Suspicion and certainty

Doubt and certainty form a central theological and political tension in Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli’s experience of the conclave. For Lomeli, doubt can keep faith alive and make room for a diverse Church; certainty, when claimed as exclusive authority, threatens unity. That position is tested not only in opposing speeches but in the practical work of deciding what is true and what conscience requires when the available evidence is incomplete.

Doubt as a crisis of faith

After reading Romano Guardini’s Meditations Before Mass, Lomeli reflects on the stillness that Guardini describes as necessary for receiving the word of God. The book offers no answer to the question that troubles him: how such stillness can be achieved. Instead, his thoughts grow noisier. He dwells on the Gospel paradox of a priest who celebrates Mass yet cannot attain Communion himself, and on Christ’s cry of abandonment. His doubt appears as spiritual distress, not detached skepticism: he is struggling to pray and to reconcile his priestly role with his inward state.

The pressure takes a physical form when, in despair, he throws the book against the wall. But the crisis does not settle into disbelief. It becomes part of the homily he is about to give, where uncertainty is recast as a condition of living faith. The movement from private turmoil to public argument does not erase the distress; it gives it theological meaning.

The homily: diversity held together by service

Lomeli begins a homily on the keys of papal authority, then abandons the prepared text as platitudinous. Turning away from the pages, he tells the assembled cardinals that he will speak from the heart. He recalls Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and its account of a Church made up of different gifts and forms of service: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Their variety is not a defect to be eliminated. Their shared work is what makes them a unity.

He develops the image of the Church as a body whose different limbs serve in different ways. The metaphor supports a practical claim: the Church must be tolerant because all its members are needed, and no person or faction should dominate the rest. Unity, in this account, does not mean sameness or submission to a single human judgment. It is sustained by cooperation among differences, directed toward growth in Christ.

Lomeli’s argument turns on a deliberate reversal of the usual association between certainty and strength. He calls certainty the enemy of unity and tolerance, and points to Christ’s words of anguish on the cross as evidence that doubt belongs within the life of faith. If faith contained only certainty, he argues, there would be no mystery and no need for faith. Doubt is therefore not a rival to belief but one of the conditions that keeps belief open and alive.

He applies the argument directly to the choice before the electors, praying for a pope who doubts and thereby keeps the Catholic faith living and capable of inspiring the world. His further prayer is for a pope who sins, asks forgiveness, and carries on. That appeal places fallibility inside his picture of religious leadership: the desired pope is not an embodiment of flawless certainty, but someone able to acknowledge failure and continue. After the homily, Lomeli feels closer to God than he has for months and prays that he has had the courage and strength to say what was in his heart.

A rival reading of the Church

The homily’s account of diversity and doubt is challenged in the Sistine Chapel by Vittorio Scavizzi. Responding explicitly to Lomeli’s use of Paul’s letter, Scavizzi argues that the passage calls for unity in faith and knowledge of Christ, not doubt. He describes the Church as the Barque of St Peter in a storm, threatened by atheism, nationalism, agnosticism, Marxism, liberalism, individualism, feminism, and capitalism. In his reading, these competing doctrines are forces that can divert the Church from its course.

Scavizzi draws a different conclusion for the election. The cardinals, he says, must choose a captain who will disregard the doubters and hold the rudder firm. He warns against the “dictatorship of relativism” and rejects a Church that merely moves with the world, advocating instead a Church that moves the world. Where Lomeli treats variety and uncertainty as conditions for collective wisdom, Scavizzi treats them as dangers requiring decisive direction. The opposing speeches make the theological disagreement concrete: they contest not only what Paul means, but whether the Church’s unity is best protected by tolerating difference or by restraining it.

Conscience amid incomplete evidence

The contrast between certainty and doubt also shapes Lomeli’s conduct outside the pulpit. After learning that the late Pope died with no one present and was already dead when discovered, he immediately anticipates the questions that the media and the public will ask about the Pope’s heart condition and whether it had been concealed. He asks whether anyone was with the Pope and whether he received absolution, then calls Archbishop Janusz Woźniak to help prepare a detailed statement. The exchange establishes both the urgency of finding out what happened and the limits of what Lomeli knows at that point.

Woźniak later tells Lomeli that the late Pope had described a meeting with Cardinal Joseph Tremblay to him over supper; Woźniak had not witnessed the meeting itself. He reports that the Pope gave no reason for dismissing Tremblay, only that the reasons would soon become clear, and that the Pope had seemed extremely angry. The information matters, but it is testimony at one remove, not direct observation. Similarly, Monsignor Raymond O’Malley recounts how a monsignor, pressed about the meeting, insisted it was routine and then said in Spanish that the report had been withdrawn. O’Malley had hinted, without claiming to know as fact, that Lomeli might have seen a contradicting document. These exchanges show why suspicion cannot simply be treated as proof: the electors have to distinguish what a witness saw, what someone later reported, and what can be confirmed by a document.

Lomeli nevertheless concludes that the evidence against Tremblay presents an overwhelming prima facie case of simony. He points to bank statements and a report naming cardinals who, he says, received cash in connection with votes on the first ballot. Bellini raises a question about whether the money might have served legitimate purposes; Lomeli answers that he has seen the recipients’ bank statements. His claim is grave, but its presentation is also bounded: a prima facie case is evidence demanding attention, not an invitation to pretend that every question has already been answered.

When Lomeli circulates the report, he publicly accepts responsibility for breaking the seals on the late Pope’s rooms and distributing the document. He explains that he had been informed that an excommunicable offence might have been committed and covered up, and that he entered the rooms to investigate. He does not claim the electors must reach a particular conclusion; he says the information is before them and that they must decide what weight to give it. Some cardinals approve of his candour, while Giulio Sabbadin objects that the disclosure has strengthened Tedesco; Archbishop Fitzgerald condemns the action as unjust because Tremblay has had no opportunity to defend himself. The episode gives Lomeli’s challenge to certainty a procedural counterpart: conscientious investigation requires action, but judgment should remain accountable to evidence and to those who must assess it.

The limits and uses of doubt

Across these episodes, doubt has more than one meaning. In Lomeli’s spiritual crisis it is a painful inability to find stillness; in his homily it becomes an element of living faith; in the conclave it is a reason to distinguish reported claims from established facts and to leave room for deliberation. Scavizzi, by contrast, sees doubt and doctrinal variety as hazards to a Church already exposed to forces that may carry it off course. The disagreement is not resolved by a simple choice between conviction and hesitation. It concerns how conviction is exercised: whether it serves a shared body or claims the right to dominate it, and whether uncertainty invites honest judgment or paralyses it.

Lomeli’s position does not make every interpretation equally sound or every allegation true. He investigates, weighs what he has been told, and acts on his conscience, while explicitly leaving the report’s significance to the other electors. The theme’s force lies in that balance. Doubt is neither a verdict nor an excuse to avoid responsibility; it is a check on the temptation to confuse conviction with unquestionable knowledge.