Lomeli–Benítez relationship

The relationship between Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli and Vincent Benítez grows from uncertainty into reciprocal trust at the moment the conclave chooses a new pope. Lomeli first encounters Benítez as an obscure candidate whose presence in the election is difficult to explain; by the eighth ballot, he votes for him in good conscience. When Benítez becomes Pope Innocent XIV, he tells Lomeli that he had voted for him throughout the ballots and asks for his continued counsel. Their exchange establishes a relationship shaped not by long acquaintance but by judgment, restraint, and the burdens of office.

An Unfamiliar Candidate in a Contested Election

At the first ballot, Benítez was almost absent from the contest: he received one vote, while the field remained crowded and the leading candidates were Tedesco, Adeyemi, Bellini, and Tremblay. Lomeli, responsible for tallying the votes, initially understood the election through its established factions and expected contenders. Benítez’s small showing registered only as a minor surprise within that larger struggle.

The second ballot made the surprise harder to overlook. As weaker candidates’ votes fell away, Adeyemi gained sixteen, Tedesco added seven, and Bellini and Tremblay barely moved. Benítez’s support rose from one vote to two. The increase did not make him a front-runner, but it marked the beginning of a trajectory that the election’s established calculations had not anticipated. Lomeli’s attention to the figures allows the relationship to begin at a distance: Benítez first appears to him as a name whose significance is only gradually becoming legible.

That distance persisted even as Benítez gained support. After Adeyemi’s collapse, Lomeli noted that Benítez had five votes, a striking result for someone the other cardinals had barely known two days earlier. The growing vote total turned him into a meaningful presence in the conclave, but did not yet give Lomeli personal knowledge of him. The eventual trust between the two men therefore emerges against a background of institutional uncertainty rather than established friendship.

From Electoral Calculation to Personal Choice

The election’s arithmetic repeatedly placed Lomeli inside the contest despite his reluctance. In the first ballot, he recorded five votes for himself and worried that his candidacy might have drawn support away from Bellini. Later, as the field narrowed, Bellini’s manager, Sabbadin, argued that Lomeli could not win: Bellini had fifteen votes, Lomeli twelve, and even transferring Bellini’s support in full would leave Lomeli behind Tremblay and Tedesco. The argument was practical and coalition-based, treating votes as a possible bloc to be redirected toward a viable candidate.

Lomeli’s eventual vote for Benítez marks a different kind of decision. On the eighth ballot, he considered the candidate a stranger whom he had not known to be a cardinal four days earlier and who remained largely mysterious to him. He nonetheless wrote BENÍTEZ on his ballot and found the choice right. The act does not rest on personal familiarity or a detailed political alliance; the scene presents it as a judgment made before God, consistent with the oath Lomeli then takes over his ballot.

That vote becomes one side of a reciprocal connection. After the election, Benítez tells Lomeli that he had voted for him in every ballot. The revelation overturns the apparent one-way nature of Lomeli’s attention: the dean had been recording and weighing the votes, while the newly elected pope had repeatedly supported him. The relationship is founded in these acts of electoral recognition, but neither man treats the outcome as a claim to office or reward.

Election and Mutual Recognition

When the eighth-ballot result is announced, Benítez has ninety-two votes, Lomeli twenty-one, and Tedesco five. Lomeli joins the applause and stands, helping prompt the conclave’s ovation. Benítez alone remains seated, his head bowed in prayer. Lomeli then approaches him with the Apostolic Constitution and asks whether he accepts his canonical election. After a long silence, Benítez accepts.

The question is not merely ceremonial in the scene: Lomeli must wait through Benítez’s silence and considers the possibility that he will refuse. He recalls the Constitution’s instruction that the elected man should submit to the divine will rather than refuse the office for fear of its weight. Benítez’s acceptance turns the election from a tally into a personal assumption of responsibility, and Lomeli is the one charged with asking him to make that decision.

When Benítez chooses the name Innocent XIV, Lomeli recognizes its unusual symbolism: a papal name derived from a virtue rather than a saint, carrying both a return to tradition and a departure from it. Lomeli kneels before the new pope, but Benítez rises, tugs at his mozzetta, and urges him to stand. His quiet declaration that he had voted for Lomeli in every ballot, together with his request that Lomeli remain Dean and advise him, reverses the visible hierarchy of the moment. The new pope’s first private appeal is not for ceremony but for the counsel of the man who has just recognized his election.

Lomeli responds with a boundary as well as an acceptance of the relationship. His first advice is that Benítez make no promises of office yet. He then returns immediately to the formal work of the election, calling for the witnesses and the deed of acceptance. The exchange combines personal confidence with institutional caution: Benítez asks for guidance, and Lomeli answers by protecting the new pope from premature commitments.

Trust Under the Weight of Office

Their confidence is tested almost immediately by the need to address Benítez’s medical history. After the election, Lomeli asks him about treatment at a clinic in Geneva and insists that the new pope’s colleagues have a right to know relevant facts before the media seeks them out. The conversation shifts their relationship from electoral recognition to a private disclosure with consequences for the office Benítez has accepted.

Lomeli also asks how many people know of Benítez’s condition. Benítez answers that only three people do: Lomeli, Monsignor O’Malley, and Benítez himself. He adds that the doctor who treated him in Baghdad was killed in a bombing shortly after examining him, and that the late Pope is dead. The exchange establishes both the narrow circle of knowledge and the precarious circumstances surrounding it. Benítez entrusts Lomeli with information that cannot be treated as ordinary political gossip, while Lomeli frames disclosure as part of the responsibilities surrounding the papacy.

That confidentiality sits within a larger crisis of trust in the Church’s institutions. Lomeli has seen the late Pope’s papers, including records of curial apartments and financial discrepancies. One list contrasts Lomeli’s 445-square-metre apartment with the late Pope’s 50-square-metre residence at Casa Santa Marta; an accompanying report estimates the APSA property holdings at 347,532 square metres and a potential value exceeding €2.7 billion, while the stated book value is €389.6 million. Bellini describes the late Pope’s demands for transparent accounts, receipts, outside tenders, and independent scrutiny, and the isolation that followed his battles with the Curia. These revelations make Lomeli’s new role as Benítez’s adviser part of a wider question of whether private information and institutional authority will be used responsibly.

The relationship therefore ends its first stage not with complete knowledge or settled policy, but with a request for counsel and a disclosure held by a very small circle. Benítez has become pope; Lomeli remains dean, now asked to help him navigate the office. Their bond rests on an unusual reciprocity: Lomeli chose Benítez without truly knowing him, Benítez had supported Lomeli throughout the election, and both now face the difficult work of deciding what trust requires.