The St. Gallen Mafia by Julia Meloni

Author:Julia Meloni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books

So Ivereigh issued a partial retraction. He said that “in keeping with conclave rules, [St. Gallen alumni] did not ask Bergoglio if he would be willing to be a candidate.”51

But why, asked one reviewer, would Ivereigh have written the original line about seeking Bergoglio’s assent in the first place, “except as a direct and checked report of what he was told by Murphy-O’Connor”?52

Repeatedly, Ivereigh insisted that this was an issue of poor phrasing; he knew that no such approach to Bergoglio ever occurred. “I knew that didn’t happen, and I’m really sorry,” he told EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo.53

But somewhere in an old, jaw-dropping blog post from two days after the 2013 election, Ivereigh tells the same original story about an approach to Bergoglio in search of an assent.

“Before or after [Bergoglio’s General Congregations speech on March 9], he was approached by some over-80 cardinals who had voted for him on the first and second ballots in 2005, to ask him if he could be willing to be considered in 2013. Having received a favorable answer, the idea of Cardinal Bergoglio spread quickly among a number of different groups,” wrote Ivereigh.54

This notion of some kind of approach to Bergoglio is not unique to Ivereigh.

On the day of Pope Francis’s election, CNN’s Cuomo spoke of having received his tip about Bergoglio’s candidacy from multiple cardinals, at least one of whom was retired.55 Two years later, Cuomo confirmed that he “got told” by multiple “retired bishops” to “watch Bergoglio.”56 Then, in a 2015 CNN special, Cuomo presented additional testimony about a mysterious approach to Bergoglio.

“Now, cardinals who had favored Bergoglio’s election in 2005 got another chance. Was he the reformer the church needed? Did Bergoglio even want the job? And was he strong enough to lead the church?” said Cuomo.

“So they sent some people to ask him questions. Someone asked him the question, how is your health?” said Rabbi Abraham Skorka, Bergoglio’s friend.57 Cuomo’s prior set-up—“Did Bergoglio even want the job?”—strongly insinuates that this topic of wanting the job of pope was one of the questions broached at that meeting.

But even if the approach to Bergoglio originally described by Ivereigh really did take place, that fact would not invalidate Pope Francis’s election, says a canonist respected by historian Roberto de Mattei and vaticanista Sandro Magister.

“The constitution of John Paul II [governing papal elections] does not sanction even a simoniac election with invalidity,” says the canonist, Geraldina Boni. “Neither does it do so if the election is the result of pacts, agreements, promises, or other commitments of any kind between cardinals (see the other conjecture of a team of four cardinals thought to have planned Bergoglio’s election as advanced recently by Austen Ivereigh in the book The Great Reformer).”58

Boni was saying that even an election touched by simony—the buying and selling of spiritual things, such as Church offices—was not punished with invalidity under John Paul II’s constitution. Similarly, the constitution did not invalidate elections resulting from pacts or the kind of commitments initially described by Ivereigh.

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