Who is going to elect
the Church’s next Pope?

There are three great mysteries on which the future of the Church and thus the future of Christianity and the future of the world depends: the Eucharist, devotion to the Virgin Mary, and obedience, discipline and trust in the Pope, who is the successor of Saint Peter, Vicar of Jesus Christ and, as Bishop of Rome, Head of the Church. Hell has multiplied its manoeuvres, its unleashed powers against these three devotions, but Christ has said that the gates of Hell, that is to say the powers of Hell, will not prevail against the Church founded on Peter.

This is what makes the moment we are living through extremely solemn, extremely important, as you all know, and if you are here, so eager for declarations, communiqués, newspaper and radio news, it is because you feel that it is our cause that is at stake, that it is our temporal and eternal future that is at stake.

Soon a Pope will be designated by the conclave, by the cardinals, that is to say the principal members of the Roman Church, those who constitute what is equivalent to a senate of the Roman Church. We see and hear the manoeuvres of factions preparing for this election, trying to influence it, and we know in advance that there are parties, that the cardinals have various leanings: there are conservatives, progressives, opportunists, Montinists, etc. We have the impression that the result of this electoral campaign and these votes will be an entirely human result. Statistics will be drawn up, conjectures will be made, and it will be said that, mechanically, it must be Cardinal so-and-so who will emerges from these votes. It will be claimed: it was not the Holy Spirit Who elected him; rather it was human passions, and it was the strongest passions that achieved the result.

On the other hand, there is a ‘mystical’ view (I say mystical in inverted commas, because it is not the view of true mystics). It is a naive view of things according to which it is God Who decides and it is God Who chooses His candidate, Who selects His chosen one. And you have good Christians, excellent Christians, a little naive and poorly instructed, who tell you: “Oh, men can bustle about, it is God Who is in command. God knows what He will do to put aside all the manoeuvres, to put aside the factions, and it will be His chosen one who will become Pope.” So when, in a fortnight’s time, a Pope is given to us, these people will look upon him as God’s son, as an impeccable and infallible being, God’s chosen one, and they will have total confidence in him and be convinced that everything he says, everything he does, is done and said by God Himself. That could have been, if God had wanted to found His Church on this kind of perpetual miracle, but that is not the truth.

Where is the truth in all this? I am going to explain it to you very clearly and very precisely. Is the Pope who emerges from a conclave like the one that is about to be held in a fortnight’s time God’s man? Yes, in the sense that since the cardinals appointed him, God considers him to be the true Pope. And when we say: it is not the cardinals, it is God Who has chosen him, that only means that, since the system was carried out legally, since there was no challenge to the election, God is saying: “From now on, he is My Pope’. This is beyond contestation. This is extremely important, and it is in this sense that the Roman Church is the rock on which the Church is built. Once someone has been designated, he is unquestionably the Pope, whether we like it or not; like the King of France, as long as he was his father’s son, there was no longer any room for discussion. That, however, does not mean that he is the best, the most virtuous, the one God would have chosen. God does not choose. How could it have been Him? If you consider the appalling list of tenth-century Popes who were corrupt, whom the German emperors put on the throne of Peter to do their bidding! The Popes of the Renaissance!

The Roman Church is very human, and in these human circumstances, in this torrent of human passions, the Popes have been good or mediocre, bad or worse than the worst. God allows this, just as he allows sin This does not mean that God readily accepts, that God asks for sin, that God asks for bad choices. When there were two thirds or more of the cardinals in the Holy Roman Church at the end of the fifteenth century who were completely corrupt, they chose the most corrupt of them to lead them and they got Alexander VI Borgia.

What happened? God accepts this humiliation, He still gets some good out of it, but He does not get good out of it by making us obey evil. He gets good out of it in the sense that evil is the punishment and humiliation of His Church. What happened when Alexander VI was Pope? France invaded Italy, there was disorder, which led to the terrible siege of 1524 when Rome was ravaged, and the cardinals, the bishops, the Romans, learned what it was to be unfaithful to God. It was a terrible punishment, after which the Roman Church rose again.

So I am sure that the Pope who will be elected will be the one that God has accepted, and so there is nothing more to be said, there is no need to go looking for another Pope on the right or the left. He will be the Pope, and he will have to be obeyed. But this Pope may be chosen from among the good or among the bad, depending on the passions of the cardinals who are going to gather in the conclave. It depends on them, and it also depends on our prayers, because God can have mercy on us and make the cardinals choose us a good Pope. The Holy Spirit can enlighten their conscience and their intelligence so as to bring them face to face with this catastrophe of the present Church and make them appoint a very good Pope, a vigorous Pope, a man of faith, a man of worship, of piety, of charity, who will raise up the Church, just as the Cardinals, left to their own devices, can give us an even worse Pope, if I dare say so, who will bring upon the Church even worse decadence, and appalling punishments upon humanity, after which humanity will be converted.

This, then, is something I think it would be very useful to tell you, so that we recognise the Pope as we have always recognised him to this day, with the grace of God, as the one that God willed, and yet do not believe that he will be God’s impeccable, infallible, envoy who will lead His Church in a way that we will just have to follow blindly. We know what it is like to blindly follow popes who destroy the Church instead of rebuilding her. So we must not slacken off, saying that God will take care of everything. On the contrary, we must pray, we must work, we must debate to the best of our ability so that Christians may realise the responsibility they have today.

Having said this, let us put our trust in the Holy Eucharist, in Jesus-the-Host, in the Blessed Virgin. We will end this ceremony with the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. I will read the consecration of France to the Virgin Mary. The Blessed Sacrament will be on the altar, the Blessed Virgin in the choir, Our Lady of Fatima, Whose grave warnings should give pause to the cardinals, and to the whole Holy Church, and we will pray for the election of the Pope, a very beautiful prayer that we are repeating throughout this time of expectation, so that God may inspire the cardinals, that He may incline their hearts: those who are good so that they may have the audacity to impose their candidate, those who are bad so that they may be reduced to impotence or converted and that the Church of God, in the face of the disasters that threaten humanity, may once again be saved from the storm.

Let us remember the Apostles in the barque in the middle of the storm. Jesus said to them: “Courage, men of little faith!” We have faith, but we still need to have hope and courage, and even the desire, as a kind of premonition, for the happy times that God is preparing for His Church, after the sad times we have lived through.

Father Georges de Nantes,
sermon given on August 15, 1978.