The popemaker: how Cardinal Cormac got his friend elected
IT IS a tale every bit as intriguing as the plot of Conclave, Robert Harris’s bestselling thriller set during a fictitious papal election.
For it has emerged that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-o’connor, the former Catholic Archbishop of Westminster who died last week, intervened in the last conclave to ensure his friend was elected Pope Francis.
The two men became close friends after meeting for the first time when they were made cardinals on the same day by Pope John Paul II.
In the days before the 2013 vote, Murphy-o’connor co-hosted a reception at the British embassy in Rome to lobby support for Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the then progressive archbishop of Buenos Aires.
According to a new book, Murphyo’connor invited cardinals from the Commonwealth but deliberately left two powerful but conservative clerics – Cardinal Ouellet from Canada, who had been a front-runner, and Cardinal Pell from Australia – off the invitation list. The plan, which succeeded, was to persuade the cardinals of the need for a liberal pope without interference from the senior conservatives.
The book by Catherine Pepinster, the former editor of The Tablet, details how embassy officials left the room to allow Murphy-o’connor time to persuade the cardinals of the importance of voting for Bergoglio.
Murphy-o’connor had been dismayed when Pope Benedict XVI was elected at the previous conclave and was determined to avoid another conservative Pope. Ms Pepinster, whose book The Keys and The Kingdom: Britain and the Papacy from John Paul II to Francis is published next month, said: “Cardinal Cormac Murphy-o’connor was a popular, genial man but beneath
‘Beneath his jovial exterior was someone of great canniness who knew exactly how the Vatican worked’
his jovial exterior was someone of great canniness who knew exactly how the Vatican worked.
“And that canniness meant he ensured his friend was elected Pope Francis – a pope who has made a huge impact on the Catholic Church and the world. There have been kingmakers in history; Cormac Murphy-o’connor turned out to be a popemaker.”
Pope Francis was elected on March 13 2013, the second day of the conclave, on the fifth ballot. He need two thirds of the 115 votes to win. It is thought the votes delivered by Murphy-o’connor were instrumental.
In 2013, Murphy-o’connor was too old to vote under Vatican rules, but he travelled to Rome, like many other elderly non-voting cardinals, to participate in talks, called congregations, before the conclave.
Shortly after his elevation, Pope Francis was overheard telling Murphyo’connor: “Tuo e colpevole”, translated as “you’re to blame”.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-o’connor, who died on Friday, had known he was really ill for some time but he dealt with the doctors’ warning to take things easy in the only way possible, by ignoring them and getting out and about as much as he could. I know, because a month ago we went to the Proms together to see Stephen Hough, the pianist, play Brahms. The Cardinal had been going to the Proms since 1953, when he paid half a crown to hear Myra Hess.
Last year we saw Marin Alsop conduct Verdi’s Requiem. And although the Cardinal was far frailer this year he gamely made the descent to visit Hough in his dressing room afterwards – bumping into the director of the Proms, David Pickard, who reminded him that they’d once played in a concert together.
He was, as always, affable and interested. He loved to play – at a writers’ meeting I organised, he brought the house down by giving us a piece afterwards on the grand piano – but had no illusions about his merits as a pianist, and had a corresponding admiration for eminent performers. Music was his disinterested passion but it also happened to be a means of engaging with all manner of people who weren’t remotely churchy, but then he simply liked the company of nice people. (He enjoyed Muriel Spark’s soirées during his time in Rome: she’d demand – “Give me a title for a book!”) His approach to contemporary secular society was to get out into it.
Eminent people sometimes make out that all the trappings of their position are shallow; but not this prince of the church. He may have had quite simple tastes himself but he enjoyed being a cardinal and the fun he got with it – like his weekend at Balmoral with the Royal family, for which he gave a good deal of thought to what he should wear to the barbecue. It wasn’t a surprise that Gordon Brown, a pastor’s son, offered him a seat in the Lords, nor that the Vatican should take a dim view.
Being genial and easy-going, he wasn’t cut out for the hostility he encountered in the wake of the Michael Hill affair; Hill was the paedophile priest whom Cormac appointed chaplain to Gatwick Airport after he came to him in tears to beg for a second chance. The Cardinal thought he couldn’t do any harm in an industrial chaplaincy. He was wrong; but the savagery of the papers and pundits was what you might have expected if he’d colluded in abuse, not made a mistake from naivety. After a series of especially vicious pieces in The Guardian he wrote to its letters page to explain, again, and concluded simply: “I am sorry.”
His other bruising encounter was with the last Labour government, specifically its Equality Act 2006 (carried with the support of David Cameron) which outlawed Catholic adoption agencies – conspicuously successful with difficult cases – because they gave precedence to married, heterosexual couples.
He was baffled by the legalistic intransigence of it all; what he never appreciated was that this was about political signalling, not children. He wrote to Tony Blair to ask him to moderate the bill; Mr Blair, later Catholic convert, rebuffed him. The intolerance of the new secular order was alien. I shall miss him, and the affable, kindly Christianity he represented.
After our Prom, he said in farewell: “Pray for me.” I hadn’t realised how close the end was, but he did. READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion