Cormac’s conclave

SIR – Your report (“Revealed: how British cardinal fixed Vatican conclave for his friend Pope Francis”, September 4) risks exaggerating the role of the late Cardinal Cormac Murphy-o’connor in the conclave that elected Pope Francis.

It was important, but could not have determined the result, as implied by Catherine Pepinster, the author of a forthcoming book on Britain and the papacy, who says that his “canniness meant he ensured his friend was elected Pope Francis”.

She gave as an example his inviting Commonwealth cardinals to a British Embassy reception in the days before voting began, in order to sing the praises of the future pope.

I was the director of public affairs to the late cardinal from 2004 to 2006. He explained to me that such “lobbying” in favour of one papal contender or another was important in ensuring that he would be given consideration once the voting began. The conclave is essentially a race between a handful of candidates who have clearly attracted support out of the starting gate.

But he was equally adamant that, once the balloting began, what happened in the conclave was a work of the Holy Spirit, in the sense that each of the 115 cardinals who votes does so in the solemn awareness that he is picking whom he believes to be God’s choice for the Church.

The geographical arithmetic of the conclave also means that the cardinal’s efforts on behalf of the future pope, of which he was justly proud, cannot alone have “ensured” the result.

Having read in The Great Reformer, my biography of Pope Francis, a description of his role in the days before the conclave, a number of Latin-american cardinals have assured me that his initiative (largely confined to the English-speaking cardinals) was not the only one in favour of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Cardinal Murphy-o’connor would have been the first to agree. Dr Austen Ivereigh

Cholsey, Oxfordshire