Trysts & Turns: The Pope is dead, long live the Pope

Cardinal Joseph Cordeiro, Archbishop of Karachi, was my father’s first cousin. He participated in two or three Conclaves, the meeting of 70 or 80 odd Cardinals who chose the next Pope when the one in office died. On one of his visits to Mumbai, I asked him about the Conclaves and whether he himself had garnered any votes. He just smiled and chose to disregard my question.

Filipe Neri Ferrao, the Cardinal Archbishop of Goa, is the son of my late wife’s first cousin. He will be summoned to Rome to choose the successor of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit to become Pope. I got vicarious pleasure in saying that my father’s cousin was involved in choosing the head of the Catholic Church in the world. Now, as my dear wife died almost three years ago, the same vicarious pleasure will be felt when Filipe Neri votes.

It is ironic that one of the last visitors to meet Pope Francis before he breathed his last was the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance. Vance, himself a Catholic, was sent by President Trump to address misgivings that Francis had about Trump’s treatment of foreign students.

The Pope is in a commanding position to influence the world’s leaders who matter. He does it in a quiet, non-controversial manner, but effective all the same. He does not have an army at his command but he has the backing of millions of Catholics all over the world and the moral authority of righteousness and justice that religions uphold.

Francis was a good Pope. He had an open mind. When asked about the Church diktat against the use of contraceptives by married Catholic couples, his prompt reply was that he did not expect Catholics to “breed like rabbits”. I am sure he would have relaxed many rules of the Church that are based on life as existed in Biblical times. Francis worried more about the poor and the exploited and placed less emphasis on Church doctrines.

The churches in Europe are experiencing sharp falls in attendance even on Sundays, the day earmarked for communal prayer. The seminaries, where priests are trained, are even worse off. It is incumbent on the Vatican, over which the Pope presides, to study the reasons for the drain.

In the economically advanced countries of Europe, the call of religion is waning. In London, for instance, which my wife and I would visit every year for a decade after my retirement, the only worshippers we noticed in the church near our hotel were people of our colour or darker. The locals, except for the elderly, were conspicuous by their absence. It was evident that religious fervour diminished in inverse proportion to an improved quality of life.

In Portugal, the attendance at churches was even more pathetic. The ancestors of the Portuguese had landed on the shores of Goa nearly five centuries ago. Those were the “days of faith”. Priests accompanied the intruding sailors and soldiers. They went about converting my ancestors and other Hindus. They even changed our surnames to obliterate castes, giving the Portuguese surname of the presiding Portuguese priest to every family converted by him. Hence the large number of Ribeiros in Porvorim, my ancestral village, and Menezes in Divar, my wife’s native village.

On a visit to Porto, the port wine-producing town in Portugal, a bunch of Portuguese boys and girls in dhotis and saris approached me with “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram” pamphlets. I reminded them that my ancestors, followers of Ram and of Krishna, were converted to the religion in which they were born! That conversion was done by their ancestors in Goa more than four centuries ago. It was ironic that they were trying to effect a “ghar wapsi” on me and my wife while on a visit to Portugal!

Pope Francis hailed from Argentina. He was the first South American to be consecrated Pope. He was also the first Jesuit, an order of priests who take 14 years to be ordained as against the eight years required to prepare diocesan priests for their calling.

I studied in a Jesuit school in Dhobi Talao, Mumbai. The priests in my time (1936 to 1944) were Spaniards. It is my ardent wish that a Jesuit should succeed Francis as the Bishop of Rome.

The laity is not consulted in the election of a Pope. So, my wish will remain just a wish. I will not dare to let my wife’s relative, who is certainly going to cast his vote at the Conclave, learn of my wish. The Archbishop of Hong Kong is a Jesuit. Cardinal Stephen Chow is Chinese. After many, many Italian Popes, we finally had a Polish Pope, followed by a German and an Argentinean. Perhaps, a Chinese Jesuit Pope would make an interesting choice, especially after Pope Francis had succeeded in signing a provisional accord with the People’s Republic of China in 2018 on the nomination of bishops in mainland China. In the wake of this accord, the Pope has the last word on Episcopal nominations.

In the 2025 Conclave, there will be 135 electors, all below the age of 80. They will be confined to the room where the voting is held twice a day till a magical number is reached. White smoke will emanate from the chimney of the Vatican when the next Pope is chosen. Till that happens, the colour of the smoke will be black.

In the film ‘Conclave’, Ralph Fiennes plays the part of the Vatican Secretary of State, who conducts the Conclave. In that film, the Archbishop of Kabul is elected Pope! (As far as my knowledge goes, there are no Catholic priests in Afghanistan, let alone a Cardinal).

The new Pope should be a ‘Servant of God’ who looks into the future and comes up with a plan to make spirituality and religion more acceptable to the young. Social mores are changing. The institution of marriage is under siege. The extended family, which served as a cushion against loneliness and rejection, is being abandoned.

How does the Catholic Church which served to keep parishioners like Melba and Julio Ribeiro rooted to an identity continue to provide this succour in troubled times?

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