Get Religion blong
March 28, 2019
By Richard Ostling
This is another of those religion beat nostalgia Memos, inspired by a pretty sensational March 22 scoop in America magazine from its Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell. He reported the precise number of votes for all 22 candidates on the first ballot when the College of Cardinals elected Pope Francis in 2013.
The cardinals’ first round usually scatters votes across assorted friends and favorite sons, but a telltale pattern appeared immediately. The Italian favorite, Angelo Scola, got only 30 votes, with the eventual winner, Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, close behind at 26 and Canadian Marc Ouellet at 22. In a major surprise, Boston’s Sean O’Malley was fourth with 10 votes, and New York’s Timothy Dolan got two. Clearly, the electors would forsake not just Italy but the Old World entirely and choose the Western Hemisphere’s first pontiff .
As so often occurs, the Washington Post immediately grabbed an important religion story that other media missed, with Michelle Boorstein adding a beat specialist’s knowing perspective (behind pay wall).
O’Connell likewise demonstrates the virtues of specialization. He has worked the Vatican beat for various Catholic periodicals since 1985, a task that requires long-term cultivation of prelates who spill secrets. (Or did his wife, a Vatican correspondent from the pope’s homeland, acquire this leak?)
Adding to the intrigue, in papal elections each cardinal must take a solemn oath before God to maintain strict secrecy on everything that occurred, under pain of excommunication.
Yet O’Connell’s oath-busting leak appeared in a magazine of Francis’s own religious order, the Jesuits. The article was excerpted from “The Election of Pope Francis,” O’Connell’s fuller version to be published April 24 by another Catholic entity, the Maryknoll order’s Orbis Books.
There was less buzz over the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany — a powerful aide of Pope John Paul II — was the front-runner through all ballots. Significantly, Bergoglio was the runner-up. This time it took only five months for a cardinal’s diary to leak to an Italian journalist, followed by more detail six years later in the daily La Stampa.
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