Ludwig Ring-Eifel of the German news agency KNA said in January that seeing the Pope so short of breath at a press conference at which he was too ill to answer prepared questions was “a difficult moment for me … and you can tell that this situation has also affected many colleagues emotionally”. At the beginning of March, Andrew Napolitano, a retired Superior Court judge from New Jersey, was staying in the papal guest house behind St Peter’s. “The Pope is in poor health, can barely speak or walk; and he radiates sadness,” he reported. “I don’t think he’ll be there much longer.”

Vatican nerves are always on edge in the final years of a pontificate. In the case of the conservative Benedict XVI, they were overshadowed by leaks — gleefully reported by a hostile media — revealing flamboyant corruption at the top of the Roman Curia, the government of the Holy See. Benedict was too frightened to act and resigned in despair.

Now the Vatican is once again paralysed by scandals, but this time round, correspondents working for secular and Catholic outlets are trying to protect Francis, who faces more serious questions about his personal conduct than any pope in living memory.

For years, allegations that would torpedo the career of any secular Western leader have been concealed or played down by a Praetorian Guard of liberal journalists who, back in 2013, staked their reputations on “the Great Reformer”. As a result, even devout Catholics don’t know that the first Jesuit pope has tried to shield several repulsive sex abusers from justice, for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

Only now is the truth coming out, to the relief of Vatican staff who have to deal with a pope who bears little resemblance to the wisecracking, avuncular figure they see on television. They are — or were until recently — terrified of a boss whose autocratic rule is shaped more by his rages and simmering resentments than by any theological agenda. And they can’t conceal their satisfaction that one particularly gruesome scandal involving papal ally Fr Marko Rupnik is stripping away the facade of “the Squid Game pontificate”, as it’s nicknamed, after the South Korean Netflix series in which contestants have to win children’s games to save themselves from execution.

The Rupnik affair is the most sickening scandal I’ve encountered in more than 30 years of reporting on the Catholic Church. Rupnik, a supremely well-connected artist on whose tacky mosaics the Church has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, was expelled from the Jesuit order last year after he was credibly accused of raping religious sisters belonging to a community he founded in his native Slovenia. Women have come forward claiming that the community was a sex cult. They say he tried to force them to watch pornographic films, drink his semen out of a chalice, violently took the virginity of one sister in a car and encouraged young women to engage in sexual threesomes that, according to Rupnik, would illustrate the workings of the Holy Trinity.

Last year, facing an explosion of rage on Catholic social media — mainstream media were strangely silent — Pope Francis said he would act against his friend Rupnik. He hasn’t done so. Nor has he explained why, when Rupnik was facing excommunication for abusing the confessional to “absolve” one of his female sexual victims, he was invited to conduct a retreat at the Vatican, or why his subsequent excommunication was mysteriously lifted within weeks with the approval of the Pope.

This month Fr Rupnik was listed in the 2024 Vatican directory as a consultant on Divine Worship, of all things. Meanwhile Bishop Daniele Libanori, the Jesuit who investigated the women’s claims and found them credible, has been removed from his position as an auxiliary bishop in the diocese of Rome.

Another toxic scandal is still unfolding in Argentina. In 2016, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, the former Cardinal Bergoglio’s most pampered protégé, had to resign from the diocese of Orán after he was accused of financial corruption and aggressive attempts to seduce seminarians. The Pope’s response? He airlifted Zanchetta to Rome and invented a job for him:”‘assessor” of the funds managed by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the Vatican treasury. Zanchetta was later convicted of assaulting seminarians, even though Rome refused to supply documents requested by the Argentinian court. He’s serving his jail sentence in a retreat house amid reports that his accusers are being harassed.

The story is coming back to haunt Francis, whose enemies — emboldened by his loosening grip on the government of the Holy See — are circulating extremely damaging documents. These suggest that the Pope is even more tangled up in the scandal than previously suspected. And there are other cases: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis unsuccessfully attempted to keep the child molester Fr Julio Grassi out of jail, commissioning a report that branded his victims as liars.

The dark secrets of this pontificate will weigh heavily on cardinals’ minds in their pre-conclave discussions before they cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel. They will be speaking in code: no one wants to take the risk of openly trashing the reputation of a recently deceased (or retired) Supreme Pontiff. But the cardinals will be forced to talk about the increasingly poisonous divisions between liberal and conservative Catholics, which date back to the Second Vatican Council but have been made far worse under this pontificate. And they will find it hard to draw a line between Francis’s policies and his personality, since he takes such visible delight in using his powers to spring surprises on the universal Church.

***

When Francis first took office, most cardinals shared the popular enthusiasm for his informal style: his preference to be known as plain “Bishop of Rome” and his abandonment of some of the more comical trappings of his office such as the red shoes. But they quickly discovered that this “informal” pope, in contrast to his predecessors, liked to rule through executive fiat.

Francis has issued a torrent of papal rulings known as motu proprios (literally, “of his own accord”) — more than 60 so far, six times more frequently than John Paul II. They have made massive changes to liturgy, finance, government and canon law. They often land without warning and can be brutal: the Pope has used this mechanism to seize control of the Order of Malta, for example, and to strip away the privileges of the secretive but ultra-loyal organisation Opus Dei.

Two rulings above all have traumatised the conservative Catholics for whom Francis nurtures a pathological dislike, rarely missing an opportunity to point out their “rigidity” or to mock their traditional vestments, decorated with what he calls “grandmother’s lace”.

The first is his decision, issued via motu proprio, to crush the celebration of the pre-1970 Latin Mass that Benedict had carefully reintegrated into the worship of the Church. In 2021, in a decision that he knew would cause his retired predecessor terrible pain, Francis effectively banned its celebration in ordinary parishes.

Only a tiny proportion of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics attend the Old Rite Masses, so why has the ban turned into such a big deal? Partly it’s a reflection of the Cromwellian thoroughness with which it has been enforced by Francis’s new liturgy chief, Cardinal Arthur Roche, the most powerful English cleric in Rome. A native of Batley with the manner of a self-important Yorkshire alderman, Roche has evolved into that familiar Roman beast: an authoritarian liberal with a nose for the juiciest Satimbocca alla Romana and the fluffiest tiramisu. This year he forced his old rival, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, to ban the Old Rite Holy Week ceremonies in his diocese.

The British Conservative peer Lord Moylan, a traditionalist Catholic, vented his fury in a post on X: “I heard a wonderful Tridentine Maundy Mass this evening. I shan’t tell you where it was in case Arthur sends his henchmen round. I’ll just say that English Catholicism has a centuries-old tradition of underground Masses. All that has changed is who’s persecuting us.”

Many bishops aren’t keen on the intricately choreographed Latin ceremonies, but what they dislike far more is having their arms twisted by a pope who, while telling the world that he’s empowering bishops by encouraging “synodality”, whatever that means, is undermining their pastoral authority over their parishes.

But even this controversy pales in comparison with the explosion of rage from half the world’s bishops when, just before Christmas, without warning or consultation, the Pope signed Fiducia Supplicans, a document allowing priests to bless gay couples. This time his chosen instrument was a declaration from the Church’s doctrine office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), that same-sex couples or people in other “irregular” situations could receive “non-liturgical” blessings from priests. This was amazing because, as recently as 2021, the same office had condemned the notion of same-sex couples. Also, no one had ever heard of a non-liturgical blessing. It didn’t exist in canon law. Who came up with that idea?

Step forward the new Prefect of the DDF, Cardinal Victor “Tucho” Fernandez, the most eccentric of the Pope’s Argentinian protégés. It’s hard to exaggerate the weirdness of appointing Fernandez to head the DDF. He was best known for writing a book on the theology of kissing — until it was discovered that he’d also written one about the theology of orgasms, containing passages so disturbing that Tucho himself had second thoughts and apparently tried to hide all the existing copies.

How could this embarrassing lightweight come to occupy an office previously held by Benedict XVI, who as Joseph Ratzinger was arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the 20th century? One theory is that Fernandez wasn’t Francis’s first choice, but the name of his preferred candidate, the German progressive Bishop Heiner Wilmer, was leaked and so he picked someone else. As soon as he was in office, Tucho wrote Fiducia Supplicans and slipped it onto Francis’s desk without showing it to other senior cardinals.

The fall-out was spectacular. There was already a growing rift between Catholic bishops, led by German and American progressives, who thought it was OK to bless gay couples and those who thought it made a mockery of the teachings of Christ. After Fiducia that rift seems irreparable.

On 11 January the bishops of West, East and Central Africa jointly announced that they “do not consider it appropriate for Africa to bless homosexual unions or same-sex couples”. Francis, unpredictable as ever, then said that was fine because they were Africans, thus throwing Tucho under the bus, opening himself up to accusations of racism and offending the LGBT lobby. Gay rights activists were already mortified by panicky Vatican “clarification” of January 4 stating that the blessings of same-sex couples should last a maximum of 15 seconds and were “not an endorsement of the lives they lead”.

Meanwhile the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, wounded by papal overtures to Putin, said Fiducia didn’t apply to them either. Likewise the Polish Church. Most recently the Coptic Orthodox Church has taken the drastic step of suspending theological dialogue with Rome.

“Hagan lio!” — “make a mess! — was the new pope’s message to young Catholics in 2013. What did he mean? All his words are drenched in ambiguity; perhaps it’s explained by his statement that the Church “always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street”. But Fiducia Supplicans smells like an accidental mess, not a calculated risk. It’s something you scrape off your shoe because you weren’t looking where you were going. Had the Pope taken leave of his senses?

***

“He is one of the most complicated men I have ever met,” says a Vatican source who has been observing the Pope closely for a decade. “He can be terrific fun and also incredibly vengeful. If you cross him, he’ll kick you when you’re at your lowest ebb.”

“But don’t get the idea that he’s a master strategist. He’s a clumsy tactician who spends his time lighting and putting out fires. His number one priority, overriding everything else, is that he should be inscrutable. He doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s planning to do — and, if you find out, he’ll do the opposite, even if it disrupts his plans.”

My source does not belong to any clerical faction and his assessments of people tend to be conspicuously gentle. It’s been interesting to watch how, during our meetings in Rome over the past five years, his opinion of Francis has hardened to the point where he unhesitatingly describes him as a nasty man.

If Francis cancels any plan anticipated by the media, then that helps explain the disaster of Fiducia Supplicans: Bishop Wilmer is probably more heterodox than Cardinal Fernandez on the subject of homosexuality, but he would never have put his name to “Tucho’s amateur doodlings”, as one critic describes the document.

But note how quickly the Pope switched into reverse gear. A book just published by the French conservative Catholic Jean-Pierre Moreau portrays Jorge Bergoglio as a liberal iconoclast inspired by quasi-Marxist liberation theology. I think that’s wrong, and he is what he’s always been: a Peronist. Like Juan Perón, the populist President of Argentina during his childhood, he is more interested in power than in ideas. My Vatican source talks of Francis’s “powerful charm, his way of making you think you’re the only person who matters”. They said the same thing about Perón, a consummate opportunist who, at the height of his powers, won simultaneous support from neo-Nazis and Marxists but who also took pleasure in lashing out unexpectedly at allies and opponents alike.

Ideologically, Peronism is all over the place, but it has always been committed to social welfare and also passionately anti-American — two enduring strands in Francis’s thinking. During John Paul II’s pontificate Bergoglio stressed his theological orthodoxy, earning the hatred of some of his fellow Jesuits. But he always disliked meticulous ceremonies — there’s footage of him virtually throwing the Blessed Sacrament into a crowd in Buenos Aires — and when you watch him yawning his way through ceremonies in St Peter’s you can’t help wondering if he finds Mass boring. He no longer celebrates it in public, and the excuse that he’s always too ill to do so doesn’t work: John Paul II said Mass even when crippled by Parkinson’s and barely able to speak.

On the evening Francis was elected, the traditionalist website Rorate Caeli published a cry of anguish from Marcelo Gonzalez, a journalist in Buenos Aires. It was headed: “The Horror!”’ and described the self-effacing figure who had just walked on to the balcony of St Peter’s as “the worst of all the unthinkable candidates”. Bergoglio was a “sworn enemy of the Traditional Mass”’ who had “persecuted every single priest who made an effort to wear a cassock”.

Like most observers, I thought the article was over the top, and like most observers I was wrong. Gonzalez was proved right about the Latin Mass — and also about cassocks. These days ambitious priests in Rome know that the swish of the soutane could land them in a miserable curacy, so now they scuttle across the piazzas in drab clerical suits.

But is Francis really a liberal? The fact that he loathes conservatives doesn’t mean that he supports women’s ordination — he doesn’t — and one shouldn’t read too much into the occasional photo-op with an LGBT Catholic: gossips in the Curia suggest that, when the Holy Father lets his guard down and slips into scatological Buenos Aires slang, he’s not especially complimentary about “the gays”. Or some other minorities.

It’s hard to explain the prominence of gay clergy in his entourage, both in Argentina and Rome, given that no one has ever suggested that Jorge Bergoglio, the former nightclub bouncer who had a girlfriend before he entered seminary, is homosexual. But he knows whose closets contain skeletons. One priest in Rome told me: “When Bergoglio visited Rome in the old days, he’d park himself among other visitors in the Casa del Clero, absorbing the gossip, much of which was about gay clergy. And he wouldn’t forget it.”(The Casa is where Francis went back to settle his bill after his election and made sure there were cameras set up to record his humility.)

Of course, the future pope wasn’t alone in gathering information in this way. Latin American politics, clerical as well as secular, has always been oiled by the exchange of secrets — and nowhere more so than in Argentina, where two thirds of citizens have some Italian ancestry and political horse-trading has a distinctly Italian flavour.

Perhaps it was naive of the cardinals in 2013 to expect the former Cardinal Bergoglio to clean up the corruption that had driven Benedict XVI to the state of helpless despair in which he resigned his office. But that was the main reason they elected him. He promised pest control, and it was a promise he didn’t keep.

Maybe the cardinal should have taken a closer look at two retired cardinals who were acting as his unofficial campaign managers. The American Theodore McCarrick and the Belgian Godfried Danneels were both in disgrace, having been caught trying to lie their way out of sex scandals. McCarrick’s assaults on seminarians had been an open secret in the American Church for decades, while Danneels had already been caught attempting to cover up incestuous child abuse by one of his bishops. Francis immediately rehabilitated both of them. McCarrick resumed his role as the Pope’s emissary and fundraiser (though Francis eventually had to defrock him when he was charged with child abuse). Danneels, incredibly, received a papal invitation to a synod on the family.

Meanwhile, Francis’s financial reforms began promisingly. He created the new job of Prefect for the Economy for the late Cardinal George Pell, a no-nonsense Australian conservative. Pell stumbled across gigantic money-laundering operations involving senior curial officials — whereupon he was conveniently forced to resign to face trumped-up charges of child abuse in Melbourne.

During Pell’s long, ultimately successful, battle to clear his name, Francis inexplicably gave free rein to Archbishop Angelo Becciu, who was already suspected of having his hand in numerous tills. Becciu took the opportunity to sack Libero Milone, the independent auditor appointed by Pell, threatening to throw him into a Vatican jail cell for the crime of ‘spying’ (i.e., doing his job).

Eventually Becciu himself was sacked after the discovery of billions of dollars poured into dodgy investments — at which point, very oddly, Francis made him a cardinal. And he remains one today, despite losing most of his cardinal’s privileges in 2020 after he was charged along with nine others with embezzlement. He was found guilty and now faces five and half years in jail — but no one thinks he’ll serve them: he knows too much.

Yet not everyone with access to damaging information has been promoted. Bishop Nunzio Galantino was president of APSA when Zanchetta was hiding there in the non-job of “assessor”. He expected to be made a cardinal when he retired. He wasn’t and is reportedly furious.

This month I was sent a 500-page dossier on Zanchetta. Many of the stomach-churning details of the allegations of the sexual exploitation of seminarians have never been reported. I was also sent a photocopy of a document purporting to show that diocesan officials from Orán accused Zanchetta of hiding the sale of properties that funded the building of his seminary. It displays the signatures and stamps of the officials. Allegedly, Zanchetta claimed that Pope Francis himself advised him to conceal the transactions. A leading Catholic blog reported this claim in 2022; the mainstream media did not. I showed the photocopy to a former very senior Vatican official, who replied via WhatsApp: “I had heard of this matter as a rumour but now I see it in black and white!”

***

However hideous the scandals associated with this pontificate, it’s unlikely that they will influence the next conclave as much as the document signed by Francis on 18 December last year. Fiducia Supplicans changed the dynamics of the electoral college — not just because it forced Catholic bishops to address the radioactive topic of homosexuality that has torn apart the Protestant Churches, but also because it summed up the catastrophic incompetence of this pontificate.

At least three quarters of the future cardinal-electors will have been appointed by Francis. So you might think that the conclave, while recognising Fiducia as a blunder, will be looking for a pope who supports Francis’s relatively undogmatic approach to issues of human sexuality. And so it might — if he’d created enough liberal cardinals. But he hasn’t.

In the early years of his reign, Francis adopted a tribal approach, especially in the United States. It was as if he was playing a Peronist board game, moving red hats to unlikely sees occupied by Bergoglian loyalists. Newark, New Jersey acquired its first cardinal: Joseph Tobin, who had been close to Ted McCarrick. Los Angeles was punished for having an orthodox archbishop, José Gomez, who really had his nose rubbed in it: instead of becoming the first Hispanic cardinal, he had to watch the honour go to his über-liberal suffragan Robert McElroy of San Diego, accused of ignoring warnings about Ted McCarrick’s predatory habits. Chicago got a red hat, as is customary, but it landed on the head of the aggressively Left-wing Blase Cupich, needless to say a Francis appointee.

Elsewhere in the world, Francis adopted a policy of appointing cardinals from the “peripheries”: Mongolia’s 1,450 Catholics have one; Australia’s five million Catholics don’t. Tonga has one, Ireland doesn’t. But, by doing so, he had to abandon his game of boosting liberals and twisting the tail of his conservative critics. These factional labels don’t mean much in the developing world. In the last two consistories he has created 33 cardinals, only a handful of whom hold Western-style radical views on sexuality. To quote one Vatican analyst: “Francis has wasted his chance to firmly stack the deck for the next conclave.” And now the college is full; even if he lives to call another consistory, he won’t have many places to play with.

The new cardinals tick various Bergoglian boxes. They relish the Pope’s attacks on free-market capitalism and his melodramatic warnings about climate change. None of them is a Right-wing traditionalist and until recently no one paid much attention to their ferocious views on “sodomy”.

Now those views really matter. To quote the same analyst, “when Fiducia Supplicans was published, the African cardinals ditched their Francis-worship overnight. The vast majority won’t vote for anyone who has backed Fiducia”. There are currently 17 African cardinal-electors; nearly all of them are in the anti-gay bloc. To these we can add at least 10 cardinals from Asia, Latin America and the West who share their views, even if they use milder rhetoric. Under current rules, a pope must be elected by a two-thirds majority of the cardinal-electors. This means that social conservatives, if they join forces with the significant number of moderates alarmed by Fiducia, can block anyone seen as progressive on homosexuality.

That’s bad news for Cardinal Luis Tagle, the ambitious former Archbishop of Manila. He was once dubbed the “Asian Francis” on account of his showmanship and socially liberal views. In 2019 Francis put him in charge of worldwide evangelisation — a huge prize that was snatched away when the Pope restructured his department and sacked him as head of Caritas, the Catholic aid agency dogged by sex abuse scandals.

It’s also tricky for Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the affable bicycling beanpole who’s Archbishop of Bologna. His politics are socialist — no problem for developing-world bishops — and during Benedict XVI’s reign he developed an enthusiasm for the old liturgy, even learning how to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. His stance on homosexuality is cautious — but he allowed a gay couple to have a church blessing in his diocese and then, disastrously, had his spokesman basically lie about it, claiming it wasn’t a same-sex blessing when it obviously was. Zuppi isn’t a fan of Fiducia Supplicans, but at the moment he’d run up against the blocking third.

Hardline liberals stand even less of a chance. Blase Cupich of Chicago isn’t papabile; nor are the “McCarrick boys” Tobin, McElroy, Gregory and Farrell, or the veteran European Leftists Hollerich, Marx and Czerny. The name of the Maltese Cardinal Mario Grech has been mentioned because he’s secretary general of the “synod on synodality”, a consultative body of bishops and lay activists that the Pope notably didn’t bother to consult about the new gay blessings. Grech, unkindly nicknamed “the Bozo from Gozo”, has seen his reputation collapse along with that of the toothless synod. His enemies describe him as the biggest toady in the Curia (unfair to Arthur Roche, many would say).

As for hardline conservative papabili, there really aren’t any; Francis has at least made sure of that. But there is a moderate conservative possibility: Cardinal Péter Erdő, Primate of Hungary. Unlike the exuberant, tearful Tagle, he’s an emotionally reserved scholar. When I met him for coffee in London years ago, we were half an hour into the laborious business of using a translator when he suddenly switched into fluent English. He has the reputation of disliking the limelight and being a bit thin-skinned — but at a synod on the family in 2015, despite arm-twisting from papal apparatchiks, he used his position of relator-general to deliver a masterful defence of traditional teaching. One Vatican-watcher describes him as “boringly conservative, which may be exactly what we need right now“.

What about moderate cardinals who are difficult to pigeonhole? The newest papabile is Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Italian-born Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. In recent months the horrors on his doorstep have revealed a diplomat of rare skill. His condemnation of IDF attacks on civilians in Gaza earned him a rebuke from the Israeli foreign minister — but he had earlier condemned Hamas for its “barbarism” and offered himself as a hostage in place of Israeli children. And while it’s not hard to believe him when he says he has absolutely no wish to be pope, it’s possible he may be forced to think again.

But any Vatican-watcher will tell you that new papabili flash through the sky during the last days of a pontificate. This time around they are busy memorising the names of Asian electors. (It’s generally assumed that after Francis we can forget about another Latin American or Jesuit for a few centuries.) Three names keep cropping up: William Goh from Singapore, orthodox on sexuality, quietly critical of the surrender to Beijing; Charles Maung Bo from Myanmar, also a critic of the China deal; and You Heung-Sik, the new prefect for the dicastery for the clergy from South Korea. Cardinal You is a fascinating figure: a teenage convert to Catholicism whose father had either been killed or defected to the North — no one knows. He then converted the rest of his own family. His faith is joyful and his vision of priestly formation far more attractive than Francis’s bitter tirades against “clericalism”.

Finally, we have to consider the most senior of all the papabili — Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who as Secretary of State (a mixture of prime minister and foreign secretary) is technically number two in the Vatican. The 69-year-old Italian is visibly on manoeuvres and his candidacy is being taken seriously. And that in itself is odd, because Parolin was in office when his deputy Becciu and others were embezzling or gambling with billions of dollars from Church funds. Also, he was the architect of the Vatican’s 2018 deal with Beijing, which — as former Hong Kong bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen warned him — would turn the Chinese Catholic Church, including persecuted underground believers, into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Communist Party.

That is precisely what happened. Zen, now 92 and regarded by many orthodox Catholics as a living saint, has used extraordinary language about Parolin: “He is so optimistic. That’s dangerous. I told the Pope that he [Parolin] has a poisoned mind. He is very sweet, but I have no trust in this person. He believes in diplomacy, not in our faith.’”

This thought is echoed by a Vatican source who has worked with Parolin: “He’s nice to everyone but hollow in the middle. Also, his health is bad. [Everyone in Rome mentions rumours of cancer and Parolin hasn’t denied it.] Last time I saw him he was so frail I was afraid to shake his hand.” But another source says (and this gives you a real flavour of Vatican gossip): “I wouldn’t put it past Parolin’s people to exaggerate the cancer thing, because they think the cardinals want a short pontificate.”

No one disputes that Parolin is a smart operator who specialises in making sure his fingerprints are nowhere near the scenes of various crimes. He nuances his statements on Ukraine and Israel while the Pope puts his foot in it with his improvised comments. He love-bombs potential enemies. Sensing a backlash against Francis, he is tacking Right, admitting that Tucho’s gay blessings are a nonsense.

To his critics, Parolin is the Italian Francis: empty, devious and sneeringly dismissive of the Latin Mass, an idiotic stance when you consider the surprising fact that the old liturgy is fast acquiring cult status among young Catholics. But are they overlooking one big difference? From the moment he became a cardinal, Bergoglio had his eyes set on the papacy and his gaze never wavered. Parolin, on the other hand, may recognise that he is too compromised to survive successive ballots. Perhaps his real ambition is to become a truly powerful Secretary of State under the next man.

And we really don’t have a clue who that will be. So much depends on how moderate, non-aligned cardinals vote. They are revealing nothing, especially now that the Vatican and probably diocesan curia are stuffed with hidden microphones. We can only guess what a swing voter such as Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster is thinking. Until recently he invoked the name of Pope Francis with cringe-making frequency. Now, not so much. He must be sick of the meaningless rhetoric of synodality and being pushed around by Arthur Roche. He clearly wasn’t impressed by Fiducia.

One can easily imagine mildly liberal cardinals voting for a mildly conservative candidate who can tackle the structural damage of the past 11 years. “Francis has left canon law with so many holes in it that it’s like the surface of Mars,” says a priest who has worked in the Curia. That’s infuriating for cardinals who, like Nichols, are diocesan bishops. They have to decide whether divorced-and-remarried Catholics can receive Communion, a desperately sensitive subject on which the Pope is deliberately evasive. And how do they ensure that these Fiducia blessings are “spontaneous”and “non-liturgical”? What does that even mean?

It’s a fair bet that, in their pre-conclave conversations, most cardinals will agree that the next pope must be someone capable of supervising an emergency repair job that clarifies doctrine, the scope of ecclesiastical authority and puts an end to the jihad against traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are a generation or two younger than the jargon-spouting Boomers harassing them.

Also, the cardinals know they must delve deep into the past of the leading contenders. They have no choice. The next pope will face instant, merciless scrutiny from online investigators. A 2021 article in The Tablet by church historian Alberto Melloni described an all-too-credible catastrophe: “The newly elected pope steps out. And as he smiles and humbly introduces himself to the crowds in the square, a lone social media post makes a stunning allegation.” The new pope, when a bishop, had failed to act against a priest who went on to commit further crimes. “In the square and in the press boxes, eyes drop from the balcony to their smartphones … The pope steps back inside, and resigns. The see is vacant again.”

The necessary scrutiny will be an awkward business, but at the very least the cardinals mustn’t repeat the mistake made by their predecessors in 2013 — that is, taking a candidate at his own estimation. The truth is that many Catholics in Argentina from across the ideological spectrum knew about Francis’s character flaws: his compulsive secrecy, score-settling, disturbing alliances and rule by fear. But no one asked them.

One might argue that none of the 120-plus eligible cardinals is quite so mean-spirited as the Holy Father. Fair enough; but there should be no question of electing anyone who imitates Francis’s modus operandi. No chameleons, in other words. No one who was orthodox under Benedict, liberal under Francis and is now slinking back to the centre.

The new pope must be a holy man who relies on lieutenants who have no dirt on him and on whom he has no dirt — and it’s a shocking fact that this would represent a departure from recent precedent. The pope must be above reproach. That is far more important than whether he’s “liberal” or “conservative”.

Traditionalists will disagree, but I don’t think it’s a bad college of cardinals. Cynics might say that’s because Francis, having made factional appointments early on, lost interest and appointed independent-minded men by accident. But let’s not neglect the role of social media: while the Praetorian Guard have been busy hiding things, countless websites have been making life difficult for the poisonous old toads who have been trying to fix conclaves for the best part of 2,000 years.

Melloni is probably right: as the new Supreme Pontiff shuffles on to the balcony there will be an unnerving moment while the faithful check their mobiles. But if the cardinals have done their job properly the applause will quickly resume. And if you listen carefully, you will hear another noise coming from every office in the Vatican: a sigh of relief that the Squid Game is finally over.

***

This article was first published on 27 April, 2024.

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Damian Thompson is a journalist and author

holysmoke

***

Israel’s secret weapon, as Golda taught, was Ain Brera: No Alternative. A companion phrase is Herzl’s Im Teratzu, ein zo Agadah. This is generally rendered “If you will it, it is no dream.” A better translation: “It is no fable (or tale).” The tale to which Herzl refers is The Torah. I understand him to mean that it is not merely a tale, that it is a promise: that God will return the Jews, from the ends of the earth, to their homeland. Herzl’s phrase is a reminder that the promise will be fulfilled, but we must act to fulfil it. That, as the age of miracles is past, God can only act in the world through human agency.

The handiest and most destructive phrase for the challenge begins “I wish”. No desire framed as a wish can ever be fulfilled. For who would fulfil it, if not the utterer, whose plea is actually a confession of failure? The replacement of the introductory “I wish…” with “I will” is Herzl’s instruction.

Through the Five Books of Moses — the Jews repeatedly face the lesson of the SAS: the test does not begin until one is assured the test is over and he has failed.

The escapees from Egypt found themselves wedged between Pharaoh’s murderers, and the Red Sea. They cried to God, and cried out against Moses: “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die? It would have been better to be slaves in Egypt than to die in the desert.”

Moses told them to stand firm and see what God would do to rescue them. He continued in what, to me, has been a most instructive verse: “The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again.”

I’ve found this a reliable comfort in a life with a sufficiency of both challenges and failures. I understand it thus: not that trust in God will bring about a foreseen resolution, but that although it may not, it will bring about God’s intended ends, which are finally, unknowable, save that we should trust.

The verse promises that acting on such trust will eradicate our fear; and, so, inspire courage in the subsequent trials we will surely encounter. But that the Egyptians — that is, the trial confronting us today, faced today — we need never face again.

Our lives are short, and we are often affronted, and often confused. The Torah acknowledges our insufficiencies as the human condition: that we, unaided, are incapable of facing, let alone surmounting, tasks beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is limited.

The alcoholic is addicted to both alcohol and to doubt, which he understands as certainty. That he cannot go through life without alcohol is the surest thing he knows, in fact, it is the central belief of his life. He tells his sponsor in AA that he can’t imagine life without a drink and is told no one can; and is asked to do something quite different: to go through the next 24 hours without drinking. Like the Jews at the Red Sea, he is challenged to enter a state, which he can only understand as death. But without death, there is no rebirth.

The Special Forces ordeals are designed to break the mind, so that it can be reformed first to imagine then to accomplish that which, prior to the reconstruction, the applicant would have been considered impossible.

The Rededication of the Temple in 165 B.C.E. required oil sufficient for eight days of purification. The Maccabees only had enough for one day. They did not, however, wish that God would perform a miracle, but listened to God, who told them to proceed in any case. They did so, preferring God’s understanding to their own — an event worthy of consideration.

Happy Hanukkah.

Those few women whom Weininger liked or respected thus turn out to have been men all along. “These so-called ‘women’ who have been held up to admiration in the past and present, by the advocates of women’s rights, as examples of what women can do, have almost invariably been what I have described as sexually intermediate forms.” George Eliot was more man than woman; in her movements as in her prose she “lacked all womanly grace”. Weininger remained firm in his conviction that in the “real female”, talent is “rare and feeble”, and therefore that talented women (often lesbians) were basically men.

Sex and Character isn’t just a series of armchair speculations; Weininger also ventured into the field, so to speak. Part of the book is devoted to the “laws of attraction” governing sexual relationships. Weininger believed he had discovered the basic law, for which “almost every couple one meets in the street furnishes a new proof”. The law dictates that everybody seeks their sexual complement. If an individual is three-quarters male and one-quarter female, they will be most attracted to one who is one-quarter male and three-quarters female. Weininger proved this law by showing pictures of women to his male friends and guessing who they would find most attractive (he boasts about his perfect score). This law, he added, offered an obvious “cure” for homosexuality: “sexual inverts must be brought to sexual inverts, from homosexuals to Sapphists, each in their grades.” That is to say, the most effeminate gay men (who are, as Weininger would have it, basically women), ought to be set up with the manliest lesbians (basically men) — and that way constitute a heterosexual pairing, by anybody’s definitions. “Knowledge of such a solution,” he hoped, “should lead to the repeal of the ridiculous laws of England, Germany, and Austria directed against homosexuality.”

Real salvation, however, could be achieved only in celibacy. Weininger’s answer to the “Woman Question” is that “man must free himself of sex”. His misogyny is not therefore one which calls for the subjection of women, but rather their total obsolescence: he is much closer to Nick Fuentes, who preaches that “having sex with women is gay”, than Andrew Tate. The ordinary objection to universal celibacy — that human beings would go extinct — is no match for Weininger’s ferocious intensity. Such an objection is impious, since it denies eternal life after death for those who merit it, and cowardly, too; he is scathing about St. Augustine for weaselling out of the logical conclusion of his premises.

As this may suggest, Weininger had, in the year before his death, swapped Judaism for an idiosyncratic Christianity. His blend of misogyny with antisemitism characterised Judaism as “saturated with femininity”. Jewish traits, to his mind, were feminine ones: the Jews were “habitual matchmakers”, “devoid of humour but addicted to mockery”. Jews were, to Weininger’s odd mind, all basically women. Although Zionism had “brought together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews”, and appeared to represent Judaism at its most assertive, ambitious, masculine, it was doomed to failure by the fundamental fact of Jewish effeminacy. Jews ought, according to Weininger’s counsel, to convert to Christianity; but fully escaping one’s Jewishness was a difficult task, and only one man had ever managed it. Christ was born a Jew for a reason, according to Weininger; “it was his victory over Judaism that made him greater than Buddha or Confucius… Perhaps he was, and will remain, the only Jew to conquer Judaism.”

Weininger was not Christ, so he took the only other path available to him. Eckart was probably right to speculate that Weininger killed himself as a self-hating Jew. There is a certain logic to the absurdities of Sex and Character, and Weininger doggedly pursues them all to their conclusions, even to the point of death. The arguments of the book — and there can be no doubt that Weininger believed them intensely — leave him with little alternative. There may be some consistency in madness.

Sex and Character was a particularly fevered product of anxieties about a “crisis of masculinity” and “feminisation of society” that we still hear a lot about, both within and without the manosphere. However eccentric and often outright loathsome, some of his ideas left more than a trace. One would be hard-pressed to name an early-20th-century figure who wasn’t influenced by him: Freud read and critiqued the earliest draft of Sex and Character, and James Joyce drew upon it when crafting Leopold Bloom. Sex and Character is, moreover, perhaps the fullest exposition ever written of the pathologies of the self-hating Jew. It is no wonder, then, that Weininger is often taken as the perfect, parodic encapsulation of the tensions and traumas of the Vienna of his day — of a society that entered the new century with its identity confused and its confidence lost.

For all that Wittgenstein matured out of his Weininger-fandom, he never shook off his fascination. It wasn’t necessary, or even possible, to agree with Weininger, he explained to Moore, “but the greatness lies in that which we disagree”. If one were to add an enormous negation sign to the whole book, he said, one might get at an important truth. Now, I am not convinced of this either: Sex and Character would probably be as mystifying with a negation mark as without one. But it is worth reading as a historical document, because of how well it captures the neuroses of the age in which it was written. And it is worth reading for the reason that all the world’s weirdest books from bygone eras are worth reading — to grimace at the unpleasantness and foreignness that Wittgenstein warned Moore about, and then be struck by those occasional jolts of familiarity.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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Luigi first reached out to me via email on 6 April. He said he was a long-time fan of my work, and had just purchased a $200 founding membership to my blog, which entitled him to a two-hour video-call with me. A month later, on 5 May, we had our chat.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. He said he was on holiday in Japan, and that he loved many aspects of the culture there, such as the sense of honour, but believed the country was full of “NPCs”, that is, people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email. One morning he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. On their way back to the man, who was seizing on the ground, the police refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red, even if the road was empty. For Luigi, this story represented “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.

I quickly realised that agency was a major concern of Luigi’s, especially as he mentioned three articles of mine which had particularly resonated with him, all of which describe threats to human autonomy.

He went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who spend their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Luigi, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

But it wasn’t just Japan. Luigi believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviours. The West was following closely behind Japan, driven by tech companies intent on mesmerising us into servile consumers. Luigi feared that once we’d surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

Unlike most people who decry others as NPCs, Luigi showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he had lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more agentic.

Along with discussing how my favourite philosophy, Stoicism, could teach him to live more deliberately, I also suggested to Luigi that he should avoid automating tasks, which led us to discuss my essay about gamification.

Luigi had much to say about this essay, not least because it involves the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who shared his belief that modern life is taking away people’s agency. I made it clear that, while I agreed with some of what Kaczynski had written in his manifesto, I found his acts of terrorism abhorrent. Luigi agreed, saying something along the lines of: “he deserved to be taken seriously, but he also deserved to be in jail.”

Besides Kaczynski, Luigi’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional. When I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Trump or Biden, but liked some of the things RFK Jr. was saying. I regard RFK Jr. as a crank who regularly pushes harmful pseudoscience, but I didn’t mention it so as not to derail the conversation.

Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Luigi implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited and accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences. It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularised by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, but also un-agentic. If you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Luigi’s agency, I pointed out, as politely as I could, why he was wrong.

After our chat, I sent Luigi an article debunking epigenetic trauma. He thanked me for the article, and also told me he’d bought me a six-month subscription to a reading app which he believed would help make my job easier.

I have Asperger’s, so I’m a poor judge of social cues. Further, I have liked every subscriber I have had a video-call with, of which I have had many, so I’m probably not very discerning in that regard. But to me Luigi seemed like a particularly nice guy.

It wasn’t just that he had bought me a subscription to an app that he thought might help me. It was also that he frequently expressed concerns about humanity generally. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but tempered with a sense of humour and a focus on solutions rather than mere complaints. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to be corrected.

We interacted on social media several times afterwards, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he had been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.

And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.

Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionising the killer. Some were frustrated about the costs of health insurance or outraged that a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, CEO of America’s largest health insurance company.

But while thousands reacted on social media with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.

When Luigi was revealed as the suspect, I was bewildered. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues that he could have done this. The only salient detail was probably when Luigi briefly mentioned that healthcare in the US was expensive and that we Britons were lucky to have the National Health Service. But this statement alone gave no indication Luigi might have been capable of murder.

When the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be quite so surprised. I have long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” Leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.

Much more puzzling than the cruelty, though, was the stupidity. Luigi had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Smart people might be better able to rationalise stupid actions and beliefs, but Luigi’s alleged rationalisation, given in a short “minifesto”, was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.

As shown by data blogger Cremieux Recueil, the minifesto gets a lot wrong. It claims that “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy”, ignoring the fact that America’s life expectancy has little to do with health insurance and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, it makes basic factual errors, such as confusing market cap with revenue. The writer even admits they don’t know what they’re talking about: “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”

Not only was the justification for the targeting of Brian Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.

Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts. As the economics blogger Noah Smith points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit is about half of the average of S&P 500 companies. According to the Harvard economist David Cutler, who has written extensively about the US healthcare system, healthcare costs are so high because of administrative inefficiencies. Insurance companies have become so bureaucratically bloated as to administrate a wildly unstandardised healthcare system. This bloat now accounts for one-third of the delta between US healthcare costs and those of other high-income countries.

Brian Thompson was a normal, flawed guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his duty to shareholders whose investment his company depended on. He was a tiny cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Ted Kaczynski called such decentralised problems “self-propagating systems”, recognising that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it. If Kaczynski’s bombs and book-length manifesto couldn’t destroy such a system, then Luigi, with his alleged 3D-printed pistol and shoddy minifesto, certainly can’t.

People allocate agency strategically, assigning praise to allies and blame to enemies. Luigi’s supporters misattribute total agency to Thompson so they can scapegoat him for a societal problem he had little control over. Meanwhile, they deny all agency to Luigi, claiming he was pushed by a corrupt system or simple back pain.

But, while they’re wrong about Thompson, they may have a point about Luigi. If he was in extreme pain, or in the grip of mental illness, it would explain why a man who was consistently thoughtful in his interactions with me may have committed a monumentally thoughtless act, rationalised by an equally thoughtless note.

On the other hand, if Luigi was mentally or physically unwell, it’s unlikely he’d have been able to carry out a meticulous assassination and then evade authorities for almost a week while travelling across one of the most surveilled regions on earth.

In my limited interactions with Luigi, I never got the impression he had spinal or mental issues. But I did get the sense he felt alienated. He often decried the lack of social connection in the modern world, and on a couple of occasions he lamented that the people around him were “on a different wavelength” to him.

On 10 June, I received my last communication from Luigi. It was a seemingly innocent request; he wanted me to help him curate his social media feed. I’d already given him tips on how to do that, so the question struck me as odd. Rather than accepting a call, I directed him to a relevant article I’d written and offered to answer any questions he had about it. I never heard from him again.

In retrospect, I wonder if his request was an awkward cry for help, as a New York Times journalist told me it was his last known online communication. It’s hard not to wonder if, had I answered his call, things might have turned out differently.

I don’t know if Luigi ever found the agency he came to me looking for. If he didn’t, I hope he gets the help he needs. But if he did find his agency, well, the price of agency is culpability.

***

A version of this article was first published on The Prism on 22 December 2024.

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Gurwinder Bhogal is a freelance writer. His work can be found at gurwinder.substack.com

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Second, The Leopard exposes the failure of Italian Unification. Lampedusa shows it to have been basically a takeover of the south by the north. The Piedmontese envoy sent to persuade the Prince to become a senator in the new united legislature refers to the happy “annexation” before hastily correcting himself to “union” while the Prince himself predicts that it will “simply mean Torinese rather than Neapolitan dialect, that is all”. Unification was also maimed at the start by the mendacity of the liberal nationalists who simply binned contrary votes in the referendum on unification. In the film, the announcement of the cooked result becomes farcical as the off-key band keeps on breaking into Don Calogero’s platitudinous speech.

The enduring relevance of The Leopard to Italy is obvious. Nearly 175 years after unification, the country remains fundamentally divided between north and south, and more so than any other European country. The Mezzogiorno — as the south of the country is often called — still lags far behind the more developed north. A major contemporary political party, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, has espoused secession in the past. No wonder that The Leopard is a set text in Italian schools.

It is with respect to Europe as a whole, though, that the book resonates most powerfully today. Before we can understand why, we need to come to a better understanding of the author’s beliefs and intentions. The cynical phrase about things changing so that they can stay the same was certainly Tancredi’s belief and the Prince’s hope, but it reflected neither Lampedusa’s own programme, nor what he was trying to convey about the nature of the Risorgimento. It has been widely misinterpreted.

The author despaired not only of the Sicilian aristocracy from which he descended but also of the island as a whole. We know from his excellent biographer David Gilmour that Lampedusa was no reactionary, but an Anglophile Whig. He dearly wished that his ancestors had grasped, for example, the possibilities opened up to them by the British-brokered Sicilian constitution of 1812. He wanted nothing more than for his countrymen to wake from their torpor and join what he called in the novel “the flow of universal history”. Visconti captured this inertia well with the two great scenes which bookend his film: the lengthy opening recitation of the rosary, so rudely interrupted by news of Garibaldi’s landing; and the interminable dance sequences, a kind of aristocratic rosary, at the end, punctuated by gunshots marking the execution of some now redundant revolutionaries.

It was, in fact, the Prince himself who delivered the most devastating indictment of Sicily’s failure to progress. Surely, the kind if naïve Piedmontese envoy asks, “the Sicilians must want to improve”? The Prince replies that “the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery”. Their “pride”, he continues, is merely “blindness”. What Sicilians want from politics, the Prince says, is “sleep and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them”. That is why, he explains, the island had always been a “colony” and, we intuit, always will be.

Unsurprisingly, The Leopard shocked Lampedusa’s aristocratic relatives when it came out, and outraged wider opinion in Sicily. The book was clearly an indictment of the island and its history. Leonardo Sciascia, then Sicily’s greatest living writer, bitterly attacked it on those grounds. If he later recanted, then only because he had come to agree with Lampedusa.

The author did not believe that things did not change. They plainly did, even in the novel. The Prince’s power, and that of his class, slips away in myriad ways. He himself acknowledges in a famous exchange with his confessor, Father Pirrone, that the nobility has merely secured a stay of execution, not developed a viable strategy for long-term survival. In due course, Mussolini plunged the nation into a catastrophic war, which Lampedusa alludes to only in passing, in an aside about the Pittsburgh-made American bomb which later shatters the palace in which the ball took place. When Lampedusa was writing in the Fifties, the latest conquerors of Sicily had been the Anglo-Americans who landed on the island in 1943, booted out the Nazis, and blasted his childhood home in Palermo to pieces.

Europe today is Italy yesterday (and today). The continent, Henry Kissinger lamented back in 2019 at a policy event, had “checked out” and was making neither a sufficient financial nor an adequate intellectual contribution to the common defence. If it persisted in this stance, Kissinger also warned, the continent would end up as a “strategic appendage of Eurasia”, of the Sino-Russian cartel — in effect a colony.

Kissinger could easily have expanded the indictment. At the time of his remarks, the European Union was attempting to run a common currency without a common state or even a common economic policy, causing a sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the euro. It had created a passportless common travel area without properly securing its external border, resulting in an unprecedented migration crisis. Meanwhile, the continent was rapidly losing its economic edge to the Indo-Pacific. In the field of security, Europe was not only failing to mobilise against Vladimir Putin’s ambitions but actually deepening its dependency on Russian energy through the construction of a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Even Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, though it produced the biggest European response to date, did not lead to a sea change. In fact, some European countries like Germany are beginning to retreat from the strong stances they adopted at the outset. Olaf Scholz’s much-heralded Zeitenwende has thus joined the long list of turning-points at which German (and European) history failed to turn. Scholz’s government wanted to change things just enough so they could stay the same. In security terms, most of Europe is still little more than an American colony, completely dependent on US military protection. But as the war in Ukraine reaches its denouement and President-elect Donald Trump threatens to withdraw, or at least re-negotiate, the American defence umbrella, the Continent needs to wake from its deep Sicilian slumber.

If Europeans really want things to remain halfway the same, in other words to maintain their standard of living, security and territorial integrity, they will have to make some very far-reaching changes. As British and American observers, including the present author, have repeatedly pointed out there are basically two options. Europe can form a full political union rallying the entire resources of the Continent on the lines of the United Kingdom or the United States. Alternatively, the Continent can re-configure itself as a looser confederation of sovereign nation-states each of which is truly committed to its own and the collective defence through Nato. So far, Europeans have done neither, not because anyone is stopping them, but because like The Leopard’s Sicilians they prefer the rest of oblivion to the effort of action.

Most likely, neither the election of Donald Trump, nor the dire situation in Ukraine will actually rouse Europe from its torpor. As Russia advances, Europeans will recite interminable rosaries about the need to “step up”, but they will not undertake the necessary fundamental reform. Europe’s vanity is stronger than its sense of strategic squalor. Like Lampedusa’s Sicily, the Continent thinks itself already perfect, and certainly far superior to its Anglo-American lecturers. But the idea that Europeans just have to change a little so that things stay the same is an illusion. While the continent sleeps, things are changing, and will continue to change, just not for the better.