Life as a cardinal

Pope Francis has reversed the pay cuts that his predecessor had imposed on cardinals, bishops and priests due to the fall in revenue caused by the pandemic. Six years ago, visitor numbers to the Vatican Museums had plummeted, prompting a sharp reduction in salaries to replenish the struggling coffers. Shortly after Francis’s announcement—which coincided with his 71st birthday—social media users criticized the well-off cardinals, to whom the Pontiff had effectively returned the funds that his predecessor, often compared to a Buenos Aires–style Robin Hood, had taken from them. Here he is, the Yankee, the elegant and chic Pope, bringing the Casta back into vogue – the one with a capital C, or perhaps even a K – with its enormous flats, spanning several hundred square metres. Gold, silver and marble everywhere, from the bathrooms to the kitchen floors. These mansions, into which for years—during the heyday of “Grillism”—cameras and curious reporters sought to peer, in order to show the indignant public the privileges enjoyed by the princes of the Church. Entire television programmes in which sociologists, pious women—perhaps fearful of God— priests reeking of sheep, and various so-called experts on the Church and the Vatican would lecture us, in heavy doses of saccharine, on the difference between the Fantozzian cardinal’s mega-mansions and the Porziuncola of Santa Marta – the meagre, sterile ‘cell’ where Francis lived – and the salons with velvet-upholstered chairs of the cardinals. On one side, the good and holy; on the other, the sinful profiteers – a comparison as crude as a low-brow pub in terms of its banality and the demagoguery on display. Yet Francis – that is, Jorge Mario Bergoglio – chose Santa Marta – as he himself stated – because the Apartment, the Pope’s residence, seemed stifling to him with its funnel-shaped entrance. He preferred to see people and had always favoured smaller spaces. Everyone, after all, has their own tastes, and everyone does as they please in their own home. He never spoke of the size of his rooms in the former convent to suggest that those over there – the cardinals – slept in rooms that resembled those at Versailles. However, in times of facile populism and relentless pauperism, anything went. Thus was born—and it has grown ever more exaggerated—the legend of the privileged cardinals. They do, in fact, live in spacious flats, but only because they are old (the flats, of course). These are homes housed in buildings which, from the outside, could be mistaken for some outlying branch of the National Social Security Institute (INPS)—anonymous and cold. No stucco, no coats of arms, nothing. Just concrete and cold marble, at best. And it’s not as though things are any different inside. Of course, some do have them restored – and rightly so. In quite a few cases, it leaks inside; the windows and doors are the very ones that Pius IX probably saw before he shut himself away as a prisoner in the Vatican. The floors are a mix of terrazzo and old-fashioned parquet. No wood-effect porcelain stoneware, as is fashionable today. Sofas straight out of a Netflix series set in the 1950s. Clocks chiming away as in the height of the Victorian era. ‘The thick, soft upholstery’, ‘the yellow fabric on the white-lacquered furniture and the yellow silk curtains at the windows’. The “round table with straight, slender legs, soberly edged with gold”, “the stiff armchairs arranged in neat rows along the walls”. To gain a clearer picture of a cardinal’s residence, one might refer to how Thomas Mann described the Buddenbrooks’ house in Lübeck. These are large flats because, well, once upon a time, over a hundred years ago, cardinals really were princes. But there were also very few of them – at most seventy in the whole world. It was John XXIII who increased their number, which had remained fixed for four centuries. They were the Pope’s chief advisers. They were recognisable by their ermine, by the long tails of their capes – which Pius XII cut off – and by their regalia.

But what about today? In the collective imagination, the cardinal is the ‘powerful one’. Someone who, essentially, does nothing. Rich, incredibly rich, wandering about all day in an ermine-trimmed robe. Myths to dispel. First and foremost, cardinals do work: they are either heads of dioceses (certainly not an enviable role) or of some department within the Curia. When they retire, at seventy-five or thereabouts, the drama often begins. The A4-sized diaries, once full of notes, invitations and dinners, celebrations and meetings, remain empty. In the morning, they get up, recite the breviary, say Mass (not all of them) and then stay at home. Some dig out the pile of unread books, those set aside for retirement. But even this grows tiresome, and the volumes remain there, on desks and coffee tables, alongside reams of unused Post-it notes and bundles of letterhead where the only thing written is the letterhead itself, bearing titles and a coat of arms (for those who have one). One waits for an invitation to a patron saint’s festival five hundred kilometres away. Vespers or Mass, or both. To see people, talk, forge relationships. Perhaps to rekindle that inspiration for the people which was not properly nurtured during the Roaring Twenties. When an appointment does come up—perhaps a journalist seeking an audience to discuss Fatima or Częstochowa—the cardinal ends up retying the threads of his own history, perhaps leafing through photo albums, recalling speeches he has given and Popes he has embraced. There, in the large apartments often shared with three nuns. They form a family; they are not servants, as certain rhetoric would have us believe. Nuns who effectively become housekeepers, much like the legendary Pascalina Lehnert, who, with the air of a Prussian general, ran Pius XII’s household, personally overseeing his diet and diary. And it is said that when the Pope died, the cardinals did not think twice about showing the nun the door, lowering her personal belongings from the window in a basket. Whether legend or not, it gives an idea of the influence nuns wield in the homes and lives of the cardinals. Years ago, on the Italian bishops’ television channel, there was a programme that followed the daily lives of bishops and a few cardinals. From dawn to dusk, from the alarm clock to Compline. And this close relationship was evident. One segment showed a brief exchange between the then Archbishop of Ancona, Cardinal Edoardo Menichelli, and the mother superior of his residence. The topic: eternal life and the final encounter with the Bridegroom. The cardinal asked the nun if she was looking forward to that moment, and she, whilst peeling an apple, replied without hesitation: ‘As late as possible.’ And everyone burst out laughing. One thinks of the cardinals who spend their days at table admiring their silver spoons, at endless lunches, such as those described by Mann: cooked ham with shallot sauce, “such a quantity of vegetables that a single dish could have satisfied them all”, carp in red wine, cheeses and puddings, wines of every type and origin jealously guarded in secret cellars. But this is the Buddenbrooks’ house, after all. In the cardinals’ home, in the year of our Lord 2026, there is a little trolley with liqueurs resting on embroidered placemats, just like the ones you used to see on top of the television in Grandma’s living room. And instead of carp and the enormous ham with shallot sauce, a simple, wholesome soup.

In the collective imagination, the cardinal is Richelieu: an almost absolute ruler, capable of deciding the fate of a man or a woman with a wave of the hand. A serving curial prefect today is, rather than a Richelieu, more like a stressed-out company managing director: dealing with staff, making decisions and reporting them to his superior (who is not the CEO, but the Vicar of Christ), giving interviews, preparing speeches, organising meetings, and compulsively checking social media to see how many attacks have been posted. But what of that leisurely ease, that devotion to jests and pastimes! Times have changed; it is no longer the era when the word of a cardinal sealed pacts or charted courses. ‘Some might say that we have long since become accustomed to boredom, that boredom is the true condition of man,’ says the country curate in Bernanos’s novel. That is where we are. Apathy reigns, almost supreme: ‘But I wonder,’ continues the young curate, ‘whether mankind has ever known such a contagion of boredom, such a leprosy. An unfulfilled despair, a vile form of despair, something that might resemble the fermentation of a decayed Christianity’.

Besides, the image of a prince cloaked in purple really clashes with the profile Jorge Mario Bergoglio maintained in his native Buenos Aires. Biographies and hagiographies recall that he lived alone and not in the bishop’s residence. He cooked his own meals—reportedly an excellent cook, with stuffed squid that has delighted generations of friends—travelled by underground and bus, and had his red cassock made by his sister rather than at a luxury tailor’s. It is unclear how many others like him serve the Church worldwide. At the last conclave, those from the most remote suburbs were like bulls in a china shop: they wandered about bewildered and disoriented; more than one said they couldn’t wait to get home. Some fled to the Castelli, certainly not in search of relief from the heat (it was between late April and early May) but for peace and quiet. Periodically, newspapers publish “investigations” into the cardinals’ wealth, usually focusing on the Curial members: their property holdings are detailed—this cardinal who even has a second home, perhaps even a third; that one who also owns a vineyard. There is even a cardinal who has an olive grove and produces olive oil. All this, it is argued, is because they are well paid – four thousand euros a month and even more – not to mention the famous ‘cardinal’s allowance’ (more money). But the nuns who make up the community have to be paid and supported, and their travels – whether journeys to the other side of the world or a Mass to be celebrated six hours away by train – also incur expenses. They also give to charity and help the most vulnerable. Often without anyone knowing about it, remaining faithful to the Gospel teaching that ‘when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret; and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you’. For weeks, newspapers and television channels recounted the deeds of Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, ‘Don Corrado’, among the homeless under Bernini’s colonnade and on Via della Conciliazione, and among the occupants of the Spin Time Labs building, where he personally reconnected the electricity supply. He too, although dressed as an electrician, is to all intents and purposes a prince of the Holy Roman Church.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing new here: it’s the idea of the wealthy Church. The one tourists conjure up when they chat on the coaches on the way back from the capital… so much gold, so much luxury. There is simply too much of it. The argument goes that the Church should instead embrace poverty rather than doing everything and more ‘ad maiorem gloriam’. This is an age—a thoroughly hypocritical one—in which poverty must be flaunted. It is no longer enough to give to charity without anyone knowing; one must be seen, must show it off so that everyone is aware. The point is to demonstrate that one is neither rich nor a prince nor powerful. What a paradox. Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, a man who right to the end emphasised that Jesus was anything but poor – “he wore a tunic made from a single piece of cloth, without seams” – practically shouted at the top of his voice that “Christians must be poor, not the Church. Today, however, wealthy Christians say that the Church must be poor’. Just like those many people who extol the poverty of St Francis, thinking that it consisted solely of his habit. And they forget, for example, that in his view even poverty had a limit: it had to stop at the foot of the altar.