Nothing guarantees the rapt attention of outsiders more than
the idea of blanket secrecy, and no procedure better illustrates this point
than a papal conclave. As the Holy Ghost gets down to business later today, the
cardinals are locked in and the rest of the world is locked out. Nobody will be in a
position to know what went on unless someone inside violates the oath, either
deliberately or by accident. The latter possibility is real. In the long
history of conclave speculation shreds of gossip,
pertinent or otherwise, have drifted like swan down from domestics in
particular—those who long afterwards have been either unable or unwilling to
resist the wiles of the most cunning seekers of information. The lowlier the sworn
official, moreover, the scrubber of loos in Santa Marta for example, the
greater must be her sense that in the midst of an unremarkable life she stands
witness to a great event, albeit on the outermost periphery. Would it be so
surprising if afterwards she casually complained to a non-sworn collega about
the length (and liveliness) of late-night discussions in the room of
a cardinal who, incidentally, likes to smoke cigars, and the inconvenience therefore of
having to trudge all the way up to the fourth floor well after one o’clock in
the morning? She has no reason to suppose that the collega’s brother-in-law is
a journalist. Then, of course, there are the politics inherent in the process itself. By
their very nature, at least a good proportion of the cardinals must be possessed
of hard-nosed political shrewdness or they would not be there. Nor would they
have attained each of the previous rungs in those long, stout ladders of ecclesiastical
preferment. The eligible voters are, of course, bound by the apostolic
constitution which governs the process, but this does not mean that some of
them are not busily doing their numbers. It would appear to be very unusual,
even counterproductive, for anyone to be doing or seen to be doing the numbers on their own behalf,
but surely not so strange for ambitious men to lobby for a “candidate,” because
not to do so would be simply naïve. Someone else will certainly be doing it. Further,
in a group of 115 eligible voters one should expect to discover the fullest
range of human characteristics, good and bad. Not for nothing is a staff of
confessors laid on in the Sistine sacristy. The cardinals will be short-tempered or placid, patient or
maddened by signs of weakness in others. There is no reason to suppose that cardinals
do not bear grudges, even nurture hatreds, just like anyone else—and those may
go back years and years, and originate in some petty quarrel to which men naturally
cling with hot resentment, even while they are fully aware of the overriding
injunction to love thy neighbor. They will be worldly and holy in different
measure, keenly aware of needing publicly to convey neither too much of one
quality, nor too little of the other. Some will be known to be fonder of clothes or canasta than
seems entirely healthy. Some will be better than others at correctly reading a balance sheet, and acting accordingly. Others will be taking blood pressure
medication. They will be clever or stupid or funny or deaf or inconceivably
dull. Some will be comparatively patrician veterans of diplomatic service, their manners further enhanced by having been born into an old and distinguished Argentine or Colombian family. Some will enjoy giving the impression of wholesome and unaffected affability, while others careful
to polish a performance of unrivaled ascetic dogmatism. Some, with long experience of the Roman curia, will have developed the useful skill of reading upside-down over distances of ten meters or more; others will be as blind as a bat. Their Eminences will have limited
opportunities to demonstrate their fluency in five languages or more, but if
and when they do so will this be misconstrued as an ostentatious display?
How will national or ethnic affinities affect their instinctive groupings—over meals,
for example, or in more formal blocs? Is the malign influence of foreign governments or even secret intelligence organisations detectable in the subtle behavior of cardinals who for years, maybe through grim necessity, have had to navigate unscrupulous, undemocratic, or corrupt regimes, and occasionally accommodate themselves to their wishes? How on earth do you do handle or even take the measure of a solitary Vietnamese cardinal, or a Sudanese, or a Hungarian? Faced with the real possibility of the election of a wholly
unacceptable candidate, will there not be some casual remark cleverly implanted
in the ear of a garrulous old fool who can be relied upon innocently to spread
it about so as to damage, if not thwart? And what about the mini-buses? In the polite
post-ballot exodus, the cardinals’ equivalent of a scrum, which Eminences will
make sure that they sit next to whom on those brief but insular rides back and
forth to the Sistine Chapel, and who will be roundly shunned by those whose
keenest interest is making sure that they are where the action is? And what
will the drivers, also sworn, notice in the rear-view mirror, or hear muttered
over their left hand shoulder? We will probably never know, and should any gossip
emerge in due course and inevitably fail to satisfy the hunger of the world’s media,
none of it will be at all reliable.
Despite its dreary title, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War by Owen
Chadwick (Cambridge, 1986) is a marvelous book to which I have returned from time to time with
real fascination ever since Jean McCaughey recommended it to me almost 25 years ago. It is largely the tale of a remarkable personality,
(Francis) d’Arcy Godolphin Osborne (left), British Minister to the Holy See from 1936 to 1947, who from 1940, when
Italy entered the war, was immured in a small flat in the Vatican City (together with other allied diplomats, their families and servants) until the Americans liberated
Rome in 1944. Amazingly, throughout this long period, and especially during the
traumatic German occupation of 1943–44, Osborne was more or less
unmolested—protected by the somewhat quaint and decidedly uncertain conventions
of diplomatic immunity while he remained on Vatican territory, much assisted by
his friend the kindly Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul
VI. Naturally Osborne was watched, by various organs of the Italian police and intelligence
services and various other spies—clerics with fascist sympathies, clerics with Gaullist
sympathies, servants in the pay of the Italian police, certain Swiss guards who
were not above accepting a little pourbois in exchange for useful information,
neutral ambassadors and their staff, but above all the servants. Livio,
Osborne’s footman, got hold of the Foreign Office cipher and copied it for the
Italian police. Though it was maddening not to be able to cast Livio out,
Osborne wisely realized that it was vital that the Italians never knew
that he knew that they had his cipher—so Livio stayed, watched in
turn by Osborne’s sharp-eyed and resourceful cockney butler John May. In fact it was a stroke
of good fortune, because this meant that, together with the diplomatic bag,
Osborne could to some extent manipulate the flow of information to the Allies’ advantage. He knew the bag was
of course routinely opened and its contents inspected and copied, sometimes more than once along the
enormously insecure route by which it passed from him to the Secretariat of
State, thence via the papal nuncio to Switzerland then Portugal, and into the
hands of the British Ambassador, and finally on to Whitehall—and back
again. The Vatican protested loudly and indignantly about Axis interference with its diplomatic bags. Yet Osborne also grasped that the Italians were by no means inclined
automatically to share the contents with their German allies, especially as
Mussolini’s regime began to unravel, and relations between the two countries
deteriorated drastically. Therefore Osborne’s position, not entirely understood
in Whitehall until afterwards, was a delicate, even an invidious one. His communications needed
to convey enough information that was true and useful so that the Italians
never suspected Osborne knew they were intercepting and reading them. Therefore
he had no alternative but to use his communications with Whitehall to create
the impression that the Vatican not only posed no threat to the Axis powers, but
might prove extremely useful to Italy in negotiating the terms of a separately negotiated
armistice (i.e. without Germany)—and that by deploring such a possibility in the strongest possible
terms, Osborne made the Italians believe it was true.
And, in more than one sense it was true. At the
same time Osborne had to be careful not to create too alarming an impression in
Whitehall (and Washington, D.C.) that the Pope was either completely useless,
or far too favorably disposed towards the Italian state at the expense of the
Allies, which was in fact not true. In fact, the Pope had engaged from time to time in certain extremely dangerous diplomatic demarches, the purpose of which was to find some way of getting rid of Mussolini. Though Osborne dearly wished to communicate this to Whitehall, he obviously could not. And he was troubled by having deliberately to misrepresent his formal diplomatic discussions with his hosts in the Vatican; he knew very well that his presence there was ipso facto dangerous for the Pope. On the other hand, Osborne thought nothing of liaising secretly with the deliciously gallant Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who let it be known about town that his
attitude as an Irish patriot was staunchly anti-British, the better to maintain cover for his extremely effective escape network for escaped allied prisoners-of-war (who knew that they needed to make straight for the Vatican), as well as
many Italian Jews and political fugitives from Mussolini—to all of which
Monsignor Montini not merely turned a diplomatically blind eye, but took care to conceal as much as possible from his wily colleague in the Secretariat Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who was not
nearly so sympathetic to the Allied cause. Towards the end of his life Osborne, a bachelor, became the twelfth and last Duke of Leeds.
Despite its dreary title, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War by Owen
Chadwick (Cambridge, 1986) is a marvelous book to which I have returned from time to time with
real fascination ever since Jean McCaughey recommended it to me almost 25 years ago. It is largely the tale of a remarkable personality,
(Francis) d’Arcy Godolphin Osborne (left), British Minister to the Holy See from 1936 to 1947, who from 1940, when
Italy entered the war, was immured in a small flat in the Vatican City (together with other allied diplomats, their families and servants) until the Americans liberated
Rome in 1944. Amazingly, throughout this long period, and especially during the
traumatic German occupation of 1943–44, Osborne was more or less
unmolested—protected by the somewhat quaint and decidedly uncertain conventions
of diplomatic immunity while he remained on Vatican territory, much assisted by
his friend the kindly Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul
VI. Naturally Osborne was watched, by various organs of the Italian police and intelligence
services and various other spies—clerics with fascist sympathies, clerics with Gaullist
sympathies, servants in the pay of the Italian police, certain Swiss guards who
were not above accepting a little pourbois in exchange for useful information,
neutral ambassadors and their staff, but above all the servants. Livio,
Osborne’s footman, got hold of the Foreign Office cipher and copied it for the
Italian police. Though it was maddening not to be able to cast Livio out,
Osborne wisely realized that it was vital that the Italians never knew
that he knew that they had his cipher—so Livio stayed, watched in
turn by Osborne’s sharp-eyed and resourceful cockney butler John May. In fact it was a stroke
of good fortune, because this meant that, together with the diplomatic bag,
Osborne could to some extent manipulate the flow of information to the Allies’ advantage. He knew the bag was
of course routinely opened and its contents inspected and copied, sometimes more than once along the
enormously insecure route by which it passed from him to the Secretariat of
State, thence via the papal nuncio to Switzerland then Portugal, and into the
hands of the British Ambassador, and finally on to Whitehall—and back
again. The Vatican protested loudly and indignantly about Axis interference with its diplomatic bags. Yet Osborne also grasped that the Italians were by no means inclined
automatically to share the contents with their German allies, especially as
Mussolini’s regime began to unravel, and relations between the two countries
deteriorated drastically. Therefore Osborne’s position, not entirely understood
in Whitehall until afterwards, was a delicate, even an invidious one. His communications needed
to convey enough information that was true and useful so that the Italians
never suspected Osborne knew they were intercepting and reading them. Therefore
he had no alternative but to use his communications with Whitehall to create
the impression that the Vatican not only posed no threat to the Axis powers, but
might prove extremely useful to Italy in negotiating the terms of a separately negotiated
armistice (i.e. without Germany)—and that by deploring such a possibility in the strongest possible
terms, Osborne made the Italians believe it was true.
And, in more than one sense it was true. At the
same time Osborne had to be careful not to create too alarming an impression in
Whitehall (and Washington, D.C.) that the Pope was either completely useless,
or far too favorably disposed towards the Italian state at the expense of the
Allies, which was in fact not true. In fact, the Pope had engaged from time to time in certain extremely dangerous diplomatic demarches, the purpose of which was to find some way of getting rid of Mussolini. Though Osborne dearly wished to communicate this to Whitehall, he obviously could not. And he was troubled by having deliberately to misrepresent his formal diplomatic discussions with his hosts in the Vatican; he knew very well that his presence there was ipso facto dangerous for the Pope. On the other hand, Osborne thought nothing of liaising secretly with the deliciously gallant Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who let it be known about town that his
attitude as an Irish patriot was staunchly anti-British, the better to maintain cover for his extremely effective escape network for escaped allied prisoners-of-war (who knew that they needed to make straight for the Vatican), as well as
many Italian Jews and political fugitives from Mussolini—to all of which
Monsignor Montini not merely turned a diplomatically blind eye, but took care to conceal as much as possible from his wily colleague in the Secretariat Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who was not
nearly so sympathetic to the Allied cause. Towards the end of his life Osborne, a bachelor, became the twelfth and last Duke of Leeds.