Papal Power and Personal Ambition

Papal Power and Personal Ambition is the novel’s sustained examination of who wants the papacy, who fears it, and whether a candidate’s desire can be separated from service. The succession contest begins amid the death of the late Pope and a carefully assembled official timeline, but its deeper stakes emerge in the candidates’ conflicting motives, Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli’s growing suspicion of his own ambition, and the Church’s need for a legitimate choice. In the end, authority is presented not as a prize secured by maneuvering but as an office whose burden must be accepted through a process the electors can recognize as more than politics.

The succession becomes a contest

Lomeli later identifies the early maneuvering at Casa Santa Marta as the moment the succession contest began. The leading figures already command distinct networks and forms of appeal. Aldo Bellini is the liberal faction’s intellectual hope, a former rector of the Gregorian University and former Archbishop of Milan. Joseph Tremblay combines his role as Camerlengo with leadership of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, giving him links to the developing world while seeming American without being one. Joshua Adeyemi embodies the possibility of the first Black Pope, a prospect that fascinates the media as well as his supporters.

The contest is not only a matter of doctrine or faction. Each candidate’s public standing takes shape through a mixture of office, reputation, perceived capacity, and the support of electors. When Bellini arrives at the Casa Santa Marta at half past five, carrying a suitcase and a black briefcase overfilled with books and papers, he has already emerged by general agreement as the favourite. Lomeli believes he has the physical and mental capacity for the papacy, notes his reputation as a man of prayer, and privately decides to vote for him. Bellini’s demanding record as Secretary of State, meanwhile, makes his competence visible: his officials had to provide a second shift of assistants to cover his work into the early hours.

Yet Bellini does not present the office as an ambition to be gratified. He says that no sane man could want the papacy and describes what it did to the late Pope as a Calvary. When Lomeli proposes that he tell his supporters to vote elsewhere, Bellini cannot accept the implication that withdrawal would be harmless. He fears that the office may pass to Goffredo Tedesco, whom he regards as ready to undo six decades of progress. The refusal to seek power therefore coexists with a determined effort to prevent a feared outcome.

The difference between ambition and service

Lomeli tests the candidates’ motives directly. At dinner he asks Giulio Sabbadin whether Bellini is sincere in saying he does not want to be Pope. Sabbadin says that he is, and makes this reluctance one of the reasons for supporting him: the dangerous candidates, in Sabbadin’s view, are those who actively desire the office. The exchange turns the familiar claim of unworthiness into a political criterion. Reluctance may signal humility, but it also does not remove a candidate from the contest or erase the consequences of his choices.

Tremblay’s conduct makes the contrast more pointed. After dinner, Lomeli waits while Tremblay listens to Asanka Rajapakse, occasionally affirming the Archbishop of Colombo and apparently ignoring the Dean’s presence. The scene places electoral cultivation inside polite sociability: conversation can serve as canvassing even when no explicit appeal is made. Adeyemi, by contrast, does not hurry after potential supporters when the cardinals gather for coffee. While Tremblay pursues Rui Brandão D’Cruz and Bellini and Tedesco move from table to table, Adeyemi stands in the lobby and lets supporters bring prospective voters to him. A queue forms. Lomeli reads this composure as a force that may be either political momentum or, in religious terms, the Holy Spirit.

The novel does not make charisma or reluctance decisive evidence of fitness. Lomeli considers whether Adeyemi might unite the Church and recognizes the scale of his personality, even as he questions how the candidate’s conservative views are received. Candidate, supporters, and electors all shape what the office appears to mean; popularity, restraint, competence, and conviction remain competing signs rather than a simple measure of virtue.

Lomeli’s reluctant candidacy

Lomeli enters the election as its organizer, not as a declared candidate. His appointment as Dean leaves him responsible for managing a conclave under difficult circumstances, a duty he never expected to perform. After a prostate-cancer diagnosis and presumed recovery, he had thought of himself as a stopgap who would die before the late Pope. He had already tried to resign. His prayer for wisdom frames the responsibility as something imposed upon him rather than sought.

Bellini’s accusation unsettles that self-understanding. After Lomeli celebrates a televised Mass at St Peter’s, Bellini suggests that he has stepped out of the shadows and recalls that he had tried to resign. Lomeli is nearly overcome by the suggestion that he could become Pope, insisting that he has neither the desire nor a realistic chance. Bellini answers that every cardinal has at least entertained the possibility and selected a papal name. The accusation matters because it converts Lomeli’s public visibility into a question about private desire: refusing to acknowledge ambition may be discernment, or it may be a failure to recognize it.

Alone afterward, Lomeli audits his conscience and concludes, as far as he can tell, that Bellini is wrong. But another possibility troubles him: that God may have a plan for him. He wonders whether his extraordinary impulse during the Mass, and the few sentences he can scarcely remember, might have been the Holy Spirit working through him. This thought does not settle the issue. When he tries to pray for guidance, the closeness he had felt disappears. His possible candidacy is thus suspended between political suspicion and religious interpretation, with no private certainty to resolve it.

Office, procedure, and institutional trust

The novel places personal ambition inside systems of information and rules. Immediately after the late Pope’s death, Joseph Tremblay hands Lomeli a printed timeline headed “Timeline.” It records the Pope’s meal with Janusz Woźniak at 7.30 p.m., his retirement to his apartment at 8.30, and his reading and meditation on Chapter 8 of The Imitation of Christ, “Of the dangers of intimacy.” At 11.30 Woźniak checks on him and finds no vital functions; at 11.34 Dr Giulio Baldinotti begins emergency treatment, and the Pope is pronounced dead at 12.12 a.m. Lomeli has just insisted that discrepancies in the official account could fuel malicious rumours, recalling the long effort to counter the claim that Pope John Paul I was murdered. The timeline makes administrative accuracy consequential: the integrity of the succession depends partly on how the transition is documented.

The office’s legitimacy is also tested through the rules governing who may elect. When Wilhelm Mandorff questions whether the newly revealed Vincent Benítez is truly a cardinal, Lomeli recalls that the late Pope revised canon law on in pectore appointments shortly before his death. He cites paragraph thirty-nine of the Apostolic Constitution: a cardinal-elector who arrives re integra, before the new Pope has been elected, may join the election at the stage it has reached. Lomeli’s conclusion is explicit: Benítez is legally a cardinal. The claim does not rest on familiarity or public recognition; it rests on a legal interpretation that gives a concealed appointment effect within the election.

The rules therefore constrain and enable ambition at once. The electors may pursue candidates, question motives, and debate the meaning of divine guidance, but the choice must still pass through a legally structured process. When Bellini later asks his supporters to transfer their votes to Lomeli, Tedesco objects that the electors are acting like a political convention and insists that the Holy Spirit cannot be summoned at will. His protest exposes the central tension: strategic coordination may look like an expedient bargain, yet refusing to deliberate collectively does not by itself establish that a choice is divinely directed.

Power after the ballot

The struggle for office is set against the late Pope’s conflict with the Curia. Bellini recalls that the pontificate began with the Pope refusing full regalia and choosing to live at Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace. At an early meeting with the prefects, the Pope demanded financial transparency, proper books, disclosed accounts, outside tenders for building work, and receipts. He brought in accountants and management consultants to examine files, placing them in offices on the first floor of Casa Santa Marta. The reforms provoked hostility and leaks; Bellini says that reports of friends such as Tutino taking funds intended for the poor to pay for renovations or first-class travel compounded the public embarrassments. Tedesco and his allies, meanwhile, attacked the Pope over statements about gay people, divorced couples, and the promotion of women. Bellini describes the result as a cruel paradox: the Pope was loved more by the outside world as he became more isolated within the Holy See, until he trusted scarcely anyone.

A cache discovered in a hidden compartment in the late Pope’s bed gives that institutional conflict a material form. Among the papers are bank statements, transfers, apartment addresses, and the Pope’s handwritten notes. An APSA list records the official apartments of Curia members, including Bellini’s 410 square metres, Adeyemi’s 480, Tremblay’s 510, and Lomeli’s 445; the Pope’s own Casa Santa Marta accommodation is listed at 50 square metres. An attached report estimates the APSA property portfolio at 347,532 square metres and more than €2.7 billion in potential value, against a book value of €389.6 million, and says that paid occupancy appears to be only 56 percent. The contrast between the Pope’s small residence and the much larger official apartments does not itself prove misconduct, but the figures give concrete weight to his demand for accountability and explain why reform became a struggle over institutional power.

Bellini’s own assessment is not that the Curia can simply be discarded. He argues that the Church can be served only through the Church and that the Curia remains its heart and brain despite its imperfections. His position makes the succession problem more than a choice between opposing programs: whoever holds the papacy must exercise authority through an institution whose service is indispensable and whose resistance can isolate its leader.

Election, renunciation, and reconciliation

Bellini eventually asks the electors to end the prolonged contest. He says that two dozen cardinals have voted for him, but argues that they will not be forgiven if they continue until the rules permit a simple-majority election. With an obvious leader after the previous ballot, he urges the cardinals to unite behind Lomeli and asks his own supporters to transfer their votes to the Dean. Tedesco immediately rejects the move as a response to pressure rather than a faithful discernment of the person best fitted to be Pope. The exchange leaves the distinction between a candidate’s withdrawal and a political arrangement unresolved even as it brings Lomeli’s reluctant candidacy into the open.

After the election, the Vatican press office reports that Pope Innocent XIV declines 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 warmly and especially addressing Bellini, Tedesco, Adeyemi, and Tremblay, men who had at one time imagined themselves in his place. He offers each comfort and admiration and pledges his support. The gesture makes the end of the contest an answer to its rivalries: there will be no recriminations or dismissals, and the Church will face the dangers ahead in a spirit of unity. Even Tedesco acknowledges the relief.

The concluding image joins secrecy to public recognition. In the vestibule, O’Malley burns the ballot papers and the Conclave’s notes and records, then releases the mixture that produces the white smoke. Lomeli sees neither the chimney nor the smoke itself; he sees the light reflected in the ceiling and hears the distant acclamation of the crowd. The record of maneuvering is destroyed, while the election’s public consequence becomes unmistakable. The office has passed to Innocent XIV, but the final emphasis falls not on possession of power: it falls on a new Pope’s decision to greet former rivals as brothers and to make unity part of his first act of rule.