Diversity, Tolerance, and Church Unity

Diversity, Tolerance, and Church Unity is the principle Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli articulates when he abandons his prepared homily and speaks instead about the Church as a body whose different members serve together. Drawing on St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, he argues that variety is not a problem to be suppressed but a source of collective strength. His appeal to tolerance is also a warning against certainty: unity, he contends, depends on living with doubt and refusing to let one person or faction dominate. The principle is immediately contested in the conclave, where Vittorio Scavizzi interprets the same Pauline imagery as a defense of doctrinal unity against relativism and modern ideologies.

The Church as a Many-Membered Body

Lomeli’s argument begins with the early Church. He recalls that St Paul came to Rome roughly thirty years after Jesus entrusted the keys of the Church to St Peter, and that Paul continued to organize and teach even while imprisoned. In the years 62 or 63, Lomeli says, Paul sent Tychicus to Ephesus with a letter to a community made up of Gentiles and Jews. That history supplies the setting for Lomeli’s reading of the passage: God gives the Church different kinds of people—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers—whose distinct work builds up the body of Christ.

For Lomeli, this diversity is purposeful. God could have made a single model of servant, but instead created a community of different capacities and impulses: mystics and dreamers alongside practical builders and managers. Their differences do not cancel their common purpose. It is their service to the Church that brings them together and makes them one body. Lomeli thus presents unity not as sameness, but as a relation among distinct members, each contributing something the others cannot replace.

Tolerance, Doubt, and Shared Authority

Lomeli develops the body metaphor through Paul’s image of a community growing into Christ, its head. Hands and feet have different functions, yet both serve the Lord; accordingly, Lomeli argues, the Church should not fear diversity. Its strength comes from having different members, and no individual or faction should seek to dominate another. He reinforces the point with Paul’s appeal for believers to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ: the unity he advocates requires mutual restraint, not the victory of a single group.

The argument leads from diversity to tolerance and then to doubt. In Lomeli’s account, certainty is the sin he has come to fear most because it is an enemy of both unity and tolerance. Even Christ’s cry of abandonment on the cross, he says, shows that faith is not the same as certainty. Faith remains alive because it walks alongside doubt; without doubt there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith. Lomeli’s proposed ideal for the next Pope follows from this reasoning: he asks that the Church be led by someone who doubts, sins, seeks forgiveness, and carries on. Fallibility is not presented as a virtue in itself, but as a condition that leaves room for humility, forgiveness, and a living faith.

The Homily and Its Immediate Reception

The argument takes shape as an act of departure from the expected script. Lomeli reads the pages prepared for him, finds them platitudinous, and sets them on the seat of his throne. He then speaks from the heart, explaining that the many gifts and roles of the Church should be understood as an ecosystem rather than a single archetype. The change in delivery gives the homily its force: instead of repeating a polished, conventional text, he offers the cardinals a direct argument about how they should understand difference and authority within their community.

After the homily, Lomeli retrieves the pages he did not deliver and hands them to Monsignor Epifano, leaving their proper destination uncertain. A traditional silence of a minute and a half follows so the cardinals can absorb what they have heard. Lomeli cannot tell what they think and allows that they may be shocked. His own response is clearer: he feels closer to God than he has in months, perhaps longer, and prays that he has had the courage and strength to say what was in his heart. The scene gives the appeal both a personal and institutional dimension: it is a statement about the Church’s collective life, delivered at a moment when its electors must choose who will lead it.

Scavizzi’s Counterargument

Vittorio Scavizzi answers Lomeli’s homily by challenging its use of Paul. He objects to the dean’s appeal for doubt and insists that the passage calls for unity in faith and knowledge of Christ, lest believers be carried about by every wind of doctrine. The same scriptural image therefore yields opposing conclusions: Lomeli emphasizes the different members who make a functioning body, while Scavizzi stresses the danger of being diverted from a common course.

Scavizzi casts the Church as the Barque of St Peter in a storm and names atheism, nationalism, agnosticism, Marxism, liberalism, individualism, feminism, and capitalism as forces seeking to divert it. He urges the cardinal-electors to choose a captain who will ignore the doubters and hold the rudder steady. In his account, accommodating every modern idea risks surrendering the Church to a dictatorship of relativism; the Church’s task, he says, is not to move with the world but to move the world. Lomeli’s appeal for tolerance and Scavizzi’s demand for doctrinal firmness thus become competing accounts of what holds the Church together: a body strengthened by the service of difference, or a vessel kept on course by resistance to ideas judged dangerous.

Significance in the Conclave

The exchange makes diversity, tolerance, and unity more than abstract theological themes. They become practical questions about authority, interpretation, and the conduct of the election. Lomeli reads the Church as a community whose members need one another and whose leader should be humble enough to doubt; Scavizzi urges the electors to appoint a captain who will prevent doctrinal drift. Their disagreement turns on a shared scriptural source rather than a simple opposition between faith and its absence, showing how a single text can authorize competing judgments about the Church’s needs.

The contrast also clarifies the stakes of Lomeli’s plea against factional domination. He does not argue that every idea is equally sound; rather, he warns that certainty and the wish to dominate can damage unity and tolerance. Scavizzi’s answer reveals the risk he sees in the opposite direction: that openness to difference may leave the Church vulnerable to teachings that take it off course. The concept’s force lies in this unresolved tension. Unity must hold a diverse community together, but the conclave’s rival speakers disagree over whether that requires making room for doubt or imposing a firmer common direction.