Cardinal who will play kingmaker in Rome
Scotland on Sunday  | April 10, 2005 | STEPHEN MCGINTY AND RICHARD GRAY
 

THE rain fell on St Peter’s Square, making puddles through which the pilgrims passed. The dark clouds were forecast for the funeral of Pope John Paul II on Friday but had kept a discreet distance until after the two million mourners who had gathered in the city had dispersed.

Yesterday they unleashed a deluge. Huddled under umbrellas, a few hundred Poles queued to enter the basilica, still imbued with the memory of Karol Wojtyla.

Before 10am a steady stream of cars carrying cardinals from around the globe arrived at the Vatican gates to be waved in by Swiss guards in their distinctive candy-striped uniforms. In their hands rests the future of the Roman Catholic Church and the spiritual direction of its 1.1 billion adherents.

On Monday, April 18, 115 cardinals will process into the Sistine Chapel to the conclave and not re-emerge in public until a new Pope has been chosen.

Although predicting who will come out of a conclave as pope is notoriously difficult, for one man the next eight days will be the most crucial of his distinguished career in the church.

On Friday the world watched as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 77, Dean of the College of Cardinals, led the Pope’s funeral. This week, as either papal candidate or kingmaker, the German theologian, who was raised in Bavaria under the shadow of the Nazis, will wage a battle against the liberal forces of reform.

Yesterday the chief spokesman for the Catholic Church, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, confirmed that no cardinal would speak to the press ahead of the conclave, a move understood to have been initiated by Ratzinger to prevent public debate of the issues now facing the church.

A church source said yesterday: "Cardinal Ratzinger doesn’t want a pope as right wing as Pope John Paul II. He wants a Pope more right wing than Pope John Paul II. There were a lot of things which the Pope chose to do against the wishes of Cardinal Ratzinger."

In 1986 the Pope gathered together representatives of all faiths including a North American Indian shaman for a meeting in the Italian town of Assisi. Ratzinger was bitterly opposed to the conference on the grounds that it could promote "relativism" - the philosophy that all religious beliefs are of equal value.

In 2000, as prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith (CDF) - the successor to the Inquisition - Ratzinger angered ecumenists and leaders of different faiths when he published a church statement, ‘Dominus Iesus’, in which it was stated that only the Catholic Church was a genuine church.

His role during the papacy of John Paul II has been as "the enforcer of the faith" as John L Allen, a journalist for the National Catholic Reporter, described him in his biography of the cardinal. The cardinal has rooted out what he believed is heretical thinking in the books of Catholic theologians and suspended their licence to teach in Catholic universities. The British nun Lavinia Byrne left her religious order after refusing orders from the CDF to pulp her book which discussed the issue of female priests.

"Cardinal Ratzinger wants a church which is pure and disciplined," said another Church source. "He would focus so much on the dogma and on the purity of the church that he would drive people away, and although that would not please him, it wouldn’t bother him that much either. At the moment he will be working to ensure that the papacy of John Paul II is followed by that of another strong right-winger."

Pitted against Ratzinger are his fellow countrymen, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the former Archbishop of Stuttguart, and Cardinal Karl Lehmann, archbishop of Mainz. Ratzinger was understood to be behind the Pope’s decision to refuse a red hat to Lehmann on four separate occasions. He was finally appointed a cardinal in 2001 after intensive German lobbying.

Kasper, on the liberal wing of the church, is considered one of the top 10 papal candidates and has repeatedly crossed crosiers with Ratzinger.

In 1993 Kasper wrote a pastoral letter encouraging divorced Catholics who had remarried to return to take communion. Under the law of the church, remarried Catholics are prohibited from communion. Ratzinger then rejected the letter and blocked its distribution.

The two then clashed over the issue of the German Catholic Church giving advice to women considering abortion, as is necessary under German law. Kasper wished to participate in order to dissuade women; however, Ratzinger insisted they take no part in the process, and won.

No cardinal would ever admit to harbouring a desire for the papacy, and Ratzinger, according to his brother, Georg, had repeatedly asked the Pope for permission to retire. Yet it cannot be ruled out that he might view himself as a stop-gap Pope. Ratzinger is also thought to favour Italian candidates such as Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, over candidates from South America such as Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the Archbishop of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Ratzinger is also thought to have had a hand in the appointment of the two key speakers who will deliver formal talks entitled: ‘de eligendo pontiface’ - on electing the pontiff. The talks are designed to raise issues which the cardinals should consider when casting their vote and neither choice of cleric is considered controversial.

Fr Raniero Cantalamessa is a Francisan priest who since 1980 has been the Household Preacher to the Pope and is the author of a number of books including Virginity: A Positive Approach to Celibacy. Cardinal Thomas Spidlik, a Czech, is a former professor of patristic and eastern spiritual theology and is a firm advocate, as is Ratzinger, of the spiritual re-conquest of Europe.

In Allen’s biography of Ratzinger, he illustrates his rigorous Catholic faith with a joke in which Ratzinger dies and in heaven he has a meeting with Jesus. Allen explains: "The better part of a day goes by, and periodically sounds of shouting and then weeping fill the air. Eventually the door swings open and Jesus Christ himself walks out, asking: ‘how could I have gotten everything so wrong?’ Many observers see Ratzinger as more Catholic than Jesus."

The historic and highly spiritual assembly of the conclave is steeped in tradition. It is intended as a time for reflection and prayer as the ‘Princes of the Church’ seek inspiration on whom to select.

But before they even set foot beneath Michelangelo’s lavish ceiling inside the Sistine Chapel, each cardinal will first be asked to walk through the arch of an airport scanner.

They will be stripped of all mobile phones, laptop computers, tape recorders and radios before being allowed to begin their profound duty.

This is the confused world that exists inside the Vatican City, where centuries of carefully scripted ceremony and custom collide with modern technology.

Such is the concern that the outside world will intrude upon the deeply religious process, the entire area around the Sistine Chapel is to be swept for bugs.

All letters, phone calls and newspapers are banned from inside the conclave. Cardinals themselves are not allowed to leave unless for a medical emergency. And even staff in the surrounding Vatican grounds are forbidden from speaking to cardinals in case they let something slip.

Father Thomas Reese, author of Inside the Vatican, commented: "Whether this will be sufficient to prevent more sophisticated eavesdropping remains to be seen."