Read Online Pandora's Curse - v4 by Jack du Brul - Free Book Online

would ever receive the two-thirds needed, so each side began to play a waiting game, hoping that the final ballot on the twelfth day, when a simple majority would take the election, would see their man victorious.
    The reasons for this loggerhead were varied, but the church was at a crossroads, changes in the world had to be addressed, issues that the Curia had put off for decades could no longer be ignored, and a leader for the twenty-first century was needed. Some cardinals felt it was time for Catholicism and the papacy to modernize while others believed a more conservative, and in some instances reactionary, hand was needed.
    On the eighth day, several of the more diplomatic cardinals realized that the bitterness infecting the conclave would likely spill over and infect the new pope’s reign. The church must show a united front, they felt. A compromise was needed. A third candidate was put forth, a man who could act as a temporary solution while the church decided its future. Cardinal Salvi was seventy-four years old and in poor heath. His reign as pope, they knew, would be a short one, giving each side time to further debate points of doctrine.
    A week after Giuseppi Salvi became Leo XIV, he was in the hospital and the cardinals feared their solution had been too temporary, much like the first John Paul, who’d been pope for just over a month in 1978. However, tests confirmed that his ill health was not a grave concern. Instead, doctors found he suffered from gastric reflux, a condition he’d never discussed. Surgery for his malformed stomach valve was performed, and within a few weeks, he had made a near-miraculous recovery.
    It was at this point that Leo XIV began to change the church, reshaping it into his vision of what it should be with a vigor that stunned the hard-liners who’d elected him. He appointed his closest friend, the liberal Cardinal Peretti, to the secretariat of state, the Vatican’s number two position. Leo had always been considered a moderate but this crucial appointment loudly stated that the status quo was about to end. He made it clear that the topic closest to him, and thus all of the church, was raising religious tolerance around the world and stamping out fanaticism. Rather than issue papal decrees on the subject, he decided to go directly to the bishops who oversaw the dioceses.
    He called for a special synod of bishops, and such was the importance he placed on this meeting, he made Peretti its president. In another unusual step, Leo XIV invited other religious leaders to attend. Though they would have no voting rights, he wanted them all to understand the Vatican’s position on the subject of tolerance. Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and bishops were common at synods, but Leo also wanted Jewish leaders from Israel and the United States, prominent Buddhist monks including the Dalai Lama, influential Mullahs and Imams from both the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam, Shinto priests from Japan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who headed the Anglican church, and hundreds of others.
    Gathering this great body fell on Cardinal Peretti, and the sheer logistics were staggering. An ordinary synod took a year to organize and the pope had given him only six months, not only to bring together one hundred and seventy bishops from the Catholic Church, but all the others as well.
    Dominic Peretti was a native Roman, sixty-five years old and something of a Curia outsider because of his modernist views on artificial birth control. Like Leo, he believed that some form of population control was going to be crucial for the sustainability of civilization. As pope, Leo couldn’t openly declare such a belief, but by giving Peretti power within the Vatican, his intentions were clear.
    The Synod on Tolerance was a planned first step to bring the church closer to other religions so that, at some point, this other topic may be discussed. The Vatican was a two-thousand-year-old institution that moved at the ponderous