Humility, Simplicity, and Ostentation

Humility, Simplicity, and Ostentation names a recurring tension between an ideal of Christian poverty and the visible performance of that ideal. The late Pope’s refusal of a luxurious papal apartment and limousine gives simplicity practical meaning, but the scenes surrounding his death complicate that example: the Church’s effort to honor his modesty becomes a public spectacle, and Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli recognizes that ostentation can wear the appearance of humility as readily as grandeur can.

The late Pope’s austerity

The late Pope’s room at Casa Santa Marta is the material measure of his chosen simplicity. It contains fifty anonymous square metres, pale lemon walls and curtains, an easily cleaned parquet floor, standard furniture, washable blue upholstery, and a dark wooden prie-dieu like a hundred others in the hostel. Nothing in the room is personal or grand. The Pope had stayed there as a cardinal before his election and never moved to the apartment in the Apostolic Palace, with its library and private chapel; one look at that residence had sent him running.

That refusal was not merely private taste. On his first day, the late Pope’s decision to remain in the modest room set him against senior members of the Roman Curia, who argued that such an arrangement did not suit a pope’s dignity. He answered them by invoking Christ’s instruction to his disciples to take neither money nor extra clothing on their journey. The choice made a religious principle visible in the place where he lived, but it also became a rebuke: those returning to grand official apartments felt the Pope’s reproach and resented it. Simplicity therefore carried institutional consequences, unsettling the habits and status attached to office.

Poverty and the public image of death

The late Pope’s preference for modesty shaped the disagreement over how to move his body from the papal apartment. Goffredo Tedesco urged speed, proposing an immediate transfer and a media presence in Piazza Santa Marta so the Church could control the news cycle. Joshua Adeyemi argued instead for waiting until daylight, with a hearse and a proper casket draped in the papal flag, in order to preserve the dignity of the office. Aldo Bellini countered that the late Pope would not have cared for ceremonial dignity: he had chosen to live as one of the humble, and would wish to be seen in death among the humble poor. Lomeli supported Bellini, recalling that the Pope had refused to ride in a limousine and describing an ambulance as the nearest available equivalent to public transport.

The practical outcome partly honored that conviction and partly exposed its limits. Adeyemi was outvoted three to one; the body was to be embalmed, and Lomeli insisted that no photographs be taken. He remembered the disfiguring deterioration of Pope Paul VI’s body in the August heat and the still more grotesque earlier episode in which Pope Pius XII’s body fermented in its coffin. The insistence on respectful handling was therefore both a matter of dignity and a response to the material vulnerability of the dead. Yet the transfer itself could not remain private. Less than half an hour after arrangements began, ambulance men whose phones had been confiscated carried the late Pope out in a white plastic body bag on a wheeled stretcher.

Lomeli found significance in the smallness of the body and its foetal shape, reading its helplessness as a statement about human equality and dependence on God’s mercy. The procession around it, however, was surrounded by the apparatus of public attention: religious lined the lobby and staircase in silence, while phone cameras clicked when the elevator doors opened. The four cardinals escorted the stretcher past the Swiss Guards and into the night, amid the ambulance’s lights, photographers’ flashes, television lamps, and the illuminated mass of St Peter’s Basilica. The juxtaposition makes the body’s humility visible even as the scene turns it into an image watched and recorded by a crowd.

The motorcade sharpened the contradiction. The ambulance departed with police cars and motorcycles; its sirens began only after it had disappeared from the piazza. Lomeli’s thought that this was less like a display of poverty than a dictator’s motorcade registers the distance between intention and effect. The Pope had refused a limousine, but the elaborate escort around his body reproduced the spectacle of power. The scene does not simply dismiss the effort to honor him: it shows how public ceremony can overwhelm the modesty it claims to express.

Simplicity as a contested ideal

Lomeli’s own response to simplicity is ambivalent. While the Sistine Chapel is being prepared for the conclave, he recalls the canopied thrones once used by cardinals during voting, and the ritual in which every canopy but that of the elected man would collapse. The thrones had been abandoned in 1965 after the Second Vatican Council, along with many older traditions; the College of Cardinals was now considered too large and multinational for such Renaissance display. Lomeli nevertheless feels drawn to the old pageantry. He privately thinks the late Pope’s repeated emphasis on simplicity and humility could go too far: excess simplicity, he reasons, may become another kind of ostentation, and pride in one’s humility remains pride.

This reflection prevents the contrast from becoming a simple opposition between virtuous poverty and corrupt luxury. The late Pope’s austere room was a genuine choice with a scriptural basis, but its moral force could also be felt as an accusation by those around him. Conversely, Lomeli’s attraction to the old thrones is not presented as proof that grandeur is right; it reveals his awareness that displays of humility can themselves become a display, while inherited ceremony can embody more than mere vanity. The issue is not only what an officeholder possesses, but what a visible choice communicates and how others are made to respond to it.

Simplicity amid electoral ambition

The same tension shapes how the cardinals judge candidates and the election. Aldo Bellini is known as the liberals’ intellectual hope, with a background as rector of the Gregorian University and Archbishop of Milan; Goffredo Tedesco has a faction of supporters, as do Joshua Adeyemi and Joseph Tremblay. In the Casa Santa Marta, the succession contest makes the exercise of authority inseparable from public identity: each candidate’s reputation and following become part of the election’s visible drama. Lomeli, as dean, must manage that contest even though he had thought of himself as a stopgap and had tried to resign.

At one point Lomeli sees Adeyemi’s support gathering momentum. While other candidates move among voters and canvass, Adeyemi stands coolly in a corner of the lobby, allowing supporters to bring potential voters to him; a small queue forms. Lomeli wonders whether the Nigerian might unite the Church and fill St Peter’s Throne. This quiet posture differs from overt solicitation, yet it too becomes a powerful image, and Lomeli’s perception of its force shows that an appearance of composure can carry political weight within the election.

Later, a cardinal who has received about two dozen votes urges the electors not to prolong the contest until they can choose a pope by simple majority. He asks his supporters to transfer their votes to Lomeli and elect him, presenting unity behind an apparent leader as the way to avoid an election conducted like a political convention. Tedesco objects that the Holy Spirit cannot be summoned at will and insists that the electors must choose the man they believe best fitted to be pope, not the one easiest to place on the balcony to calm the crowd. The exchange puts the central ambiguity into procedural form: humility and unity may restrain ambition, but an appeal to them can also become a means of directing votes.

The resolution is expressed through a different kind of ceremony. After his election as Pope Innocent XIV, Lomeli refuses to receive the traditional pledges of obedience while seated on the papal throne. Instead, he stands before the altar and greets the cardinal-electors individually, embracing them, especially Bellini, Tedesco, Adeyemi, and Tremblay, who had once hoped to occupy his place. He offers each comfort and admiration and pledges his support. The gesture uses the authority of the new office to reject recrimination and make unity tangible; the cardinals feel relief, and even Tedesco grudgingly acknowledges the effect. The episode gives simplicity and humility a political consequence without presenting them as withdrawal from power: the newly elected pope exercises authority through a personal encounter rather than enthronement.

The motif’s unresolved balance

Across these scenes, humility is neither a decorative virtue nor a guarantee against spectacle. The late Pope’s room and his refusal of a limousine make his convictions concrete; the arguments over his body show how quickly those convictions become contested public symbols. Lomeli’s suspicion that humility can become ostentation keeps the theme unsettled, while the conclave’s rituals show that dignity and display cannot simply be removed from institutional life. Even the new pope’s choice to greet the electors standing before the altar is a public act, but it redirects ceremony toward forgiveness and shared responsibility.

The book closes the election’s visible pageantry with an image of secrecy and acclaim together. In the vestibule, Raymond O’Malley burns the ballots and the conclave’s notes and records; Lomeli watches the smoke flue, unable to see the chimney or the white smoke itself. Then the distant roar of hundreds of thousands of voices rises in hope and acclamation. The private destruction of the election’s records and the public response to its result stand side by side: simplicity cannot erase the spectacle of authority, but it can alter what that authority chooses to honor.