The Red Hat

The College of Cardinals, 2010 – Present

The phone call from the Secretariat of State came on a Tuesday morning in March 2010. I was in my office, working through correspondence, when the number appeared on my telephone screen.

My first thought, honestly, was: I am going to need a better tailor. The cardinal’s red is a very specific shade and requires a very specific cut, and mine was several years old.

My second thought was of my mother. She had been dead for fourteen years. I thought of her sitting in the pew at Sant’Alessandro in Brescia, reading the lives of the saints in the evening, weeping with relief when I told her I was going to the seminary. I thought of what she would have said about this moment, and I knew exactly what she would have said: “Don’t forget the tomatoes.” It was her shorthand for the domestic, the ordinary, the thing that keeps the ground under your feet. She deployed it whenever she felt that any of us was at risk of taking ourselves too seriously.

I have not forgotten the tomatoes. Or I have tried not to. The Thursdays in Trastevere are, among other things, the tomatoes.

• • •

What a Cardinal actually is diverges considerably from the mythology, which is perhaps inevitable given how old and elaborate the mythology has become.

The College of Cardinals is, in its practical dimension, an advisory body to the Pope and, in extremis, the body responsible for electing a new Pope. It carries great symbolic weight. It carries less executive authority than people assume. A Cardinal without a specific curial appointment — and even many who have one — spends a great deal of his time doing what I spent the first years of my priesthood doing: listening, celebrating, visiting, writing, teaching.

The difference is the scale. You are doing these things across a larger geography, with more people watching, with more institutional weight attached to every public word. This weight can be used well. It can also be a temptation of its own — the temptation to confuse the significance of your office with the significance of your person.

Father Leone’s lessons on prayer have been more practically useful in the curial environment than almost anything else I brought there. The spiritual discipline of reducing yourself before God daily — not performatively, not as a technique, but as a genuine reckoning with who you are and who God is — is the only reliable antidote I have found to the particular form of pride that high ecclesiastical office cultivates.

• • •

I have maintained the professorship at the Gregoriana throughout. People have occasionally suggested that the combination is anomalous — that a member of the College of Cardinals should not be sitting in a classroom answering a twenty-five-year-old’s question about Barth. I find this suggestion baffling. The classroom is where I am kept honest. The twenty-five-year-old’s question about Barth is, more often than not, the right question, and if I cannot answer it I should find out why, and if I can answer it I should be grateful for the reminder that the faith is both harder and simpler than institutional life sometimes makes it appear.

Thursday evenings in Trastevere: never missed. Emmanuel is always there. The soup is still made in the same large pot that we acquired in 1986 and which has been repaired twice and should probably be replaced but which neither of us is willing to retire. The faces change. The need does not. The strange holiness of ordinary mercy persists.

These things are not side projects. They are the center. The red hat is the side project. I mean this seriously.

• • •

I have watched the Church in the last fifteen years with the complex and aching love of a man who is fully inside something that is simultaneously his home and his heartbreak. I have seen extraordinary holiness and catastrophic failure in the same institution, sometimes in the same person, sometimes in the same week.

I have learned to resist the temptation of either despair or triumphalism. Despair says the institution’s failures prove that God has abandoned it. Triumphalism says the institution’s existence proves that God endorses everything it does. Both are wrong. The truth is harder and more hopeful than either: God is at work in and through and sometimes despite His Church, and the work continues, and the gates of hell have not prevailed, and will not.

This conviction is not optimism. It is not even confidence in the institution. It is faith in the promise of the One who made it, and He has not broken a promise yet.