Nerone the Insider's Guide to Rome
and
Rome Made to Measure
offer a tour based on Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons," a best seller focusing on the Vatican.
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Photos by Claudio Palmisano for The New York Times
THE NEW YORK TIMES - APRIL 14, 2005
TITLE: The Papacy: Art
Invents What Few Really Know
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, April 13 - With the papal conclave deadlocked, the 117 cardinals
compromise on a Filipino as pope. When he is assassinated six months
later by an Islamic suicide bomber, Cardinal Timothy John Mulrennan, the
handsome, media-savvy archbishop of Newark, takes his place, becoming
history's first American pope.
So goes the story of "Conclave," an action-packed first novel published
in 2001 by Greg Tobin, a writer from New Jersey. As a result of the
death of Pope John Paul II and the conclave scheduled next week to
choose his successor, Tor Books is reprinting it in a new paperback
edition.
Steeped in ritual, shrouded in secrecy, the sealed forum in the Sistine
Chapel where the world's cardinals elect the pope is probably the oldest
and most mysterious electoral body in the world. Laymen hungry to know
more must rely largely on novels, films, television docudramas and
speculative nonfiction. The accounts range from imaginative distortions
of reality to scholarly tomes that can be informative yet dull.
But sometimes even the fiction proves prescient.
"The Shoes of the Fisherman," the 1968 film of the novel by Morris L.
West, with Anthony Quinn as the pope, was panned by critics for what
they considered an absurd plot. It tells the story of a Ukrainian
ex-political prisoner who becomes pope, ministers directly to the
faithful and prevents China from going to war - all in an era when the
idea of a non-Italian, anti-Soviet, activist pope like John Paul II was
considered impossible.
"Angels & Demons" (Atria, 2003), the current best seller by Dan Brown,
is at least as improbable. The book - peppered with factual errors,
papal scholars like to point out - tells the story of a Harvard scholar,
Robert Langdon (also the hero of Mr. Brown's "Da Vinci Code"), who helps
save the Catholic Church from a bomb during a papal conclave convened
after a pope is assassinated. The powerful camerlengo, or papal
chamberlain, turns out to be the biological son of the dead pope,
conceived through artificial insemination.
"The Vatican is really like a royal court full of intrigue and secrecy,"
said the Rev. Vincent O'Keefe, the former president of Fordham
University, who spent nearly two decades in Rome. "Then there is the
conclave that is such a mysterious process, with white smoke announcing
the election of the pope."
"Ordinary people are not so much interested in how many persons there
are in the Trinity," he added. "But they are hungry for all the inside
stories."
Tell-all memoirs by cardinals of the goings-on inside a conclave do not
exist, partly because of the grave consequences threatened for those who
talk. (The only pope ever to have discussed the election process in an
autobiography was Pius II in the 15th century.)
Despite the imposed secrecy, there was considerable leakage of
information during the conclave that elected John Paul II in 1978. It
was widely known in church circles at the time that Cardinal Carlo
Confalonieri (who has since died) was the unnamed source in many
journalists' reports on the voting patterns.
The next year, the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley wrote "The Making of the Popes,"
which tracked the death of Pope Paul VI, the election of John Paul I and
his death after a 33- day tenure, and the election of John Paul II. The
book jacket describes it as an "exposé" of "the balloting, the intrigue,
the politics behind the deliberations" of the cardinals at that time. It
includes a special thanks to "Deep Purple," who Father Greeley said is
really two sources: one a cardinal who is now over 80 and therefore
ineligible to vote, but who will participate in the conclave, which
opens on Monday.
"I view the conclave as a political process," said Father Greeley, who
is in Rome researching a book to be titled "Making of the Pope 2005." "While
the Holy Spirit is at work, as she is in everything, I don't believe she
whispers in anyone's ear."
Some films and books on the Vatican have also grappled with the broad
moral and doctrinal crises facing the church. Otto Preminger's 1963
film, "The Cardinal," for example, relates the life story of a young
cardinal played by Tom Tryon, who is tempted by a woman and wrestles
with the thorny issues of premarital sex, abortion and anti-Semitism.