ALEXANDRE MONIZ BARBOSA
The choice of name of Leo XIV, completes in a manner of speaking the Papal trilogy of Morris West, where fiction has come as close to reality as possible.
As an avid reader of fiction, one writer whose works came rushing back to memory as the announcement of the new Pope was read out from the balcony at St Peter’s Square are those of West.
West may not be too familiar a name in Goa. He was an Australian writer who died in 1999, but what triggered the mind were his three books on Popes and the Vatican, and how what he penned has turned almost prophetic.
West’s first book in this trilogy was published in 1963 and is titled ‘Shoes of the Fisherman’. It was about Kiril Lakota, a Pope who was elected from behind the Iron Curtain. Some 15 years later, in 1978, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II and came from Poland, a country that was under communist rule and on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The similarity in the names of Kiril and Karol was not lost on me when I first read the book, sometime in my teenage days.
The book was subsequently turned into a film with Anthony Quinn playing the role of Pope Kiril I and also starred Lawrence Olivier.
West’s next book in the trilogy was ‘The Clowns of God’, published in 1981, about a Pope who abdicates. John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI resigned from the Papal throne in 2013. In the book, the Pope announces his resignation in the presence of a full consistory of cardinals. In reality, Pope Benedict did so to the Cardinals.
Of course the reasons for the resignation in the book are, well dramatic and fictional, and better left for reading in the book than discussing them here.
Which brings us to West’s third offering in the Papal trilogy, ‘Lazarus’, published in 1990 and about a Pope Leo XIV, a conservative. How the papacy of Leo XIV pans out will be seen over the next few years, for now, it is only the name that is significant.
These are not the only works of West on the Vatican, but other eminently readable books include ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ of which there is also a movie version and ‘Eminence’.