The cardinals participating in a conclave swear never to reveal anything, under penalty of excommunication, but not the Popes who, instead, have the ability to spill all the maneuvers and cabals that intertwine behind the scenes of the Sistine Chapel. Pope Francis has thus let the cat out of the bag and recounted how he was “used” after the death of Pope Wojtyla, in the 2005 conclave, to neutralize and block the election of Joseph Ratzinger. “In that conclave - it is known - I was used,” Bergoglio recounts in the interview book written with Spanish journalist Javier Martinez Brocal titled “Pope Francis. The Successor” (Planeta Editions).
On April 2, 2005, at 21:37, John Paul II dies after a pontificate of almost twenty-seven years. The electors are one hundred and fifteen cardinals. “It happened that I got to have forty of the one hundred and fifteen votes in the Sistine Chapel. They were enough to restrain the candidacy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, because, if they had continued to vote for me, he could not have reached the two-thirds necessary to be elected pope. This was not the idea of those who were behind the votes. The maneuver consisted in putting my name, blocking Ratzinger's election, and then negotiating a different third candidate. They told me, later, that they did not want a foreign pope.”
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Francis continues: “It was a maneuver in all respects. The idea was to block the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. They used me, but behind they were already thinking of proposing another cardinal. They were not yet in agreement on who, but they were already about to launch a name. The first vote was in the afternoon. That operation was in the second or third vote, Tuesday 19 morning. When I realized in the afternoon, I said to a Latin American cardinal, the Colombian Darío Castrillón: Do not joke with my candidacy, because at this moment I will say that I will not accept, eh? Leave me there. And there Benedict was already elected.”
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“Joseph Ratzinger was my candidate. I voted for him because he was the only one who could be pope at that time. After the revolution of John Paul II, who had been a dynamic, very active pontiff, with initiative, who traveled... there was a need for a pope who maintained a healthy balance, a transitional pope.” Then Bergoglio adds: “If they had chosen someone like me, who makes a lot of mess, I could not have done anything. At that time, it would not have been possible. I came out happy. Benedict XVI was a man who accompanied the new style. And it wasn't easy for him, eh? He found a lot of resistance inside the Vatican.” The Holy Spirit with the choice of Razinger for Bergoglio was saying: “Here I command. There is no room for maneuvers.”
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CARDINAL MARTINI
The electoral operation revealed by Francis would have avoided the election of an Italian. In that instance, indeed, there were talks of several very strong curia candidates, including Angelo Sodano, the then Secretary of State. In parallel, the name of the great Jesuit Carlo Maria Martini, biblical scholar and archbishop of Milan who in turn channeled his votes to Ratzinger, was also mentioned. The reconstructions of those moments are very precise and arrived years ago from Father Fausti, Jesuit confessor of Martini. Martini would have shifted his support to Ratzinger precisely to avoid “dirty games” to eliminate both and elect “someone from the Curia, very sneaky, who did not succeed.” Fausti also recounted that Ratzinger and Martini “had more votes, a bit more Martini.” The archbishop of Milan discovered the maneuver to elect a curial cardinal and reacted immediately. “Having discovered the trick, Martini went in the evening to Ratzinger and told him: accept tomorrow to become Pope with my votes... He had told him: accept you, who have been in the Curia for thirty years and are intelligent and honest: if you can reform the Curia well, otherwise you leave.”
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