Conclaves, plots, and papal health scares

A preview of veteran Vatican journalist Maria Antonietta Calabrò's new book

Maria Antonietta Calabrò is one of the most prolific Italian journalists covering the Vatican. For years, she has been on the front line covering stories like the Secretariat of State’s financial scandal, the workings of the city state’s tribunal, and maneuverings of papal conclaves.

When Calabrò has something to write, a lot of people — in the Vatican and here at The Pillar — are interested in what she has to report.

Next week, Calabrò is publishing a new book, “The Throne and The Altar: War in the Vatican,” in which she reports on behind the scenes curial maneuverings, attempts to steer papal elections, and churning political waters of the Benedict and Francis pontificates.

The Pillar hasn’t finished the whole book yet, but when Calabrò sent us an excerpt, asking if we’d like to read it and carry it in English we said yes — because we know a lot of Pillar readers are Maria’s readers, too. 

The translation is ours, but the words and work are hers. We’re reading them, so you can, too.

“The Throne and The Altar” is out next week and available on Amazon.

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‘Omens of death’ 

On February 10, 2012, Il Fatto Quotidiano came out with a headline that went around the world: “Plot against the pope: He will die within 12 months.” 

A letter reported information attributed by the anonymous writer (who wrote in German) to Cardinal Paolo Romeo who had spoken about it during his trip to Beijing in November 2011. 

Benedict XVI, the document claimed, “would only have another 12 months to live(…).” Romeo was at the time archbishop of the Sicilian capital, succeeding Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi who had governed the diocese of Palermo from 1996 to 2006. 

When Vatileaks broke out, De Giorgi was chosen by Benedict XVI as one of the three investigating cardinals, charged with investigating the Corvo scandal, and drafter of the Relatio delivered by Benedict to Francis, in their first meeting after the election. A significant decision if one considers the role of his successor in Palermo, Romeo, in the final stages of Ratzinger's pontificate. 

On May 25, 2013, De Giorgi presided, as a delegate of Pope Francis, over the beatification rite of Don Pino Puglisi, a priest killed by the mafia in odium fidei, whose beatification process he had initiated in 1999 during his episcopate in Palermo. 

Monsignor Romeo, former nuncio to Colombia (1990-1999) and Canada (1999-2001), had also been nuncio to Italy and San Marino from 17 April 2001 to the end of 2006, covering with his mandate also the duration of the second government of Silvio Berlusconi. 

After the publication of the note with the omen of death for Benedict, Cardinal Romeo, questioned by journalists, confirmed only his “private trip” to Beijing. For the rest he said nothing. 

The anonymous text did not end up only in the newspapers. It was brought to the Secretariat of State by another cardinal, the Colombian Darío Castrillón Hoyos, born in Medellin, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Clergy, retired since 2009. 

Hoyos had led the negotiations with the followers of Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre to recompose the schism of the traditionalists, and was the cause of a serious incident that threatened to overwhelm Pope Benedict. The Colombian cardinal had not realized in fact that among the four bishops whose excommunication Benedict XVI had to revoke there was also Richard Williamson, an anti-Semite who has always denied the Holocaust. 

Indeed, it was Hoyos himself who “pressured” the pope to speed up the process of revocation in his case, claiming that Williamson was very ill, even in danger of life, and that it was necessary to act quickly to let him die in the grace of God. An absolutely false circumstance, like that regarding the brother of Monsignor Carlo Maria Viganò contained in the letter published by Gianluigi Nuzzi in the book “His Holiness: The secret papers of Benedict XVI” (see chapter 6). 

Cardinal Castrillón, who died in Rome in May 2018, was the protagonist – as Pope Francis himself stated in the June 2024 book-interview “The Successor” – of a complex maneuver, a “carombola” as he himself called it, to try to block the election of Ratzinger in 2005, by making 40 votes converge on the name of Bergoglio, while waiting for a third “reliable” candidate to be identified. An Italian cardinal. 

In the 2005 conclave they tried to prevent Joseph Ratzinger from being elected pope, Pope Francis said. And then he added: “In that Conclave – the news is known [and in fact it is so, ed.] – they used me.”

The point is that, as we have seen in this chapter, Castrillón Hoyos was also the cardinal at the center of another complex “carambola” at the end of Benedict’s pontificate, that of the letter “Benedict: In 12 months he will die.” 

This happened a year before the historic resignation of Ratzinger, who – we learned only in 2024 thanks to Pope Francis – Castrillón Hoyos and his friends had never wanted to be pope. 

Why did Francis speak openly about it? 

Evidently because he considered the circumstance important. The prevailing narrative in 2005 was instead that Bergoglio was the “progressive” candidate in competition with and antagonistic to the “conservative” Ratzinger. The narrative of the two contending candidates remained under the radar and was relaunched in a big way after Benedict’s resignation, so that it could serve to fuel the narrative of the “contrast” between the “two popes.” 

There can be many ways to die: in a physical or even symbolic sense. The document, which at the time it was made public seemed – as Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi observed – completely senseless and bizarre, was interpreted completely differently when reread after the end of Benedict’s pontificate. 

On February 11, 2013, exactly one year after the anonymous German had predicted the death of Pope Ratzinger within twelve months, the pontiff made his resignation public. That pope – who, according to the “carambola” revealed in 2024 by his successor Francis, was never supposed to be elected – finally left the papal throne, the first pope in seven hundred years to resign.

[...]

A brain tumor, a missing lung: Francis like Ratzinger, ‘on the point of death’ 

Pope Francis has also been a constant victim of this misinformation about a sick pope, if not on the point of death, at least ready to resign, throughout the years of his pontificate, in parallel with the unfolding of the second Vatileaks scandal (…). 

On October 21, 2015, Quotidiano Nazionale “splashed” the news of a presumed brain tumor of Pope Francis on the front page: the pope – they wrote – has a “small dark spot in the brain,” adding however that it would be a “curable tumor”. (…) 

On November 5, 2015, a letter to the Director of Il Tempo by the fixer Luigi Bisignani (involved in the judicial investigations into the Enimont mega-bribe and the so-called P4) was titled “Pope Francis is ready to resign.” 

“Will we end up with three popes?” he wondered. “The rumor is circulating in the Vatican rooms and many are wondering,” wrote Bisignani, “what will really happen in the coming weeks.” Bisignani talks about the amazement that is mounting in and around St. Peter’s after the publication of Via Crucis, the new investigative book by Gianluigi Nuzzi. He says that “page after page, one is immersed in a universe made up of apparently ancient rites and rules whose common denominator up to now has been inertia.” 

Bisignani adds that Nuzzi ends his book with a provocative question: “Will the pope succeed in winning his battle?” According to Bisignani, “his is an obligatory path, certainly the pontiff will not be intimidated, unless the pressure becomes unbearable, such as to induce him to resign, as he occasionally lets slip” [author’s italics]. (…) 

Here it is worth noting that the scheme put in place at the end of that year is very similar, if not identical to what had happened before the resignation of Benedict XVI. 

The “hoax” of the tumor had also been attributed to Bisignani by the then director of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, Marco Tarquinio, who spoke on November 6 in the program Piazzapulita on La7. 

The accusation was reiterated by him in the newspaper of the Italian Episcopal Conference on November 10, 2015: “Whatever rubbish is sterilely put into circulation, the path of the Church continues […]. Can we say it? But, yes, let’s face it: we are simple and we are Franciscans, not ‘Bisignani’”. (…) 

The suspicions about the alleged poor health of Cardinal Bergoglio, moreover, were meant to prevent — as had already happened in other ways for Ratzinger — the election of a pope in 2013. 

The preventive "hoax" of a missing lung was about to change the fate of the votes of the conclave in which Francis was elected, had it not been for the direct question posed to him in Santa Marta by the Spanish cardinal Santos Abril y Castelló, a few hours before the last meeting, on the afternoon of March 9, 2013. (…) 

The characteristic of the letters that end up in the newspapers in 2012 is the same that we find in the documentation published during the second Vatileaks scandal, in the Fall of 2015. 

The documentation is authentic, but incomplete. What appears is a portion of truth, the selection however is not random, but targeted. On the other hand, when letters with stamps and signatures are reproduced, they seem to take on, with their visual force, a documentary value that, at first glance, appears absolute.

The pope is not ‘Their guy’ 

The very name of the scandal, the Corvo scandal, harks back to the tragic years of the “Corvo of Palermo,” the anonymous person who raged in the most exposed anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in Italy using anonymous writings against Judge Giovanni Falcone. (…) 

In 2012, the main objective was to try to prevent the overcoming of international anti-money laundering controls, given that the Vatican had submitted itself in those months for the first time to the evaluation of the controllers of the Moneyval Committee of the Council of Europe. 

Why were false news stories spread in the newspapers? Perhaps because by preventing the continuation of the recovery process, it would have been possible to continue using the Vatican as a safe “paradise” for dirty money, conveniently offshore but on Italian soil, as had happened at least since the 1960s? 

The Holy See, on the other hand, has continued on the path of transparency, despite everything. Despite the errors, delays and stickiness that are perhaps inevitable in an epochal change. (…) 

And yet — though we only discovered this 10 years later — at the time of a dramatic transition for the Catholic Church, with Benedict XVI about to pronounce his resignation, at the top levels of the terza loggia, as the Vatican Secretariat of State is nicknamed, they were working hard to bring a real treasure of about a billion euros “out” from under the controls, even before knowing what to do with it. (See chapter 3 "Francis goes to Assisi, and the money to Switzerland) (…) 

Francis alluded to something similar on 8 November 2015 at the Angelus when, speaking this time of Vatileaks 2, he said that the new leak of documents would not block his commitment to reform. 

And speaking of corruption in the press conference on the return flight from Central Africa (November 30, 2015), he recalled the first Vatileaks scandal: “Thirteen days before the death of Saint John Paul II, in that Via Crucis, the then Cardinal Ratzinger, who led the Via Crucis, spoke of the ‘filth of the Church’: he denounced this! First! Then the pope died in the octave of Easter – this was Good Friday – Pope John Paul [I] died, and he became pope. But in the Mass pro eligendo Pontifice – he was Dean… Camerlengo… no Dean — he spoke of the same thing, and we elected him for his freedom to say things. Since that time, there has been corruption in the air of the Vatican, there is corruption… corruption comes from afar.” (…) 

In 2024, Francis emphasized again that it was Ratzinger who “inaugurated a new style” and began the reforms. If we then read the “premonitions of death” that Bergoglio was a victim of in 2015 and what was happening in parallel in the Vatican to clean up the finances, the coincidence of the dates is truly shocking. 

We learned all this only thanks to the investigations carried out during the trial for the London palace held before the Vatican tribunal between 2021 and 2023. (…) 

The speculations about Francis’ health, after the peak of 2015, have grown even more since the summer of 2021. But they have not intensified only because of the aging of the pontiff and the surgical operations he has had to undergo.

In the summer of 2021, many hoped that the trial for the London scandal would not even begin. The day after the indictment of the ten defendants, Sunday 4 July, 2021, Francis had to enter the Gemelli Polyclinic to undergo a scheduled operation to remove 33cm of intestine affected by necrotized diverticula. The rumors about an imminent conclave at that point became real rumors also because, if Francis had exited the scene in one way (resignation) or another (death), the trial could also have ended up on a dead end track. 

On 1 September 2021, the pope himself had to take oxygen away from the flames, stating in an interview with Radio Cope: “It never crossed my mind to resign.” 

As the months passed, the drip feed of talk began about his walking difficulties and the need to frequently use a wheelchair. Years later, Francis joked: "The popes in the past used the gestatorial chair, this is more practical", pointing to the wheelchair. In December 2022, in an interview with the Spanish broadcaster ABC, he stated peremptorily: “You govern with your head, not with your knees.” 

Similarly, rumblings of resignations returned after the abdominal operation on 7 June 2023. The trial for the fraudulent purchase of the building in the heart of the English capital had reached a decisive turning point: the final statements of the Promoter of Justice were scheduled for the end of July, who urged heavy requests for conviction for the defendants — almost a century of prison time. 

In the meantime, nine years have been "lost" in the Vatican behind the history of the palace, first to buy it, then to sell it, then to "liquidate" the various entanglements with Mincione and Torzi. 

With an enormous investment of time and resources, much of Pope Francis' pontificate has been conditioned. The prolonged bronchitis that Francis suffered in the spring of 2024 has further fueled the hope of those who observe every little clue to be able to conclude: “This time we are there.” 

At the beginning of April 2024, even after Francis's explosive statements on Monsignor Gänswein in the book "The Successor" — which rewrote the history of the cohabitation of the two popes (see chap. 9) — what has the mass media attention, especially in Italy, been diverted to? On Bergoglio's future funeral, reportedly a simplified funeral without a catafalque and without exposing the body! 

It is known that crows feed on corpses.