Iraq

Iraq enters the novel through Vincent Benítez’s ministry and the car-bomb attack that injured him, linking his work among victims of violence to the security crisis surrounding the conclave. Baghdad’s small archdiocese becomes the unlikely culmination of his rapid rise, while the attacks associated with Iraq and elsewhere sharpen the conflict between measured response and calls for religious confrontation.

Benítez’s Ministry and Appointment

After working in Manila, Benítez requested a transfer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1996 and undertook missionary work there. In 2018, he was appointed Archbishop of Baghdad, Iraq. His appointment followed the late Pope’s rejection of three nominations proposed by the Congregation for Bishops and insistence that Benítez, then a priest, take the post. The unusual choice makes Iraq a decisive point in Benítez’s ecclesiastical trajectory: he went from missionary work to leading a small archdiocese, which Lomeli understood to number barely more than two thousand people.

The appointment was personal as well as administrative. According to Monsignor O’Malley’s note, the late Pope had met Benítez during an African tour in 2017 and was impressed enough by his work to make him a monsignor. After Benítez suffered minor injuries in a car-bomb attack in January, he offered to resign on medical grounds, then withdrew the offer following a private meeting with the late Pope in the Vatican. The file disclosed little else about that meeting, leaving Iraq’s new archbishop’s rapid advancement and fragile health as questions Lomeli could only observe discreetly.

Iraq and the Conclave’s Security Crisis

Before the cardinals entered the conclave, Italy’s Minister of the Interior warned Lomeli that the terrorist threat was serious and imminent. The security plan included surface-to-air missiles and snipers on buildings around the Vatican, five thousand uniformed police and army personnel patrolling nearby streets, and hundreds of plain-clothes officers among the crowds. The measures made the election’s vulnerability tangible even before violence reached the Vatican’s threshold.

The danger became immediate when a suicide bomber and a car bomb struck the Piazza del Risorgimento, a place packed with pilgrims roughly four hundred metres outside the Vatican walls. The Piazza was the closest public space to the Sistine Chapel. At least thirty people were reported killed, and a shooting also took place during Mass at San Marco Evangelista. A second explosion was heard from the chapel; broken glass covered the floor and the windows beside the stove flue had been blown in. Lomeli crossed the vestibule and descended a wooden ramp through the debris, then blocked armed security men from entering, insisting that nobody inside was injured and that their intrusion would be a sacrilege.

From Local Violence to Religious War

Witnesses reported that the bomber in the Piazza had shouted “Allahu Akbar.” O’Malley reacted with disgust at the use of the words, while Lomeli warned him against being swept up in emotion. The distinction mattered: the reported words identified the attacker’s invocation, but did not by themselves settle what the attack meant for the Church or how it should respond.

During the cardinals’ argument, Goffredo Tedesco turned the attacks into an indictment of the Church’s perceived weakness and of its tolerance of Islam. He invoked the dead at the Piazza and at San Marco, then claimed that Christians were being exterminated elsewhere and that the attackers were now at the Church’s walls. He also attacked Lomeli’s suitability to lead, associating his positions with relativism and the presence of mosques and minarets in Europe. The scene shows how the attack’s proximity to the election could be used to press a wider ideological case: what had happened in Iraq and around the Vatican risked being recast as the beginning of a religious war. Lomeli instead urged clear thought, recognizing that the Church’s response to violence would itself shape how the world understood the crisis.