The late Pope's loss of faith in the Church

The late Pope's loss of faith in the Church was a defining private crisis: he retained his faith in God, but had come to distrust the institution he led. Revealed to Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli by Aldo Bellini shortly after the Pope’s death, the distinction gives the disclosure its force. It also reframes the Pope’s battles over Church governance and finances as the efforts of a reformer increasingly alienated from the people and structures around him.

The distinction between God and the Church

Bellini raised the subject while inviting Lomeli to pray with him for their dead friend. He knew that Lomeli had been struggling with prayer and suggested that the late Pope, too, had experienced doubts. Lomeli understood this as a doubt about God; Bellini immediately corrected him. The Pope had never lost faith in God. What he had lost faith in was the Church.

The exchange makes the crisis institutional rather than theological. The Pope’s belief in God remained intact, while his confidence in the Church as a human organization had failed. Bellini’s account unsettles Lomeli, who tries to put the revelation out of his mind; later, as he looks at the Curia gathered for the conclave, the remark returns with a possible referent in view.

The Curia and the loss of awe

Lomeli sees the Curia’s permanent residents as knowledgeable but blasé, lacking the awe he notices in cardinals who have travelled from across the world. He recognizes the same spiritual disfigurement in himself and has prayed for strength to resist it. The late Pope had openly warned his fellow churchmen against vanity, intrigue, malice, and gossip—the vices of courtiers. Lomeli therefore suspects that Bellini’s disclosure about the Pope’s lost faith in the Church was directed, at least in part, at the bureaucratic culture surrounding him.

That suspicion is complicated by the Pope’s own responsibility for the institution’s leadership: he appointed the curial officials he later had to confront. The account does not present his estrangement as a simple opposition between a reforming Pope and an entirely separate bureaucracy. He was leading a Church whose senior officials included people he had chosen, and whose habits of office could reproduce the very failures he opposed.

Reform and resistance

Bellini describes the pontificate as a war that began on its first day. The late Pope refused the full regalia of office and insisted on living at Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace. He then demanded financial transparency from the prefects of the congregations, including proper books, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for building work, and receipts. To pursue the reforms, he brought in accountants and management consultants to examine the files and gave them offices on the first floor of Casa Santa Marta.

The measures provoked hostility within the Curia. Bellini says the Pope wondered why the institution resented the scrutiny, and stresses that resistance did not come only from its old guard. Leaks followed, with embarrassing reports about the misuse of funds intended for the poor, including money allegedly used to renovate apartments or pay for first-class flights. The effort to make the administration answerable thus produced both investigations and public disclosures that further damaged trust.

Isolation at the end of the pontificate

Bellini places this financial conflict alongside attacks from Goffredo Tedesco and his allies, who, in Bellini’s account, treated the Pope’s comments on gay people, divorced couples, and the promotion of women as grounds for accusations of heresy. The contrast sharpened the Pope’s predicament: the outside world loved him, while inside the Holy See he became increasingly isolated. By the end, Bellini says, the Pope hardly trusted anyone—not even Bellini himself.

The documentary traces surrounding the Pope’s death give this loss of trust a material context without resolving every suspicion. An official timeline records his final evening, including dinner with Archbishop Janusz Woźniak, his reading of The Imitation of Christ, and the attempts to revive him after he was found unresponsive. Woźniak later tells Lomeli that, after the death, Joseph Tremblay took control of the situation and asked what the Pope had said at supper; Woźniak withheld details because he was frightened and believed he was not meant to know them. These episodes show how information and authority were managed around the Pope, but they do not by themselves establish that the death account was false.

The Pope’s hidden papers offer a more concrete record of the institutional problems he had been investigating. Among them, Lomeli finds an APSA list of official apartments occupied by serving and retired curial members, with electors’ names underlined. His own apartment is listed at 445 square metres; those of Aldo Bellini, Joshua Adeyemi, and Joseph Tremblay at 410, 480, and 510 square metres respectively, while the Pope’s accommodation at Casa Santa Marta is listed as 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 stated book value of €389.6 million, and says that only 56 percent of the properties appear to be paying rent. The report suggests that much of the income may not have been properly declared. Together with Bellini’s account of the reform campaign, these records make the Pope’s distrust legible as a response to entrenched opacity and resistance to oversight, rather than a loss of religious belief.