Tradition and Reform

Tradition and Reform is the conclave’s defining argument over what the Church must preserve and what it must change. It takes concrete form in disputes over Latin liturgy, the distribution of authority, the place of women in the Curia, and the transparency of Church administration. Yet the conflict is not simply between old customs and new ones: formal law, inherited practice, institutional interests, and competing visions of unity all determine what reform can mean and who has the authority to pursue it.

Inherited forms and the meaning of tradition

Lomeli remembers the conclaves of 1958 and 1963 through newspaper illustrations of cardinals voting beneath canopies, which the elected man alone would leave standing. The ritual had belonged to a political and ceremonial world that soon receded: the thrones were abandoned in 1965 after the Second Vatican Council, along with much else of the Church’s older tradition. Lomeli admits a private fondness for this Renaissance pageantry, even as he recognizes why a large, multinational College of Cardinals might regard it as impractical. His recollection complicates the idea that tradition is either sacred continuity or empty display. A form can embody a remembered authority and still become difficult to sustain in a changed institution.

Lomeli also resists reducing humility and simplicity to self-evident virtues. He privately thinks the late Pope sometimes carried those ideals too far: simplicity can become ostentation, and pride in one’s humility can itself be sinful. That judgment gives the debate a characteristic ambivalence. Reform may oppose the vanity of elaborate ceremony, but an insistence on simplicity can also turn into a display of virtue; the meaning of a practice depends on how it is enacted and what it serves.

Latin, language, and competing ideas of unity

At dinner, Tedesco makes the case for tradition through language. He argues that reform often produces the opposite of its intended improvement, using the abandonment of Latin as his example. In the dining room, the cardinals have unconsciously clustered by language: Italians near the kitchens, Spanish-speakers elsewhere, and English-speakers toward reception. Tedesco contrasts this everyday separation with the older conclave, where cardinals could converse in Latin. In his account, a change intended to make communication easier has instead made it harder.

His argument expands from practical communication into a claim about Catholic identity. Language, he says, shapes thought, philosophy, and culture; after the Second Vatican Council, being Catholic in Europe no longer means the same thing as being Catholic in Africa, Asia, or South America. He fears the Church has become a confederation rather than a universal body. The same diversity that might be understood as evidence of a worldwide Church becomes, in his rhetoric, a sign of division. He warns that abandoning Latin may eventually lead to abandoning Rome, presenting liturgical change as the start of a larger displacement of institutional and spiritual authority.

Tedesco’s warning is set against the Church’s actual multinational character. His candidate profile is itself framed by geography: as Camerlengo and Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, he has links to the developing world, while seeming American without being one. The possibility that the newly recognized cardinal comes from the Philippines also raises the question of whether the papal center must remain in Rome. Tradition, in this exchange, concerns not just what language is used but where the Church’s authority belongs and whose experience can claim to represent the universal Church.

Reform, authority, and the limits of change

Bellini articulates the opposing program as a break with what he calls a repressive past: the return to Latin liturgy, priests celebrating Mass with their backs to the congregation, and large families shaped by ignorance. He advocates respect for other faiths and tolerance of differing views within the Church. He also wants bishops to have greater powers and women to occupy more senior positions in the Curia. His reforming vision therefore includes liturgical, theological, and administrative change, rather than a single revision to worship.

The discussion of women exposes a boundary within that program. Sabbadin cautions that a proposal to increase women’s role could give Tedesco an opening to suggest Bellini supports female ordination. Bellini distinguishes administrative service from priestly ministry: women could work at the highest levels of the Curia because that work is administrative, not sacerdotal. He says the late Pope often spoke of such appointments, though he never implemented them. Sabbadin counters that women instructing or selecting bishops could be seen as ordination by another route. Bellini accepts that female ordination is not available in his lifetime, while maintaining that this does not settle the separate question of women’s administrative authority. The exchange shows reform being negotiated through distinctions between offices, functions, and forms of authority, each of which can be challenged as either a meaningful limit or a concealed expansion.

The late Pope’s pontificate supplies an institutional example of the costs of reform. According to Bellini, the Pope began by refusing the full regalia of office and choosing to live at Casa Santa Marta rather than the Apostolic Palace. He then demanded financial transparency from the prefects, including proper books, disclosed accounts, outside tenders for building work, and receipts. Accountants and management consultants were brought in to examine files, with offices established on the first floor of Casa Santa Marta. Bellini recalls that officials in the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See were unaccustomed even to keeping receipts. The reform was not only a statement of ideals: it introduced oversight into systems where information and accountability had been weak.

Bellini describes the reaction as sustained resistance. Leaks exposed embarrassing reports about friends of the Pope benefiting from funds intended for the poor, while Tedesco and his allies attacked the Pope over remarks concerning gay people, divorced couples, and the promotion of women. The Pope’s popularity outside the Holy See coincided, in Bellini’s account, with increasing isolation inside it; by the end of his pontificate, he trusted very few people. Reform thus appears as both a moral demand and a struggle over institutional power. Greater transparency can reveal misuse, but the resulting disclosures and opposition may further isolate the person demanding change.

Law, continuity, and the authority to interpret

The argument over tradition also turns on written rules. The late Pope revised canon law shortly before his death concerning appointments made in pectore, in which a cardinal’s identity is withheld. Lomeli notes that the appointment could remain unknown even to close associates, apart from its beneficiary. The concealment unsettles expectations about how a cardinal is recognized, but it does not by itself decide whether the appointment is valid. That question becomes a contest over interpretation rather than a simple choice between obeying and rejecting tradition.

When Mandorff challenges Benítez’s status, Lomeli answers by invoking paragraph thirty-nine of the Apostolic Constitution: a cardinal-elector who arrives re integra, before a new pope has been elected, is allowed to participate at the stage the election has reached. Lomeli treats the provision as decisive: Benítez is legally a cardinal. The exchange makes procedural continuity an instrument of change. A new or recently revised arrangement can be accepted not by abandoning law but by reading its stated conditions and applying them to an unforeseen case.

The ballot itself demonstrates how tradition is also enacted through procedure. Lomeli reads aloud the required sequence: each cardinal-elector folds and displays his ballot, carries it to the altar, swears that his vote is given to the person he believes should be elected before God, deposits it, bows, and returns to his place. Lomeli then writes Bellini’s name on his ballot. The ritual places personal judgment within a common legal and religious form. Its force depends on both continuity—the prescribed oath and order—and the freedom of each elector’s choice.

Crisis and the work of institutional continuity

The terrorist attacks in Rome bring the tension between procedural legitimacy and immediate need into sharp relief. With bombs exploded in the piazza, black smoke rises near the conclave’s own smoke, and the Sistine windows are shattered. Lomeli considers whether to suspend the election out of respect for the victims, but recognizes that suspension would prolong the Church’s leadership vacuum. Accelerating the vote, however, would violate the Apostolic Constitution and risk producing a pope whose authority could be challenged from the beginning. O’Malley urges him to break the rules, arguing that the Church would understand; Lomeli remains concerned that a doubtful election would compromise the new pope’s legitimacy.

Rather than decide alone whether the crisis permits an exception, Lomeli asks the assembled cardinals for authority to inform them, citing paragraphs five and six of the Apostolic Constitution, which allow special matters to be discussed if a majority agrees. When Tedesco attempts to interrupt the decision, Lomeli puts the question to a vote. Scores support receiving the information; Tedesco, Krasinski, Tutino, and roughly a dozen others oppose. The motion carries, and Lomeli makes clear that anyone unwilling to hear the information may leave; no one does. The episode makes the practical stakes of reform visible: the rules are neither a script that removes judgment nor an obstacle that can be discarded at will. They provide a shared means of authorizing action while the institution faces an emergency.

Across these disputes, tradition and reform remain interdependent rather than mutually exclusive. Tedesco invokes inherited language and liturgy to defend unity; Bellini argues that tolerance and administrative change can better serve a universal Church. Lomeli’s decisions rely on written rules even when their application must address circumstances the rules’ authors could not have anticipated. The conclave’s central question is therefore not whether the Church should change, but how change can be made intelligible, legitimate, and binding without dissolving the continuities that give the institution its identity.