Following the dying of a pope, there’s a nine-day interval of mourning in Rome with sombre rites often known as the Novemdiales. For these Cardinals whose ambition is to stroll out onto the balcony of St Peter’s wearing papal robes (traditionally from the Roman ecclesiastical tailor Gammarelli), it’s additionally a week-long interval of enacting one other equally sacred ritual: intensive rounds of lunching, eating and vote buying and selling over glasses of wine when the real papal hustings happen.
For all the spiritually-correct speak of the Conclave consequence being determined ‘by the grace of the Holy Spirit’, its realpolitik is a cross between Machiavelli’s The Prince and an unholy political election marketing campaign playbook alongside with dirty tips, smears, and – critically this time – gossip stuffed WhatsApp teams and social media lobbying (all telephones are confiscated when the 133 cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel, so now’s the hour). Bar Peneitenzieri, in a side-street off St Peter’s, has been buzzing with prelates and Vaticanistas all week.
‘The cardinals see one another in the New Synod Hall. They hear one another give speeches. But the real discussions happen at non-public dinners, lunches, over espresso or cocktails,’ says my pal Father Gerald Murray, who’s in Rome commentating for American TV networks. He is a former navy priest straight out of Vile Bodies and – with his silver hair, shiny eyes, classical features and excellent manners – resembles Ronnie Knox, the Oxford pre-war priest and scholar who transformed Evelyn Waugh. He arrives at our assembly at a café outside the Venerable English College carrying a wise Panama hat with a black band.
