This English-born 20th century conservative could be an inspiration for the next Pope

Yahoo

08-05-2025

The only English-born pope was Adrian IV in the twelfth century. But another such candidate came close, in successive conclaves in 1903 and 1914, when it was effectively impossible for a non-Italian to be elected.
Rafael Merry del Val was insuperably qualified by experience, character and a cosmopolitanism that made him almost emblematic of the universal aspirations of Catholicism. He was the most widely admired cardinal in the curia. He would have been a perfect pope for his times. His rational, discerning conservatism would also make him a model for the sort of pope we need now.
His birth in London's Portman Square in October, 1865, was an accident of his Spanish father's diplomatic career, but Rafael absorbed Englishness along with the sporting ethos of his prep school in Bournemouth. When his first job in the Church took him to a chaplaincy for the poor in a Roman slum, he taught the boys cricket as well as catechism.
He always dreamed in English and longed for an English parish, but his talents made him indispensable in Rome: mastery of music and languages; perfect recall of faces and conversations; a lively sense of mischief, tempered by tact; inexhaustible energy and efficiency; charisma and commanding presence, which every acquaintance found compelling.
The wise and wily Leo XIII picked Rafael for an accelerated career. In 1887 he sent him to tender the pope's congratulations on Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, with the rank of a papal chamberlain and the title of a Monsignor – an almost unheard-of honour for a young man who was not yet a priest. I suspect that, although Leo had a reputation as a friend of the proletariat, he was also a bit of a snob, impressed by Rafael's aristocratic family and friends.
Such connections helped. But Rafael rose by merit. When the pope died in 1903, after a pontificate so long that everyone had forgotten how to run a conclave, the cardinals picked Rafael to organise the election, even though, unlike predecessors, he was not Italian and not yet a cardinal.
The outcome was the election of one of the simplest and saintliest of popes, Pius X, whom Rafael had to persuade to discard modesty and diffidence for pontificality. The new pope and young priest shared tastes in music and liturgy and exchanged profound respect and love. Pius made Rafael the youngest cardinal and Secretary of State to the Holy See – the best job in which to become papabile, because it gives a candidate a chance to get to know electors and to shine in the curia's most conspicuous role.
The Secretaryship demands worldly competence. Rafael combined it with extraordinary sanctity. He dissipated his wealth in charity. He did most of his good works, stringent mortifications and sacrificial self-denials secretly: their scale only became known after his death.
Even his faults seemed holy: the exasperating length of his public prayers, his neglect of his possessions, his impenetrable spells of self-scrutiny. However busy with official duties, he never failed to return, every day, to his old slumland stomping-ground, to call on former pupils and their parents, say Mass, slip secret alms under needy doors and take part in the sports he organised and the plays and music he wrote. No one who sought his spiritual counsel was ever turned away. As a diplomat he had to do deals with secular governments, but as a priest he was unyielding with anyone who opposed or rejected Catholicism.
He would have brought the same clarity to the papacy – the clarity the Church needs now in rejecting trends Rafael denounced in his day: moral relativism, blurred values, subversion of the family and the conversion of the Church to the ways of the world instead of the other way round.
He encouraged beautiful, dignified liturgy, strict sexual disciplines, vocations to traditional married love and unremitting devotion to all the sacraments. He never became pope, but never pined for preferment. The litany he wrote makes a perfect prayer for anyone in a top job in Church and world alike: 'That others may be preferred to me, .... provided only that I may become as holy as I should – Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.'
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a professor of history who has taught at Tufts, Queen Mary and Oxford
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