On a flight back from World Youth Day 2019, Pope Francis casually asked Cardinal Kevin Farrell to tackle a task steeped in Vatican tradition: camerlengo.
This position, also referred to as chamberlain, involves managing the Holy See throughout the sensitive period between papacies and orchestrating the conclave to elect the subsequent pope.
Cardinal Farrell, then relatively recent to Rome after being summoned from Dallas, Texas to guide the Vatican’s laity office, accepted the role with a humorous condition: that the Pope preach at his funeral. The stipulation reflected Cardinal Farrell’s hope that he would predecease Francis, thereby avoiding the weighty responsibilities of the camerlengo.
Underlying the jest was a deeper sentiment. Cardinal Farrell not only felt the burden of the position but in addition expressed a private desire to not outlive a pope he deeply admired.
He credited Francis with initiating an important shift within the Catholic Church, moving away from defensive culture wars towards a more inclusive, Gospel-centered approach.
“We were defending ourselves all the time: self-preservation was the theme of the church,” Cardinal Farrell observed, contrasting this with Pope Francis’s emphasis on “welcome and accompaniment”.
This shift, in Cardinal Farrell’s view, marked a significant renewal for the Church, redirecting its focus towards its core values.
The camerlengo’s role
With Francis’s death, though, Cardinal Farrell is within the highlight, albeit only until a recent pope is elected.
Cardinal Farrell on Monday morning announced the death from the chapel of the Domus Santa Marta hotel where Francis lived and died. In a brief statement read live to tell the tale Vatican television, he said Francis’ “entire life was dedicated to the service of the Lord and of his church”.
According to tradition, the camerlengo certifies the pope’s death, seals the papal apartment and breaks the pope’s fisherman’s ring, as a logo of a emptiness on the Holy See. He leads the procession accompanying the coffin into St Peter’s Basilica and presides over the burial.
The camerlengo also gets written reports from Vatican offices about their current assets; a replica of the present and projected budget for the Holy See; and another information from the Vatican’s economic ministry that will be useful for cardinals and the longer term pope.
He and the dean of the College of Cardinals, Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then play key roles in organising the meetings of cardinals preceding the conclave.
Cardinal Farrell, a no-nonsense Irish-born American, said the financial duties are much more necessary than the ceremonial ones and those for which he’s more qualified.
He already heads top Vatican committees on funds, investments and confidential matters, in addition to its supreme court, making him particularly well-suited to deliver a financial prospectus to the brand new pope.
From Ireland to the US
The man Francis selected to bridge his papacy was born in Dublin on 2 September 1947. He entered the Legionaries of Christ religious order in 1966 and was ordained a priest for the Mexican-based order in 1978. He left six years later (long before revelations that its founder was a paedophile who sexually abused his young seminarians) and have become a diocesan priest within the Washington Archdiocese.
He worked in a series of parishes but in addition took on increasing charge of the books within the archdiocese. He has a keen mind for funds but says he never finished his MBA. He became auxiliary bishop of Washington in 2001 and served under the ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick before being made bishop of Dallas in 2007.
Cardinal Farrell has said repeatedly that in his years in Washington, he never heard the rumours that McCarrick had behaved inappropriately with seminarians, sleeping with them in his bed while he was a bishop in New Jersey. McCarrick, who died earlier this month, was defrocked after a Vatican investigation in 2019 found he sexually abused children in addition to adults.
Cardinal Farrell said he was comfortable and “very comfortable” as bishop in Dallas when his secretary got here to him in May 2016 to inform him the pope was on the phone.
“And I said ‘the pope’s not on the phone. Popes don’t use telephones,’” Cardinal Farrell said, assuming one other bishop was playing a prank. “And so I picked up the phone. I used to be about to inform him where to go,” when unexpectedly the voice on the road said quietly in Spanish: “Soy Francisco” (“This is Francis”).
The two had never met, but Francis knew Cardinal Farrell spoke Spanish fluently, given his years within the Mexican-based Legion.
A Vatican task
Francis also knew that Cardinal Farrell had made it a policy in each Washington and Dallas to place qualified lay experts, reasonably than priests, in positions of authority in running the dioceses.
Cardinal Farrell said Francis asked him to do the identical with the Holy See’s laity office, which the pontiff desired to rebuild by merging it with the Vatican’s family and life departments and function a model of lay-led governance of church management.
“I used to be attempting to give you every reason why I shouldn’t do it. And he said, ‘Well, you consider it for 3 days and I’ll call you back,’” Cardinal Farrell recalled. “Three days later, at the identical time, I get a telephone call after which I gave him all my reasons that I had formulated. And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you come on over and confer with me?’
“Well, that was the top.”
He moved to Rome in October 2016 to go the laity office. Within hours of his arrival, Francis announced that he could be made a cardinal.
It was an indication, later confirmed along with his nomination as camerlengo, that Francis fully intended to entrust him with a few of crucial responsibilities of the church, including after he was gone.
