Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli

Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, a man who thinks of himself as a stopgap rather than a future power in the Church. When the Pope dies, Lomeli inherits the practical burden of organizing the succession and the moral burden of deciding what the electors must know. His arc turns on the tension between impartial administration and conscience: he conducts the election under its strict rules, yet ultimately acknowledges breaking the seals on the papal apartment and circulates evidence that could alter the contest.

Identity and Background

Lomeli serves as Dean of the College of Cardinals and has a longstanding clerical role in the Vatican. His earlier prostate cancer diagnosis, and the belief that he had been cured, shaped his expectation that he would die before the Pope. He had tried to resign and had not imagined himself presiding over a conclave; in his own estimation, he was a temporary officeholder, not a figure destined to direct the Church’s next chapter.

That expectation is unsettled by the Pope’s sudden death. Shortly before two in the morning, Lomeli leaves his apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office and hurries through the darkened Vatican toward the Pope’s bedroom. The trip begins as an act of prayer and self-forgetfulness: he asks God to spare the Pope, whom he regards as beloved and still occupied with unfinished work, and to take him instead. At the Piazza Santa Marta, an ambulance waiting apart from the buildings changes the meaning of his errand. He understands that it has come not to carry a sick man to hospital, but to remove a body.

The Succession and Its Rules

The first account of the death arrives as a printed timeline, a document Lomeli examines amid the confusion. It records the Pope’s dinner with Archbishop Woźniak at 7:30 p.m., his retirement and reading at 8:30, and his going to bed at 9:30. Woźniak checked on him at 11:30 and found no vital functions; a doctor began emergency treatment at 11:34, and the Pope was pronounced dead at 12:12 a.m. The carefully arranged chronology makes the initial response to death part of the political atmosphere: Lomeli has already been warned that discrepancies could invite rumors, particularly given the unresolved public suspicions surrounding Pope John Paul I’s death.

For Lomeli, the succession becomes more than a ceremony when he recognizes that the contest has begun. Bellini, Tremblay, and Adeyemi each have supporters among the electors and distinct political advantages. Lomeli knows Bellini as a liberal intellectual figure and former university rector and archbishop; Tremblay combines the Camerlengo’s office with leadership in the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples; Adeyemi attracts attention as a possible first black Pope. As the factions begin to maneuver at Casa Santa Marta, Lomeli realizes that, as Dean, he must manage the election in difficult circumstances. He prays for the wisdom to strengthen the Church and resolves that impartiality must come first.

At the opening of the conclave, that responsibility takes a formal shape. Lomeli swears the required oath with his hand on the open Bible, pledging to observe secrecy about both the election and what occurs in the place of voting. He watches the other cardinals make the same oath, conscious that later images may make the eventual Pope’s elevation look inevitable, although at this stage any elector might emerge as the choice. The history of unexpected election remains present in his reflection: the late Pope had not been widely tipped, yet won a two-thirds majority on the fourth ballot.

Lomeli’s own ballot makes his political position concrete. The three scrutineers, selected by lot, take their places at the altar. Shielding his paper with his arm, he writes Bellini’s name in capital letters, folds the ballot, carries it forward, and drops it into the urn after swearing that the vote reflects his judgment before God. His private vote for Bellini sits alongside his public obligation to administer a process whose outcome he cannot control.

The first ballot ends without any candidate reaching the required majority. Lomeli announces that voting will resume the next morning and reminds the electors that written records of the vote must not leave the Sistine Chapel. Their notes are to be collected and burned with the ballots, and he asks them not to discuss the result where the bus drivers can hear. The officials collect the tallies in paper sacks; some cardinals surrender them reluctantly, as if unwilling to let go of the only record of having received a vote. Lomeli’s task is thus both procedural and human: preserve secrecy while shepherding a divided body through the ritual of election.

Investigation and the Burden of Evidence

Lomeli’s search for the truth reaches into the Pope’s private room and its furnishings. In the headboard of a bed, a loose carved disc conceals a small wooden case, fitted into a cavity and drawn out by a tiny knob. Inside are financial documents: statements, transfers, addresses, and notes in the Pope’s small, angular handwriting. One document lists apartments occupied by serving and retired Curia members, including Lomeli’s own 445-square-metre apartment, while the Pope is listed as living in a 50-square-metre room at Casa Santa Marta. The comparison turns the papers into more than bookkeeping: it juxtaposes the scale of institutional privilege with the late Pope’s modest quarters.

An attached report estimates the APSA property holdings at 347,532 square metres, with a potential value exceeding €2.7 billion but a stated book value of €389.6 million. It also reports a paid occupancy rate of only 56 percent and says that much income appears not to have been properly declared. These figures give concrete form to the suspicion that financial oversight has failed. They also expose Lomeli to the same system he is investigating: his own apartment appears in the Pope’s records, identified by its size and location.

Bellini recalls the late Pope’s sustained attempt to impose financial controls. On his first day, the Pope refused full regalia and chose to live outside the Apostolic Palace; he then demanded transparent accounts, receipts, disclosure, and outside tenders for building work. Accountants and management consultants were installed at Casa Santa Marta to examine the files. According to Bellini, leaks and embarrassing reports followed, while opposition from traditionalists and hostility within the Curia left the Pope increasingly isolated. That account makes the concealed papers part of a larger struggle over who controls Church resources and whether reform can survive the resistance of the institution it is meant to serve.

The death itself is also shadowed by an account that was not included in the initial official chronology. Archbishop Woźniak tells Lomeli that he found the Pope dead and summoned the doctor, who in turn summoned Tremblay as Camerlengo, in accordance with the rules. Woźniak says he was frightened and in shock when Tremblay later asked whether the Pope had been troubled after supper. He admits that he withheld details, then saw Tremblay speaking privately with Monsignor Morales. His account raises the possibility that information about the Pope’s state of mind was contained before the conclave began, sharpening Lomeli’s responsibility to distinguish rumor from evidence.

Conscience, Disclosure, and Conflict

Lomeli’s dealings with Sister Shanumi reveal how carefully he tries to combine inquiry with pastoral responsibility. He asks Sister Agnes to leave before speaking to Shanumi privately, sitting close enough that the conversation is difficult for him. He tells Shanumi she is not in trouble and frames his questions around his duty before God and the Church to ensure that the electors make the right decisions. Rather than treating her simply as a source of information, he asks her to share what is troubling her in relation to Adeyemi and offers assurance that the matter will go no further than the room. His investigation therefore carries a personal obligation to protect the person whose testimony may affect the election.

When the information from the Pope’s papers reaches the other electors, Lomeli does not retreat from his role in making it public. He remains seated as cardinals approach, repeatedly acknowledging that he circulated the document and broke the seals on the Pope’s rooms. He explains that he had been alerted to a possible excommunicable offence and possible cover-up, and that he judged it his duty to investigate even if doing so required entering the sealed apartment. He presents the evidence to his fellow electors and leaves its weight to their judgment, insisting that he acted according to conscience.

The response shows that disclosure is not a neutral act. Sabbadin argues that Lomeli has thrown away a weapon that might have been used to control Tremblay after an election, and accuses him instead of strengthening Tedesco. Archbishop Fitzgerald, a prominent Tremblay supporter, objects that the report gives their fellow cardinal no chance to defend himself and condemns Lomeli for acting as judge and jury. Other electors murmur agreement. Their objections frame the same disclosure in competing ways: as an act of conscience, a tactical mistake, or an injustice to the person implicated.

Character and Narrative Significance

Lomeli’s defining conflict is not between procedure and disorder but between different kinds of duty. As Dean, he must maintain secrecy, administer the ballots, and protect the legitimacy of the conclave. As an investigator responding to evidence, he must also decide whether those rules can justify withholding information that may reveal serious wrongdoing. His decision to disclose the report does not settle the political consequences; instead, it places the evidence and its interpretation in the hands of the electors, while exposing him to criticism from opposing camps.

The contrast between the oath on the Bible and the opened papal room gives his trajectory its central shape. Lomeli begins by praying to be spared responsibility and proceeds to undertake it, first through scrupulous attention to election rules and then through a breach of the seals that he openly admits. His authority comes less from certainty than from accepting that the decision is his to make and that others may judge it differently. In a conclave shaped by factions, private information, financial opacity, and fragile trust, he becomes the figure who must hold the process together without pretending that institutional order and moral truth always coincide.