Gabriel Garca Mrquez on the crusading Colombian who could be the new Pope
Cardinal Daro Castrilln Hoyos sleeps in the bed that Pope Pius XII died in. The painting of the Immaculate Conception hanging above the bronze bedhead once belonged to Leo XIII. His apartment, lying 30m from the border between Italy and the Holy See, belongs to the Vatican and his study looks on to the pope’s bedroom window. Most of the furniture in this apartment was plucked from the shipwreck of the centuries by the Vatican antiquarians.
The walls of the corridors, bedrooms and study are lined from ceiling to floor with bookshelves stuffed with volumes in various languages, suitable for the man who, among other tasks, watches over the ministry of the clergy, religious education and the administration of the church’s “temporal goods”.
Most of the books are theological, philosophical and pastoral tracts, some are classics in the original Latin and Greek. Very few are works of contemporary literature.
At 69, Castrilln lives and thinks in Colombian and he’s proud of it as he shows us around his apartment room by room. Where books permit, there are paintings on the walls. Some are antiques but most are popular Colombian folk pieces, with echoes of his own pastoral history. The altar of the chapel where he takes mass every morning at six is decorated with art from his homeland.
A primitive carving of Christ sits propped on two planks of wood. The cardinal’s most remarkable, indeed notorious, piece hangs in the reception room – a biblical scene of the maiden Susanna bathing naked in a spring while two men spy from the bushes. Painted by Jos Ramn Tarazona, it won first prize in a religious art competition organised by the cardinal when he was archbishop of Bucaramanga. Tarazona painted in a veil at the last minute so as not to offend the jury. Later he painted in another one so that he could give it to the archbishop as a present.
This rustic man with the profile of an eagle is far from your academic image of a cardinal. His domestic staff consists of two tiny, quick-witted Colombian women, devout Catholics who keep the house in the childlike cleanliness and order of a convent. They are experts in their regional cookery with a growing repertoire of Italian dishes. The cardinal enjoys good food, but his tastes are more nostalgic than gastronomic. He likes to take lunch around his eight-seater dining table. Recently he surprised Andrs Pastrana, the Colombian president, and his retinue with a traditional breakfast of fried beans, tortillas and scrambled egg with chorizo.
It is admirable that the cardinal can maintain a house on his salary as a prefect of the holy congregation of the clergy: four million lira, less than R15 000. The Vatican has its own internal supermarket with humanitarian prices, but Italian workmen aren’t so accommodating. The cardinal drives his clapped-out Volkswagen himself because he doesn’t have a budget for a driver and can only afford one tank of petrol per month. This is ironic considering the vast sums of money he handles for the church. No Catholic church transaction anywhere in the world worth more than $500 000 can take place without his signature.
Four things stand out in this shepherd of souls’ apartment: a piano in the library, a treadmill and exercise bicycle in the bedroom, and an incredibly expensive hi- tech computer in the study. All can be explained away. The piano is the family heirloom with which the cardinal began his studies in religious music, and upon which he continues to play folk songs from his childhood, and the odd work by great composers.
“Chopin?” I ask him, deliberately provoking him. He shakes his head. “Chopin’s pieces for children.” The treadmill and bicycle, on the other hand, are utterly indispensable for the cardinal who has won his battle against the rust of old age. Whenever he can, he water- skis and rides horses.
He gave up the bike for the treadmill, which he uses first thing in the morning while watching the news. He would return to the bicycle, he says excitedly, if someone invented a pedal- controlled video projector.
The computer, expensive as it is, is a matter of life or death for someone obliged to be in constant contact with every parish in the world. In the past, the Vatican communicated by letters hand-delivered by bishops and parishioners. Castrilln now operates with a four-gigabyte computer and a personal website, .
A few blocks away are his offices at the Congregation of the Clergy with a privileged view over St Peter’s Square and into the rooms where the pope works. In these offices, Vatican documents are stored and information is processed and transmitted so that every bishop in the world is kept up to date with papal paperwork.
The service is provided in the eight languages that the cardinal speaks: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, German, French, Latin and Greek. He is currently learning Arabic.
It’s hard to believe that this strange figure, an unpredictable cross between popular Latin American culture and Renaissance reserve, is the same man who managed two bishoprics in Colombia with the severity of a cleric at war. Since his ordination into the seminary of the Santa Rosa de Osos, aged 23, he has seen the priesthood as a form of crusade for social justice. He followed that calling like a poet driven by the mystical gift of inspiration, first as bishop of Pereira for 22 years, then as president of the Latin American episcopal council (Celam) and finally as archbishop of Bucaramanga, until he was called to Rome to be appointed the sixth Colombian cardinal.
“Just as he advised the poor to be diligent, he advised the rich to distribute their wealth wisely and share out their earnings,” one of his oldest friends has said. In Pereira, a prosperous and peaceful city, he tackled the greed and corruption of the coffee barons.
Those who sent him cheques to assuage their guilty consciences found their money returned with a note that they should worry about the hordes of homeless sleeping on the streets. Every night at midnight, he went out on to the streets himself and distributed bread and coffee to the children he found there. He was a great admirer of the lucidity and kindness of the streetwalking madmen who alleviated their hunger in conversations with themselves. “The mad know more about life and human rights than the sane,” he would say.
When, upon leaving his house at dawn, he began to stumble on the corpses of those madmen, shot dead with the beggars, prostitutes, orphans and street children, he understood that someone was carrying out their own savage interpretation of social justice.
He went straight to the head of the police. When the head of police took no notice, he went straight to the president; when the president took no notice, he took to the pulpit. “At 11 o’clock last night, I invited the boys for a coffee,” he shouted. “At dawn, some were dead and others had disappeared. Chief of police, answer me: where are my children?”
The response was immediate. The disappeared reappeared on the streets, but no one could resurrect the dead so Castrilln left the city.
When drug trafficking threatened to wipe Pereira off the map, the bishop pressed for the extradition of drug barons. Dressed as a milkman, he went to the house of Pablo Escobar (the notorious drug trafficker) in Medelln. An arrogant Escobar asked him who had sent him. “The one who will judge you,” the bishop replied drily.
Moments later, Escobar was confessing. Castrilln asked him if he prayed the rosary, if he had taken first communion and if he repented of his crimes. He told him that the only sins the church could not forgive are those committed against the Holy Spirit.
Escobar was respectful, humble even. He let the bishop record their exchange, he even addressed a message to the Colombian president: if the government promised not to extradite him, he pledged to liquidate the entire Medelln cartel, surrender his weapons and his fortune and give up terrorism. The president turned the offer down.
But what shook the bishop were Escobar’s parting words. “If I have to kill the whole of Colombia just to stay here with my wife, I’ll do it without flinching.”
As archbishop of Bucaramanga, Castrilln experienced first hand the inconsistency and dogmatism of Colombian guerrillas and the swift counter-actions of the military.
Each accused the other of the same sins, but the archbishop was never taken in. “I can tell who is who from the shape of their bootprints in the mud.”
Both sides trusted him and both sides turned to him as a mediator. Among his souvenirs of that period, his favourites are six rifle cartridges from both the guerrilla and military sides that he collected himself between two rounds of fire in a local skirmish. He mounted them on a silver base and named the ornament “Bullets of Peace”.
Today, he is less given to illusions. He feels that neither the guerrillas nor anyone else have much of a sense of the country they are fighting to create. After 40 years of war, he sees a new generation emerging with a warlike mentality that has little to do with the rest of Colombia.
“Anyone from the countryside with a gun thinks they have the power of a government minister. Arms are their new way of life,” he says. “This is not about dialogue, it’s about negotiation. No one wants to give up power without the promise of something in return. No one wants to bargain with something they have shed blood over.”
No doubt his actions as president of Celam were decisive in his current standing. Ronald Reagan was stubborn in the belief that the Latin American church had benefited from armed revolution by taking the side of the guerrillas.
Castrilln convinced him that taking the side of the guerrillas and struggling against social injustice were not necessarily one and the same. In any case, the cardinal argued, he was acting within Celam, he was authorised by the papal ambassador and he was steeped in the thinking of John Paul II.
Few know that he interceded with George Bush to prevent United States troops being sent to Nicaragua when the Sandinista government came to power. His argument was that after all the progress made by Mikhail Gorbachev, it was necessary to separate the future from the past. From then on, his diplomatic efforts were so intense, and so discreet, that some leading journalists were certain that he was working as a secret mediator between Gorbachev and the US to end the arms race. The cardinal denies it as solemnly as he would deny a secret from the confessional.
As he recounted these memories on Maundy Thursday in his flat in Rome, I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask what on earth had spurred him to get involved in all this worldly confusion. “I wouldn’t have spent five minutes on any of this if I didn’t believe in the existence of eternal life,” he said.
By the end of 1995, rumours had spread that he would be called to Rome. In 1996, the pope cryptically informed a meeting of Colombian bishops at the Vatican: “I am going to Colombianise the Curia [the papal court and government].”
No one knew what he was talking about until the first of July when the papal ambassador to Bogota urgently telephoned Archbishop Castrilln to notify him that he had been named prefect of the clergy and would be based in Rome, an appointment which would open the way for him to be made a cardinal in the next church council.
Castrilln had been in Rome a few times, he had met the pope and they had talked about Latin America, particularly Colombia. Nevertheless, when his holiness received him for the first time as prefect, he didn’t address him as usual by his first name Dario, but by his second surname. “Good morning, Hoyos,” he said. Castrilln interpreted it as a secret sign that he would not be cardinal.
He was wrong. On February 23 1998 Daro del Nio Jess, the only child of Manuel Castrilln Castrilln and Mara Hoyos Salas, born in Medelln on July 4 1929 under Cancer, the sign of the dreamers, was made cardinal of the holy church of Rome.
With him, 20 other cardinals were appointed from various corners of the world, with the notable exception of the secretary of the People’s Evangelical Congregation, the Croatian Guiseppe Kuhac, who had died the night before.
Another, the Archbishop of Lyon, Jean Baland, died within two months. The Italian prefect, Alberto Bovone was presented with the cardinal’s hat in a Roman clinic. He died shortly afterwards.
Seduced by the homely manner in which the cardinal was telling me his life story, I asked him whether these things scared him. He told me his secret. When he was a priest in the Colombian countryside, he made up a series of short, almost instant prayers that he repeats before taking a serious risk. “For example, I’d always say them before an interview.” He pauses and smiles. “I did before this one.”
Fourteen months have passed since he was made cardinal but he moves with enormous ease between the real world of Italy and the fantasy world of the Vatican, responding distractedly when Swiss guards stand to attention as he passes, and describing the sights like a professional tourist guide. Effectively, he is the field marshal of an immense and timeless empire less than 1km2 in size, he has more than a billion subjects on earth and all the saints in heaven, but this does not give him vertigo.
His good humour remains untouched by the invisible thread that ties him to the greatest army in history: four million priests who hear his voice on their computers in seven languages each day and another four million in monasteries and closed communities who represent him in their parishes as they go about their sermons and baptisms.
His meetings with the pope are frequent and friendly and he has a privileged audience to discuss ministerial business. The papal dignity has certain restrictions. Telephone conversations are forbidden and every official lunch is timed to begin at 1pm in memory of the Last Supper, with the added pagan superstition that one of those invited must always “betray” that set time. “The traitors can then be replaced,” I am told. But the pope has other lunches at home in groups of three: his holiness, one guest and one witness.
On various occasions, that guest has been Cardinal Castrilln. Others have included the French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray and the Italian Cardinal Camillo Ruini. It can’t be a coincidence that both are in the running to be pope. A recent distinction on Castrilln’s part was assisting his holiness in the Holy Week services, and acting as his server in the baptism mass.
The frailty of John Paul II worsens day by day, so it’s only natural that there should be an accumulation of omens about his successor. All the cardinals are eligible. You don’t have to be single or a priest to be Pope. Any baptised male is eligible. Those who favour Castrilln base their theories on his identification with the ways of John Paul II, and the observation that he treats Castrilln as a disciple.
He may also win the vote of the Third World Catholic community, Asian, Africans and Latin Americans. Before making him a cardinal, the pope entrusted Castrilln with the co- presidency of the synod of the Americas, the council of bishops that evaluates the church’s work and plans its course for the next millennium. If you add the votes of the US and Canada, you have 50% of the Catholic world.
The papacy was the only subject we hadn’t touched on by Easter Saturday after three days of lunches and afternoon apple teas, a superb concert by the Argentinian tenor Jos Cura in the Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, and hours spent chatting and reminiscing. Each time I tried to sound out the cardinal’s views on the rumours of papal candidacy he elegantly side-stepped the question.
When we came to say goodbye, his words were more elegant than ever. “May God preserve this pope for many years and may he be the one who prays over my tomb.”
A friend of mine had more luck by asking him straight out if he would like to be chosen. He answered like a pope. “You can’t say no to the Holy Spirit.”