“Maneuver against Pope Benedict XVI”

MADRID.— In the book “El Sucesor”, from which the Spanish newspaper “ABC” published an extract yesterday, Pope Francis explains the reasons that led him to stop a “maneuver” to block the candidacy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and confirms that he himself voted for him.

“I had forty of the 115 votes in the Sistine Chapel. They were enough to stop the candidacy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, because, if they had continued to vote for me, he would not have been able to reach the two-thirds necessary to be elected Pope,” Francis confesses in “The Successor,” a book-interview with the correspondent of “ABC” Javier Martínez Brocal, published by Planeta and which will be released tomorrow in Spain.

“The maneuver consisted of putting my name in, blocking Ratzinger’s election and then negotiating a third, different candidate.”

“When I realized (…) I told a Latin American cardinal, the Colombian Darío Castrillón: ‘Don’t joke with my candidacy, because right now I’m going to say that I’m not going to accept, eh?’ Leave me there.’ And there Benedict was already elected” who, the current Pope confesses in the book, which has the subtitle, “My memories of Benedict XVI”, “was my candidate”.

In the pre-publication released by the monarchist newspaper, Pope Bergoglio denounces that the idea of ​​those who promoted him was not that he would be elected.

Foreign

“The maneuver consisted of putting my name in, blocking Ratzinger’s election and then negotiating a third, different candidate. They told me, later, that they did not want a ‘foreign’ Pope,” maintains the current Pontiff, who affirms that “it was a full-fledged maneuver” to “block the election of Cardinal Ratzinger.”

“They used me, but behind them they were thinking about proposing another cardinal. They still did not agree on who, but they were about to name a name,” says Francisco, who maintains that he was not behind the plot.

Candidate

Even the current Pope confesses that Ratzinger “was my candidate.”

Why? Martínez Brocal asks him.

Because “he was the only one who at this moment could be Pope. After the revolution of John Paul II (…) there was a need for a Pope who would maintain a healthy balance, a transitional Pope.”

And, Bergoglio concludes, “if they had chosen someone like me, who makes a lot of trouble, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. At that time it would not have been possible. I left happy.”—Digital Religion.