Magazine causes stir about election of Bergoglio

A biography of Cardinal Godfried Danneels has caused controversy in Belgium because a weekly magazine reported – inaccurately – that it reveals a secret network of church reformers who allegedly paved the way for the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis in 2013, writes Tom Heneghan.

The former archbishop of Brussels may have fuelled the fire by describing the so-called “St Gallen group” – a network of reform-minded prelates founded by the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini – in a television interview as “a kind of mafia”. Canon law bans lobbying for a papal candidate.

The biography by Jürgen Mettepenningen and Karim Schelkens – church historians at the Catholic University of Leuven – says that Cardinal Danneels was part of the group that included cardinals Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Walter Kasper, Karl Lehmann and Achille Silvestrini. They began meeting in St Gallen, Switzerland in the mid-1990s to discuss ways of modernising the Church after the papacy of John Paul II. But the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 dashed their hopes and they held their last meeting in 2006.

When Godfried Danneels – Biography was published last week, Le Vif magazine carried an article entitled “Godfried Danneels worked for years for the election of Pope Francis”. It said the election was “prepared in St Gallen ... and the outlines of his programme were those that Danneels and company discussed for over 10 years”.

The authors issued a statement denying their book ever spoke of lobbying by the group at the 2013 conclave.

The 542-page biography included the 2010 sexual abuse scandal that tarnished Danneels when it emerged that he had protected a bishop who had abused his own nephew.