Pope Francis: I Was ‘Used’ Against Ratzinger in 2005 Conclave, But He Was ‘My Candidate’
Pope Francis said he was “used” in the 2005 conclave in an effort to block the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, though he supported the candidacy of the man who soon became Pope Benedict XVI.
“He was my candidate,” Francis said of his predecessor in excerpts from the forthcoming book The Successor, published by the Spanish newspaper ABC on Easter Sunday.
In the book, Pope Francis told Spanish journalist Javier Martínez-Brocal that his name, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, was put forward as part of a “complete maneuver” by an unnamed group of cardinals to manipulate the conclave’s outcome.
“The idea was to block the election of [Ratzinger],” he explained. “They were using me, but behind them they were already thinking about proposing another cardinal. They still couldn’t agree on who, but they were already on the verge of throwing out a name.”
Francis said that at one point of the conclave, which began on April 18, 2005, he was receiving 40 of the 115 total votes. If cardinals continued to support him, Cardinal Ratzinger would not have reached the necessary two-thirds threshold to be elected, likely prompting a search for an alternative candidate.
Francis said that he realized the “operation” was afoot on the second day of voting and told the Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillón to not “joke with my candidacy” and cease supporting him, “because I’m not going to accept” being elected.
Austen Ivereigh, the Pope’s English-speaking biographer, has previously written that Bergoglio, “almost in tears,” had begged not to be elected.
Cardinal Ratzinger, who had been the longtime prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope John Paul II, was elected that same day.
Pope Francis did not say who this group of conclave manipulators consisted of nor who they planned to introduce as a third candidate, but the Argentinian prelate said that the group of cardinals “did not want a ‘foreign’ Pope.”
Several accounts from the time have claimed that a group of liberal European cardinals, known as the Saint Gallen Group, attempted to manipulate the outcome of the 2005 conclave. Three members of the group, German Cardinals Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann and Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, also participated in the 2013 conclave that elected Francis. According to Ivereigh, they advocated for Bergoglio after first securing his assent, a claim the cardinals have denied.
