Cardinal Lomeli

Cardinal Lomeli is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, a reluctant organizer whose careful attention to rules and vote counts becomes crucial when a papal election grows volatile. Diagnosed with prostate cancer and accustomed to thinking of himself as a temporary figure, he enters the Conclave expecting to manage a duty rather than become its focus. Yet as the leading candidates falter and the election’s stakes widen, Lomeli must confront the possibility that his own name may be the answer to the crisis he is trying to govern.

Identity and Background

Lomeli’s understanding of himself is shaped by mortality and limited expectations. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier; although he was supposedly cured, he had assumed that he would die before the Pope. He had tried to resign as dean and thought of himself as a stopgap, not as a future pontiff. When the Pope dies, however, the task of managing the succession falls to him, and he prays for wisdom to discharge it in a way that strengthens the Church.

His administrative temperament is evident both in his attention to procedure and in the way he reads the contest through its figures. During the first ballot he marks each vote against a candidate’s name, continuing even as his own name appears and the tally begins to alarm him. The first count gives Tedesco 22 votes, Adeyemi 19, and Lomeli 5; Bellini finishes behind Adeyemi, contrary to expectations, while no candidate comes close to the 79 votes required for election. Lomeli immediately understands that the Conclave may be prolonged: the rules require repeated ballots for a two-thirds majority, potentially as many as thirty ballots over twelve days before a different threshold can be used.

Governing the Election

Lomeli presides over the Conclave not as a detached observer but as the official responsible for keeping its decisions within the rules. When the seventh ballot also fails to produce the required majority, he announces an eighth. The ritual has become familiar to the cardinals, but the decision before him is not. He is certain that he does not wish to become Pope and prays to be spared what he calls a Calvary. He resolves that, if elected, he will refuse, fearing that an insufficiently holy Pope would be a worse failure than his own refusal of office.

At the same time, Lomeli recognizes that his choices have helped shape the danger confronting the assembly. He believes that, as dean, he has helped bring about the destruction of one front-runner and the collapse of another. Though convinced that Tedesco must be stopped, Lomeli sees that continuing to vote for Bellini would amount to self-indulgence if Bellini can no longer prevent Tedesco’s advance. His duty is therefore not simply to keep the Conclave moving; it is to decide which remaining course can preserve both a viable election and its legitimacy.

The coordinated attacks in Rome sharpen that dilemma. Lomeli imagines the public image of black smoke rising both from the Roman piazza where bombs have exploded and from the Sistine chimney. Suspending the Conclave might show respect for the victims, but would prolong the leadership vacuum; accelerating the vote would violate the Apostolic Constitution and put the legality of the new Pope’s authority in doubt. When O’Malley urges him to break the rules, Lomeli refuses to treat urgency as a reason to compromise the election’s validity. His concern is consequential as well as legal: if the process can be challenged, the new Pope’s decrees may be contested from the start of his pontificate.

The Vote and the Turn to Benítez

Lomeli’s ledgers register how rapidly the contest changes. In the second ballot, Adeyemi picks up sixteen votes from candidates who had fallen away, while Tedesco gains seven. Bellini and Tremblay barely move, and Benítez, almost an afterthought in the first count, rises from one vote to two. Later, after Adeyemi loses thirty-two votes, Lomeli attributes the collapse to news spreading from the dining hall; the transfer of support benefits several candidates, including Lomeli, but Tedesco returns to the lead. The figures show that neither an apparent surge nor an established faction guarantees the outcome.

By the seventh ballot, Lomeli concludes that the choice has narrowed. Bellini and Benítez do not seem able to stop a possible stampede towards Tedesco, while Lomeli calculates that he must retain his own forty votes and prolong the election until the cardinals can find a worthy successor. He writes his own name on the ballot, not because he desires the office, but because he sees himself as the only candidate positioned to hold the contest open. The act brings his public responsibility into direct conflict with his private certainty that he should not be Pope.

The next count makes the consequences plain: Benítez is in front, and Lomeli is stunned by the result. From his place, he announces another ballot and asks that the doors be unlocked. As he leaves his seat, the cardinals avoid his eye. He first reads their silence as hostility, then recognizes it as a new and unsettling deference: they are beginning to think he might be Pope. That change in how they look at him turns his previous calculation into a personal prospect, without resolving his doubts about accepting the office.

When the Conclave reconvenes after the crisis, Bellini proposes returning immediately to the Sistine Chapel and resuming the vote. Lomeli confirms that the rules allow it: two ballots may be held that afternoon, with the following day set aside for meditation if no decision is reached. He puts the proposal to a vote, and a strong majority supports it; only Tedesco raises his hand against it. The decision preserves the election’s procedural legitimacy while allowing it to proceed urgently. Bellini privately warns Lomeli to prepare himself, predicting that he will be Pope by the end of the afternoon.

Election of Benítez and Continuing Responsibility

At the eighth ballot, Lomeli rejects the prospect of voting for himself again. He casts his vote for Benítez, a man he had never met and had not known to be a cardinal four days earlier. Although Benítez remains largely a mystery to him, the choice feels right as he prepares to make his oath before the assembly. The result is decisive: Benítez receives 92 votes, Lomeli 21, and Tedesco 5. Lomeli joins the applause and then goes to the altar with his copy of the Apostolic Constitution to announce that the necessary majority has been achieved.

The election is not complete until Benítez accepts it. When the new majority candidate does not respond at first, Lomeli fears that he may refuse. He cites the Constitution’s appeal to the elected man not to reject the office out of fear of its weight, but to submit to divine will and trust that God will sustain him. Benítez then stands and accepts. Lomeli’s words bridge the formal rule of election and the personal burden that had made him fear the papacy for himself.

Benítez chooses the name Innocent XIV. Lomeli sees in it both a symbolic declaration amid bloodshed and an unusual combination of return to tradition and departure from it. He kneels before the new Pope; Benítez rises, draws him back to his feet, and says that Lomeli should have been in his place. He also tells him that he voted for him in every ballot and needs his advice, asking him to continue as dean. Lomeli answers that the new Pope should make no promises of office yet and turns to the formalities of acceptance. The ending thus leaves him neither elected nor removed: he has declined to make himself the solution, helped Benítez attain the required majority, and remains responsible for guiding the transition.

Secrecy, Oversight, and the Church’s Institutions

Lomeli’s role in the election is framed by a wider problem of institutional trust. After the Pope’s death, he receives a printed timeline of the final evening: dinner at 7:30 p.m. with Archbishop Woźniak at the Casa Santa Marta, retirement to the apartment at 8:30, and discovery of the death at 11:30. When Woźniak later tells Lomeli that Cardinal Tremblay took control after being summoned and asked what the Pope had discussed at supper, the account complicates the official handling of events. Woźniak says he withheld details because he was frightened and believed he was not supposed to know about them; he suspects Tremblay later persuaded a papal secretary not to speak. Lomeli’s insistence on the straight facts makes him a recipient of sensitive information, but not an omniscient judge of what happened.

That tension between stewardship and secrecy appears again in material Lomeli finds among the Pope’s papers. A wooden case concealed inside a bedpost contains financial records, transfers, addresses, and annotations. One document lists official apartments occupied by serving and retired Curia members, including Lomeli’s 445-square-metre apartment and larger residences assigned to other cardinals, beside the late Pope’s 50-square-metre room at the Casa Santa Marta. An attached report estimates the APSA patrimony at 347,532 square metres, with a potential value exceeding €2.7 billion but a stated book value of €389.6 million, and says that a paid occupancy rate of only 56 percent suggests that much income has not been properly reported. These figures place Lomeli inside the same institutional system that the Pope sought to scrutinize.

Bellini describes the late pontificate as a sustained struggle over transparency. The Pope had rejected full ceremonial regalia, lived at the Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace, and demanded proper books, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders, and receipts. He brought in accountants and management consultants to examine files and housed them on the first floor of the residence. Bellini says the reforms provoked resentment and that subsequent leaks brought further embarrassment, while opposition from Tedesco and his allies intensified the Pope’s isolation. Lomeli’s election work therefore unfolds against an institution where the lawful transfer of authority is essential, but where internal oversight and confidence have already been damaged. JSON