Luomei entered the papal residence and discovered the secret documents

During the conclave, Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli breaks the symbolic seals on the late Pope’s apartment and uncovers a concealed archive in the bedposts. The records expose discrepancies in the Church’s property accounts and the late Pope’s secret examination of cardinals’ finances; they also reveal how deeply his attempts at reform had left him isolated. The scene turns a private search for divine guidance into an encounter with the material evidence of institutional secrecy and mistrust.

The decision to enter

For hours Lomeli lies fully dressed on his bed, staring at the ceiling while light comes only from the bathroom and Joshua Adeyemi snores through the partition wall. He turns over a pass key borrowed from Sister Agnes on the morning he returned to the Casa Santa Marta after Mass at St Peter’s and found himself locked out of his room. Prayer and self-questioning merge as he weighs whether his duty is merely to organize the cardinals’ deliberations or to intervene in their outcome. He does not expect a sudden revelation; he believes he has already received signs and must decide whether to act on them.

Lomeli twice rises to the door and returns to bed before finally going out a third time. The Apostolic Constitution requires the Casa Santa Marta to be empty after midnight except for the cardinals: the nuns have returned to their quarters, security guards are outside, and two doctors wait at the nearby Palazzo San Carlo. At the late Pope’s apartment, votive candles burn beside the door. Lomeli hesitates, then inserts the pass key. The ribbons Tremblay had hastily attached after the death hold the door only partly shut; their wax seals, marked with the crossed keys and parasol of the Apostolic Camera, are symbolic. Lomeli pushes until the wax cracks and the ribbons fall free, then crosses himself and enters.

The room and the first clues

The apartment is stale and airless, but its sitting room looks as it did on the night the late Pope died: lemon-coloured curtains, a blue scallop-backed sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table, a prie-dieu, and a desk. Beside the desk stands a battered black leather briefcase. Inside, Lomeli finds an electric razor, peppermints, a breviary, and a paperback copy of The Imitation of Christ, identified in the Vatican press office’s account as the book the Pope had been reading before his heart attack. A yellowing bus ticket from the Pope’s home city, issued more than twenty years earlier, marks the passage on the dangers of intimacy.

The familiar objects connect the public account of the death to the private room in which it occurred. Earlier, an official timeline had said that the Pope ate with Archbishop Woźniak at 7:30 p.m., retired to his apartment at 8:30, read and meditated on that same passage, and went to bed at 9:30. Woźniak found him without vital signs at 11:30; emergency treatment began at 11:34, and the Pope was pronounced dead at 12:12 a.m. That printed sequence had been prepared amid concern that discrepancies could fuel malicious rumours. In the apartment, the marked book makes one detail of that account tangible, while the surrounding search leads Lomeli beyond the timeline to a different kind of record.

The hidden archive

Lomeli first searches beneath the bed frame and lifts the mattress, but finds nothing. He then examines the bedposts. A small carved disc in the right post feels loose; when he grasps the post for support, its domed top comes away in his hand. Inside is an empty cavity with a tiny wooden knob. Pulling it reveals a plain wooden case, approximately the size of a shoebox, with documents rolled inside. Rather than an obvious drawer or exposed hiding place, the archive is concealed within an ordinary piece of furniture, accessible only through a small detail in its carving.

The papers include columns of figures, bank statements, money transfers, apartment addresses, and notes in the late Pope’s small, angular handwriting. One list records official apartments occupied by serving and retired members of the Curia and appears to have been prepared for the Pope by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. It gives Lomeli’s apartment in the Palace of the Holy Office as 445 square metres; the listed apartments of Aldo Bellini, Adeyemi, and Tremblay measure 410, 480, and 510 square metres respectively. At the bottom, the Pope has added his own accommodation: 50 square metres at the Casa Santa Marta. The comparisons turn a bureaucratic inventory into an implicit contrast between the cardinals’ official residences and the Pope’s own modest quarters.

An addendum marked for the Pope’s eyes alone quantifies the disparity in the property accounts. The Administration’s overall estate is estimated at 347,532 square metres, with a potential value above €2.7 billion but a declared book value of €389.6 million. The report says that a paid occupancy rate of only 56 percent appears to indicate that much of the income is not being properly declared. Its figures give the private archive a concrete basis for the Pope’s suspicion that the institution’s reported finances did not match its holdings.

Private accounts and papal mistrust

Other documents summarize personal accounts at the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican Bank. Lomeli finds his own monthly balances for more than a decade, including a closing balance of €38,734.76 on 30 September—a figure he himself had not known. The files also list Bellini at €42,112, Adeyemi at €121,865, and Tremblay at €519,732. Goffredo Tedesco’s balance is €2,821, while Vincent Benítez appears to have no account. The archive also includes the much larger wealth of Calogero Scozzazi, Archbishop Emeritus of Palermo, whose past at the Vatican Bank and investigation for money-laundering are noted in the account Lomeli reads.

The records are not simply an audit of institutional property: the Pope has obtained and kept his colleagues’ private banking information. Lomeli feels compromised by reading it, even as he recognizes that the apartment scandal had reached the press years earlier and that he had already suspected some cardinals were wealthy. What most unsettles him is what the collection suggests about the Pope’s state of mind. Across one page, the Pope has written a verse from Mark’s Gospel condemning the transformation of a house of prayer into a den of robbers. The records place that moral accusation beside balances, property figures, and named officials, joining spiritual reproach to a private investigation.

The discovery’s wider meaning

The archive gives material form to a reform campaign that Aldo Bellini later describes to Lomeli. The late Pope had rejected the full regalia of office and chosen to live at the Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace. At an early meeting with the congregation prefects, he demanded financial transparency, proper books, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for building work, and receipts. He brought in accountants and management consultants to examine files and housed them on the first floor of the Casa Santa Marta. Bellini says leaks and fresh public embarrassments followed, while Goffredo Tedesco and his allies attacked the Pope over remarks on gay people, divorced couples, and women’s advancement. In Bellini’s account, the Pope became increasingly isolated inside the Holy See as his popularity outside it grew, and by the end trusted scarcely anyone.

Lomeli returns the first set of papers to its wooden case, replaces the bedpost top, and briefly clings to the solid upright, afraid of what else he may find. He then searches the opposite side of the headboard and the foot of the bed, discovering three more concealed containers. The revelation therefore does not end with one cache: the apartment holds a larger hidden record whose contents remain to be explored. The episode’s decisive shift is from uncertainty about whether to intervene to direct evidence of the financial and personal suspicions surrounding the late Pope. The bedposts, designed to appear seamless and ordinary, turn the private bedroom into a repository for what the institution’s public accounts and official narratives leave out.