VATICAN CITY
Chiesa
by Sandro Magister
ROME, March 1, 2012 – The chair of Peter is empty. Joseph Ratzinger has left it with a clean break, and has left the future governance of the Church to a successor who is unknown to him, just as he is still unknown to the very cardinals who will elect him.
One cannot recall, in the last century, a previous conclave so much in the dark and so vulnerable to external and internal pressure.
But today it is the “fourth power,” that of the media, that is granting no truce to the cardinals called to conclave.
One of them has already fallen, the Scottish Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien. In one of his last acts as pope Benedict XVI expedited his resignation as archbishop of Edinburg, and he himself has announced that he will not go to Rome for the election of the new pontiff.
Another is former archbishop of Los Angeles Roger Mahony, censured by his own successor, José Horacio Gómez.
A third is former archbishop of Brussels Godfried Danneels.
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