Scavizzi counterattacks Tromeli in the second meditation

Scavizzi’s second meditation is the address delivered in the Sistine Chapel immediately before the first ballot of the conclave. Chosen to remind the electors of their responsibility, the ninety-four-year-old Cardinal Vittorio Scavizzi instead directly contests the Dean’s morning homily on doubt. His appeal for unity and resistance to modern ideologies gives the prescribed moment of reflection the force of a public rebuke, and reveals that the conclave’s divisions are already sharp before voting begins.

Purpose and setting

Only two men in the chapel were not cardinal-electors: Archbishop Mandorff, who had closed the doors, and Scavizzi, the ninety-four-year-old Vicar General Emeritus of Rome. The College had selected Scavizzi after the late Pope’s funeral to deliver the second meditation, an address required by the Apostolic Constitution to take place in private immediately before the first ballot. Its stated purpose was to remind the electors of their grave duty to act with the right intention for the good of the Universal Church.

Tradition assigned the meditation to a cardinal over eighty, who could not vote. The choice gave the old guard a voice at a decisive moment without restoring its members to the electorate. Scavizzi’s address thus came from outside the vote but directly into its deliberations: he could not cast a ballot, yet he could frame the choice the voting cardinals were about to make.

A challenge to the Dean

Scavizzi was helped to the microphone by Mandorff. Holding his notes close, he began after a pause and addressed the cardinal brothers as they faced a moment of great responsibility. He called on them to attend to Scripture, then turned explicitly to the Dean’s homily that morning, which had used Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians as an argument for doubt. Scavizzi professed astonishment at that emphasis and questioned whether doubt was truly what the modern world lacked.

The intervention disrupted the solemnity of the preparatory rite. A murmur passed through the chapel; electors shifted in their seats, while Lomeli heard his own pulse. Scavizzi was not offering a neutral meditation detached from the election. By identifying and disputing the Dean’s argument before the ballot, he made the disagreement itself part of the electors’ immediate decision-making context.

The Barque and the threat of relativism

Scavizzi answered the appeal to doubt with Paul’s insistence on unity in faith and knowledge of Christ. He invoked the image of children tossed by every wind of doctrine and developed it into a storm at sea: the Church was the Barque of St Peter, struggling against forces that threatened to divert it from its course. He named atheism, nationalism, agnosticism, Marxism, liberalism, individualism, feminism, and capitalism among the competing “isms” he believed endangered that course.

The metaphor made his political and theological prescription plain. The electors, he argued, must choose a captain who would hold the rudder firm rather than heed the doubters. He rejected the idea that every opinion deserved equal weight and warned against the “dictatorship of relativism,” which he associated with accommodating the Church to passing sects and modernist fashions. His alternative was a Church that would move the world, rather than one that merely moved with it. He concluded by praying that the Holy Spirit would guide the deliberations toward a pastor who could end what he described as recent drift and lead the Church back to knowledge of Christ, love, and joy.

Reception and significance

When Scavizzi released the microphone, the amplification rang through the chapel. He bowed to the altar, leaned on Mandorff, and limped down the aisle under the silent attention of the electors. He did not look at anyone, including Goffredo Tedesco, who sat in the front row opposite Lomeli. Lomeli understood from the scene that Tedesco had known what was coming and considered the possibility that he had even written the address.

Scavizzi and Mandorff disappeared behind the screen. In the stunned quiet, their footsteps, the doors opening and closing, and the key turning in the lock could be heard. The action returned the electors to their enforced seclusion, but the speech had already changed the atmosphere in which they would vote. The account frames the divisions as beginning when Mandorff closed the doors; Scavizzi’s intervention gives those divisions an explicit voice, setting a defense of unity and doctrinal stability against Lomeli’s appeal to doubt just as the first ballot is about to begin.