally judged  unsuitable for a place that should express the sacred  serenity of God and the harmony between God and man.  

Inside the Nervi, the Main Hall is gargantuan. Its floor  slopes downward. like the floor of any theater, from the  entrance to the stage at the western wall, nearly 2,756  feet away. The undulating ceiling is like the roof of some  giant mouth swallowing the visitor. That vaulted ceiling is  constructed of 42 prefabricated, white, geminate arches.  The Main Hall holds 6,900 people seated, or 14,000  people standing.  

On the stage. the Pope's throne is placed on a raised dais.  Behind the throne will be placed the biggest bronze sculp ture in the world. commissioned by Pope Paul in 1965  from the 64-year-old Peride Fazzini, one of Jacqueline  Kennedy's favorite artists. There were some reports that  Pier Luigi Nervi was disturbed that the commission had  gone to Fazzini. and by Fazzini's plans for the sculpture.  "Two primadonnas singing in the same opera will not  sing well at all." Nervi was reported to have quoted an other Atlantean. Le Corbusier.  

But Paul likes Fazzini's plans, commenting: "I want a  work that will last." His Holiness will have it.  

It is in the Main Hall that Paul has his General Audi­

58 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

ences. Here he will celebrate his 80th birthday in 1977­ the day many expect he will resign.  

Apart from the Main Hall, the most important room is  the Synod Hall, or "Upper Room," as it is also called be cause of its location above the Main Hall, tucked neatly  under the Nervi roof. That nickname, "Upper Room,"  brings to mind echoes of the upper room in the house in  Jerusalem where the Apostles waited, after the Resurrec tion and Ascension of Jesus, for the coming of the Holy  Spirit at Pentecost. The floor of this modern Upper Room,  is formed by the sloping outer curve of the huge ceiling  of the Main Hall below. The Upper Room is reached by  ample staircases and by elevators. It seats upward of 280  people and is equipped with every modern device necessary  for simultaneous translation, and for instantaneous radio  and television broadcasting. The quasi-official description  of this room speaks of its "perfect efficiency in holding  large numbers of people and providing technical services ..•  which will make this Synod Hall ever more useful and used-for important meetings of a religious charac ter. ..." In (act, the Third International Synod of Bishops,  set for the coming September 30, will be held in this  Synod Hall, this Upper Room. And there is already a  rumor, pooh-poohed by many Vatican officials, that Con clave 82 may be held here, and not, as in centuries past,  in the Sistine Chapel.  

Paul, in his inaugurating speech, stresses one aspect of  the Nervi: It was built to be the special place where "the  Holy Father will welcome the people and which will ex press a spirituality suitable for the sovereignty of the Pope  and the faith of believers ... [The Nervi] will be a visible  symbol of the unity of Pope and people."  

Rumors Of no, the Nervi, with its Main Hall and its  Upper Room, is destined for fateful and historic meetings. 

Series Three-1972  

POPE PAUL'S RESIGNATION THIS YEAR  IMPOSSIBLE  

None of Pope Paul's plans for altering Church govern ment has come close even to marginal success. His pro posed resignation would be catastrophic for his plan of  extreme change.  

First, the College of Cardinals. Paul's new ruling that  barred Cardinals of 80 and over from Conclaves has elim inated the old guard chieftains: Ottaviani, Parente, Roberti,  Tisserant, Zerba. But a good majority of the Electors would  still be Traditionalist: Cardinals such as Samore, Siri,  Traglia, Vagnozzi. A whole host of Italians and most of  the Cardinals from the United States, Germany, Spain,  Portugal, Ireland, England, Austria, and Poland, are Tra ditionalist. The very same holds for Yii Pin of China and  Kim of Korea. Razafimahatratra of Tananarive, and all  the African Cardinals.  

The result, of Paul's probings, though still incomplete,  convince him that he could not persuade 'enough Tradition alist Cardinals to accept his plan. Resigning in those cir cumstances would be certain, swift death for his Papal  policies.  

On top of that, there have appeared this year the first  genuine signs of serious revolt among clergy and lay people  against Paul's new "liberal" laws of worship that have  changed nearly every aspect of Catholic religious life. The  spearhead of the revolt is one Archbishop of the Tradi 

tionalist mind that Paul felt it so essential to change: Mar cel Lefebvre. Archbishops don't make headlines much  these days. But this one proves to be an exception.  

Lefebvre preaches that Paul's revised version of the  59 

60 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

Roman Mass is an inspiration of Satan. He charges that  the Vatican has been infiltrated by C~mmunists and  atheists, and corrupted by Protestants. He gives voice and  focus and new muscle to the Traditionalist faction of the  Church. And he is setting out to create a backlash move 

ment in the Church of Europe and the Americas.  Paul, for his part, is as aware as Lefebvre that most  Roman Catholics do not like his new forms of worship  or the way theology is going.  

At least two extraordinarily powerful "Cardinals hate  Lefebvre: Villot, the Secretary of State for the Vatican;  and Cardinal Garrone, a Frenchman, as are Villot and  Lefebvre. These two urge Paul to stay on as Pope, in order  to combat Lefebvre and the entire Traditionalist movement.  

On top of these matters, small straws in the wind begin  to make Paul uneasy about how his plan is proceeding  for the massive transfer of Vatican investments. Both  Cardinal Vagnozzi, head of the Vatican's Prefecture of  Economic Affairs (PECA), and Bishop Marcinkus, head  of the Vatican Institute of Religious Works (IRW), bring  disturbing reports of the management of Vatican funds  in the hands of Italian financier, Michele Sindona.  

PAUL PROPOSES NEW DEMOCRACY  

For the moment, the only way for Paul to further his  vision of radical reform is to remain on as Pope and try  to effect a reform himself. He issues another Encyclical  Letter, known by its first two words, Octagesima Adveniens  (the Eightieth Anniversary). It concerns the state of  democracy and its future.  

His message about Western democracy is put in a  negative way: "It is necessary to invent fresh forms of  democracy," he says. And it becomes clear in his message  that what he means are democratic structures as different  from American-style democracy as America's democracy  is from the Democratic German People's Republic.  

Paul's letter greatly encourages many in the Roman  Catholic Church who regard democracy as an outworn  system and as a pest. Paul's letter stimulates such men  to think of a wholly new departure in the next Pontificate,  and even of the possibility of a real rapprochement with  Marxists in Europe and Latin America. For, while Paul 

The Time Before Conclave 61  

rejects Marxism as an ideology, he does not completely re ject Marxism as an economic system, or as a political  structure, or as an intellectual framework.  

PAUL LOOKS TO NEXT POSSIBLE DATE FOR  RESIGNATION AS HIS APPOINTMENTS OF  NEW CARDINALS SWING BALANCE OF  POWER AWAY FROM OLD GUARD. THE  PAPABILI BEGIN TO EMERGE  

The next date when Paul could willingly resign would  be on his 80th birthday, September 26, 1977; or, if the  Sindona Affair and Lefebvre problems are laid to rest,  possibly sometime before that date. Always provided that  Paul is confident that he has attained his two main goals  of revampin? the Conclave system and the assurance  that his successor will be the man of his choice with  whom he can work, even in retirement.  

At this time. only one name stands out for Paul on  his list of possible papabili: Sergio Pignedoli, Vatican career  man, Assistant to Secretary of State Villot. He is not yet a  Cardinal. But Paul will soon be making some Cardinals;  and those appointments must, as far as possible, reflect  his new policies.  

Since becoming Pope in 1963, Paul has made more  Cardinals than any Pope in history-150 in all. The first  group in 1965 contained due and expected appointments,  as did the second group in 1967.  

His 1969 appointments already marked a change. Out  of 32 new Cardinals. 11 belonged to the Third World of  Africa, Asia. and Latin America. Two Frenchmen are  appointed. Gouyon and Marty, together with the Dutch 

man Willebrands. and the United States's Deardon.  Meanwhile. the Traditionalist Curia has fixed on two  Vatican career-men as its candidates.  

The French. the Germans, and the others have not yet  made up their minds. 

62 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

CARDINAL VILLOT QUIETLY BEGINS  PRE-CONCLAVE ACTIVITY  

The Secretary of State for the Vatican or some other  senior member of the College of Cardinals will be the  Camerlengo of the Universal Church when the Pope either  dies or abdicates. He will be in charge, so to speak, until  a new Pope is elected, and he will be responsible for the  organization and the functioning of Conclave 82.  

He has not ignored the possibility of Pope Paul's resigna tion. Or of his death. It is not too soon to begin the huge  task of taking stock of the status quo of the world and  of the Church on every issue and in every area. Nowadays  -and differently from past ages-it is issues, not per sonalities, that dominate the Conclave election.  

Accordingly, the first task of the Cardinal Electors  in the Conclave will be to formulate and adopt the General  Policy-a Papal policy to be followed by the next Pope.  That General Policy will be based on the conditions,  changes, and developments in religion, politics, and eco 

nomics, and on the current evolution of nations and of the  community of nations.  

Villot, as Camerlengo of the Conclave, begins the process  of gathering the vast amounts of information required and  of organizing that information into what are called Posi tion Papers and Special Reports.  

Position Papers will, on the basis of extremely accurate  and up-to-date information, describe the condition of:  Roman Catholicism; Eastern Orthodoxy; non-Catholic  Christian Churches; non-Christian religions; Europe; Rus 

sia; the United States; Latin America; the Near East;  Africa; Asia. These Position Papers are drawn up with  the aim of giving the Electors a comprehensive view of the  state of religion (Christian and non-Christian), the evolu 

tion of world politics, and economic projections for the  next ten years. Under all headings, of course, the emphasis  is on the position of the Roman Church in relation to  religious conditions, politics, and economics. . .  

There are three Special Reports. These deal with the  Pontificate of Paul 6 (his politics and achievements and  failures); the results of the Second Vatican Council; and  the social revolution around the world. 

The Time Before Conclave 63  

Finally, on the basis of the facts and analyses contained  in the Position Papers and the Special Reports, a summary  of the condition of the world as seen by the Roman Curia,  and a blueprint of a general policy, are supplied in the  General Policy Paper.  

All of this will be the subject of discussion, debates, and  exchanges by the Cardinals in the Conclave, until they  reach a consensus on a General Policy that is accepted by  a vote of two-thirds plus one. Only after adoption of a  General Policy will the Conclave proceed to elect the  next Pope. 

Series Four-1973  

AMERICAN AMBASSADOR MARTIN  

DISSUADES POPE PAUL FROM GESTURE  TO THIRD WORLD  

Paul's Papal policy carries him in the direction of being  open to all comers and all shades of opinion, especially  from the Left. That policy suffers a rude shock in January  1973. A delegation of American anti-Vietnam War ac 

tivists arrives in the Vatican asking for an audience with  the Pope and carrying as a gift for him some fragments  of an American bomb dropped on Hanoi.  

Paul's policy has been to receive such anti-war groups  and Vietcong representatives.  

But American Ambassador Graham Martin succeeds in  persuading Paul not to receive this delegation. Increasingly,  United States authorities are realizing how Paul's mind is  working, and what could happen if Paul's policies should  affect the mind of the next Conclave and the policy of  Paul's successor.  

PAUL EFFECTS FURTHER CRUCIAL SHIFT  IN TRADITIONAL POWER BLOCS  

On March 5, Pope Paul creates 29 new Cardinals. Only  seven are Italian--Sergio Pignedoli is among them. Twelve  are Third World Cardinals. With these appointments, Paul  has upset still further the Traditionalist balancing power of  large European groups: the Italians alone, or the Italians  and the Spaniards together, or the French with the Italians  and the Spaniards. No European bloc can ever dominate  a future Conclave.  

64 

The Time Before Conclave 65  

With this last change in numbers, Paul is ready to move  on to the next part of his plan for reform of the Conclave  system-and of the Church.  

PAUL'S FlRST FORMAL PROPOSAL FOR  REVOLUTlON TN WORLD-WIDE CHURCH  GOVERNMENT  

On the same March 5, at a secret Consistory of his  Cardinals, Paul asks the College about the possibility of  "utilizing in the election of a Pope the contribution of the  Oriental Patriarchs and of elected representatives of the  episcopate, that is to say, of those who make up the per 

manent Council of the Secretariat of the Synod of Bish ops."  

Apparently simple words! But this is "Romanese" for  one of the most far-reaching changes proposed in over  twelve hundred years of Roman Catholic history.  

Paul's idea concerns more than merely slicing up the  pie of Papal elections among more Electors. He wants  more than a mere democratization of Conclave by the in clusion of a few men who aren't Cardinals. He is aiming  for more than an increase in the number and the diversi fication of Electors. He is asking his Cardinals to approve  two measures that would have effects neither Paul nor  they can foresee.  

First, he is asking them seriously to weigh the feasibility  of reforming the relations of Papacy and bishops so that,  as they now are, non-Catholic Churches such as the  Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Church can  achieve de facto union with the Roman Catholic Church.  This is a huge change. Always, up to now, Rome has said  that the non-Roman Catholic Churches would finally have  to submit and "return" to the fold of Catholicism.  

Second, he is asking the Cardinals seriously to weigh  the feasibility of electing the Pope, after his own abdica tion, on the very broad basis of Electors drawn both from  the Catholic Church and from non-Catholic Christian  Churches. If they consent to that, it will mean that the  Pope they elect will be handed, as the mainstay of his  Papal policy, the principle of governing in conjunction  with all those Catholic and non-Catholic Electors.  In all of this, Paul has taken seriously the admonition of 

66 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

non-Catholic churchmen: "Peter (meaning the Pope) must  give up his imperial power in the Church, in order to gain  authority in spirit and in moral stance."  

It will take a couple of years for all the opinions and  reactions to be gathered in, analyzed, and brought to a  conclusion. But Paul's efforts along these lines will fail. 

Series Five-1974  

RETURNS SUGGEST THAT CHANGES  PROPOSED BY PAUL IN 1970 ARE REJECTED  BY CATHOLIC AND NON-CATHOLIC  

CHURCHMEN  

"Extremely negative"-this is the nature of the responses  so far received to Paul's earlier probings, begun in 1970,  when he made his first tentative public overture at abdica tion, tied to his pet reforms.  

Many responding point out that, if Paul's ideas are  adopted, the Pope will become the equivalent of the elected  chairman of the Roman Catholic Episcopal, Inc. And that,  in effect, would only place the Roman Church in the  same helpless position in which the Anglican and Epis 

copal Churches find themselves today.  

Others observe that the very system Paul now proposes  has already paralyzed the Eastern Orthodox Churches Greek and Russian. Those Churches have failed to ex pand. They have become nothing more than national  Churches. They have not healed the differences between  themselves and other Christians. And most of them have  sunk into a ghetto of their own ossified traditions.  

The Internationalists-those who earnestly want a non Italian Pope---<)bject that, in all probability, in Paul's new  system the Pope would always be an Italian. Maybe he  would be a very honored and honorable member of an  international board of Bishops. But his chief title would  still be Bishop of Rome-and, for all its glory, Rome is  and always will be an Italian diocese. Just as the Bishop  of a French diocese should be French and the Bishop of  a German diocese should be German, so the Bishop of  Rome will be an Italian. Now, the Internationalists add,  67 

68 THE FINAL CONCLAVE  

no Italian Pope has ever made the Vatican truly inter national--opening out the "Roman Club" to others. The  last Pope to promise to do that was Martin 5. But once  he was actually elected in 1417, he concentrated more  power than ever in Rome. So the Internationalists see the  whole proposal as a trap.  

The response to Paul's proposal from various govern ments is also negative. General Franco of Spain, right-wing  regimes in Latin America, the United States Government:  none wants to see local Bishops have autonomy, and thus  be placed beyond the control and veto of the Vatican when  it comes, for example, to Ilairline election battles between  Communists and non-Communists, both in Europe and in  Latin America.  

In spite of the fact that his Papal policies do not seem  to go well--or perhaps because of that-speculation never  dies that Pope Paul will resign. Most Cardinal Electors  still have their eyes fixed on September 26, 1977, Paul's  80th birthday. But When Paul made his rule excluding  80-year-old Cardinals from Conclave, he had no thought  of himself at 80. He thought only to exclude the core of  the Traditionalist old guard in the Vatican from any direct  influence on the future of the Church.  

MORE PAPABIU BEGIN TO EMERGE;  FACTIONS DEVELOP  

For the moment, under the prodding and persuasion of  the powerful Bishop of Marseilles, Roger Etchegaray, the  French Cardinals and their foreign friends have rallied  around the figure of a German Cardinal as a prime pan 

European candidate, one who is in favor of slow, gradual  change.  

There is another group of Electors who are seeking a  Third World candidate. Their choice would be somebody  who is a true Progressivist, and in favor of a totally "open"  Church: easing up on all the official differences maintained  between Catholics and other Christians; adaptation of all  Church activity-theology, liturgy, piety, social perfor mance-to modem conditions; cultivation of Marxists as  people trying to effect suitable changes in the regimen of  nations and individuals.  

The Italians are slowly splitting up into three groups: 

The Time Before Conclave 69  

the Conservatives (who advocate slow, gradual change but change); the Traditionalists (who want a strong reas sertion of all pre-Vatican Council II Church beliefs and  practices); and the Radicals.  

The Radicals decry both Conservatives and Progres sivists as two sides of the same coin. They accuse both  of them of advocating no initiative specific to the Catholic  Church, but of merely allowing themselves to be pushed whether slowly (the Conservatives) or at breakneck speed  (the Progressivists)-by outside events and interests. The  Radicals accuse the Traditionalists of being out of touch,  of trying to set the clock back, and of being blind to the  vast change that has taken place already.  

The Radicals would uproot the entire system of Church  government and religious activity-all that savors of a  former age when the Church was immersed in politics and  wielding temporal power. They would repair the damage  done since the Vatican Council by the liberal Progres 

sivists-especially in doctrine and Liturgy. They would  oppose the slow changes of the Conservatives as being  merely pale, hesitating imitations of the Progressivists. But  they would not try to restore the old order of things-as  the Traditionalists often seem to wish to do. 

Series Six-1975  

FINAL RESULTS OF POPE PAUL'S PROBES:  NO SUPPORT FOR HIS POLICY OF  

PLANNED REVOLUTION  

Whatever the rumors-and they persist-of his resigna tion, and whatever the public response to those rumors,  it is now quite unfeasible for Paul to contemplate resigning.  

First, again. the Conclave. The Eastern Patriarchs will  not participate. they answer, in the election of a Roman  Pope. Their response mirrors the old Eastern anti-Roman  prejudice: "As long as the Bishop of Rome claims sover 

eignty as a temporal ruler and absolute authority over all  the Church. we cannot appear to endorse such an un apostolic and uncatholic position by participating in a  Papal election-even as observers." They appear to want  

the chicken. but are unwilling to hatch the egg.  And, for a great variety of reasons. most Europeans  and Americans consulted fear Paul's proposal. Some, be cause his successor would be another Italian. Some-a  surprising number. in fact-want no change in the status  quo of Conclave. Some----quite a large minority-are in  total disagreement with Paul's theology of the Church,  and witlt his obvious leaning to open every door and win dow in the Churclt. ''Too much, too fast, in too many  directions, with too little thought as to the aftermath," is  how one person summarized the gist of the comments.  

TRADITIONALIST THREAT GROWS  

At the same time, the revolt of Traditionalist Arch bishop Marcel Lefebvre is obviously becoming much more,  70