Conclave | #5
Who Will be the Next Leader of the Catholic Church?
After Pope Francis’ death, the conclave erupts into holy chaos. Cardinals are part diplomats, part schemers. They leverage modern tools (AI, social media, opposition research) to lobby, sabotage, and outmaneuver rivals. Publicly, they project piety and unity. Privately, they’re calculating politicians racing to exploit cracks in the Church’s fragile global coalition.
Please note: this is fiction.
The Relic Gambit
For Cardinal Herrera, it all ended with a parchment. A 16th-century indulgence, its edges singed by time, surfaced on SacraStakes’ shadow market—auctioned as collateral for bets on his papal odds. The document, “Pro remissione peccatorum (For the remission of sins),” bore the wax seal of a Medici pope and a proviso: “Bidders must demonstrate contrition (or liquidity).”
Herrera’s fingerprints were subtle: a whisper to a Kraków-connected broker, a nudge to list the relic as “verified.” He’d aimed to buoy his relevance; instead, he’d anchored himself to history’s grift.
Sister Margherita intercepted the listing. “They’re trading salvation futures, Eminence. Your name’s on the margin call.”
Herrera palmed a rosary of Baltic amber. “Authenticity is… fluid.”
“Fluid as the Tiber after rain,” she countered. “The Medici seal is a forgery. And the Latin’s shoddy.”
The leak hit at Matins. L’Osservatore Romano splashed the indulgence across its front page, pixelated and damning. TradCath forums erupted: “Is Herrera the New Tetzel?” “Can I Venmo penance?”
Luca, Herrera’s aide, hovered at the confessional’s edge. “They’re saying you’re monetizing grace.”
“Grace is currency here,” Herrera snapped. “Or have you missed the votive candles?”
“The candles don’t charge interest.”
Matteo traced the forgery to Kraków’s crypto miners, their server farm humming in a deconsecrated chapel. Amid the rigs, he found a familiar hand—a scribe from Palermo, once his rival in the scriptorium. “You did this?”
The scribe smirked. “The Medici paid in ducats. Herrera pays in clout. Which tarnishes faster?”
Herrera’s redemption play unfolded like a bad hagiography. He announced a donation of his SacraStakes “earnings”—87,000 Monero and a crate of counterfeit relics—to migrant aid. The press conference reeked of desperation: a banner reading “Charity Over Crypto” flapped limply behind him, its font Comic Sans (Luca’s doing).
Caritas International’s director, a nun with the glare of a desert saint, inspected the relics. “A third-century martyr’s femur?” She held it to the light. “This is PVC.”
“A symbolic gesture,” Herrera insisted.
“We prefer literal bread.”
Luca cracked at Vespers, his guilt outpacing his ambition. “I’m joining the Jesuits,” he told Herrera, clutching a dog-eared copy of The Spiritual Exercises.
Herrera scoffed. “They’ll eat you alive.”
“Better them than this.”
Nguyen intervened quietly. He reclaimed the forged relics, smuggling them into the Vatican Gardens under cover of night—a nod to his grandmother’s wartime daring. Beneath an olive tree, he buried the PVC femur alongside her rosary. “Inter vulnera,” he murmured. “Amid wounds.”
Matteo cornered Herrera in the archives, a forged mea culpa in hand. “Sign this, or I publish the Kraków ledgers.”
Herrera’s pen hovered. “You’re worse than Judas.”
“Judas didn’t have leverage.”
Byrne brokered the silence. Herrera’s departure was swift, his legacy reduced to a footnote in the next day’s bulletin. Luca took his Jesuit vows in a chapel lit by the cold glow of his phone’s SacraStakes app, still open to Herrera’s flatlined odds.
Matteo left the forged confession in the Archivum Secretum, tucked between Tetzel’s indulgence receipts and a 1943 sugar ration. On the back, he’d scrawled: “Ubi grift, ibi exitus.” (Where there’s grift, there’s an exit.)
Nguyen tended the olive tree, its roots cradling plastic and prayer. Above, St. Peter’s dome loomed—a relic, a rebuke, a thing that refused to crumble.
The Palimpsest Prophecy
Matteo’s manifesto arrived not as a pamphlet, but as a whisper—a single line etched into the margins of conclave ballots, scribbled on sacristy walls, and tucked into communion wafers: “Ecclesia est palimpsestus. Denudate nos ad membranam.” (The Church is a palimpsest. Strip us to the vellum.)
By dawn, the phrase had metastasized. Seminarians chanted it during Lauds; trad influencers dissected it as “neo-gnostic heresy”; a Slovenian nun set it to a haunting arrangement of the Salve Regina. Matteo, ever the specter, left no signature—only the faint scent of Sicilian bergamot and the ghost of his grandmother’s defiance.
Nguyen found him in the Archivum Secretum, bent over a 13th-century Summa Theologica annotated by a long-dead cardinal’s mistress. “You’ve given them a weapon,” Nguyen said, tossing a ballot defaced with Matteo’s words.
“A mirror,” Matteo corrected. He pointed to the mistress’s marginalia: “Thomas, you dreary man—grace is messier than this.”
“You’d reduce us to scribbles in a heretic’s diary?”
“Better than marble lies.”
Outside, Volkov’s faction processed through the courtyard, their chanted Psalms a wall of sound. Nguyen’s shadow fell across Matteo’s manuscript. “They’ll burn your words. And you with them.”
Matteo’s smile was a shard of glass. “Fire reveals what paint hides. Ask your grandmother’s rosary.”
Nguyen stiffened. The rosary—buried with forged relics days prior—had been her last act of rebellion. Scrape us raw.
“You think yourself Savonarola,” Nguyen said.
“Savonarola had a pulpit. I have this.” Matteo tapped the mistress’s note. “She knew the truth: God prefers graffiti to gloss.”
By nightfall, Matteo’s words bled beyond the Vatican. Graffiti quoting “Ecclesia est palimpsestus” appeared on the walls of Roman trattorias and Dublin dive bars. A Franciscan friar in Naples stenciled it above a soup kitchen, replacing us with you. In Kraków, the crypto miners etched it into their rigs—a mantra for their unholy communion.
Nguyen descended to the crypts, where the tombs of dead popes lay like dormant sentinels. Before Pius X’s sarcophagus—a man who’d condemned tango as “pelvic heresy”—he lit a candle. The flame trembled, casting shadows that danced like his grandmother’s silhouette in Hanoi’s bomb-lit chapels. “Sancte Pater,” he murmured, “Did you fear the margins too?”
The silence hissed back.
Above, Swiss Guards stormed the archives. Byrne orchestrated the raid himself, barking orders with the cadence of a man saving a soul by arresting it. Matteo offered no resistance, his hands stained with ink and sacramental wine. “Strip us to the vellum,” he whispered as they led him away, quoting his own manifesto back to the frescoed saints.
In his cell—a windowless alcove near the Archivum Secretum—Matteo carved “palimpsestus” into the stone with a stolen communion wafer. The guards, bribed with Monero and existential doubt, looked the other way.
Nguyen’s ballot, when revealed, sparked pandemonium. The conclave scribe squinted at “Crescere.” “Not a name, Eminence?”
Nguyen’s reply, though silent, echoed louder than any homily: Growth is not a name. It is a reckoning.
Matteo’s cell door creaked open at dawn. Byrne stood framed in light, a dossier in hand. “Volkov’s faction wants you tried for heresy. I want you quiet.”
Matteo flicked wafer dust from his cassock. “Quiet as a margin?”
Byrne tossed him a key. “Quiet as a footnote.”
Outside, Nguyen’s “Crescere” unfurled like a vine on the Vatican’s facade, its letters etched by anonymous hands. Somewhere, a Slovenian nun hummed the Salve Regina, her voice threading through the cracks.
The Unseen Council
The final ballots fell like leaves in a storm, each “Crescere” in Nguyen’s hand a blade slicing through vellum. The tally teetered—76 votes, two shy of the sacred threshold. Cardinal Volkov rose, his cassock a shroud, to invoke the ius exclusivae, a veto dormant since Pius X banned the tango. “Silentium!” he thundered, but silence had already curdled into revolt.
From the sacristy’s gloom, Sister Agatha emerged, her arthritic hands clutching a scroll older than the schism. “The Council of Worms, 1521,” she rasped. “Nullus veto in conclavi—no veto in conclave. Unless”—she paused, savoring the Latin—“you are Martin Luther.”
Volkov’s face purpled. “This is farce!”
“No,” Sister Agatha said. “This is footnote.”
The scribe, a Benedictine with a martyr’s patience, struck Volkov’s name from the roster. The chapel exhaled—a sound like centuries of held breath.
Byrne slid his ballot into the urn, the ink still damp. “Nguyen. (Deus adiuvet nos.)” (Nguyen. God help us.)
Matteo watched from the Archivum Secretum, a stolen key burning his palm. The manifesto’s final line—“Ecclesia est palimpsestus”—glowed on his screen, auto-translating into a hundred tongues. In Kraków, the crypto miners toasted with sacramental servers; in Hanoi, a nun read his words over static-crackled radio.
Nguyen knelt before the altar, the Fisherman’s Ring glinting like a shackle. Herrera approached, hollowed out by scandal, and pressed not a coin but a 3D-printed relic into his hand—a “femur” from his failed charity gambit. “For the poor,” he croaked.
Nguyen pocketed it. “They deserve better jokes.”
Nguyen walked the Vatican Gardens at dusk, Matteo’s manifesto a quiet weight against his heart. The olive tree he’d planted over the fake relics had sprouted a single shoot, its leaves trembling in the wind like his grandmother’s fingers clutching her rosary. He knelt, pressing Herrera’s 3D-printed femur into the soil. “Inter vulnera,” he murmured again. Amid wounds.
A Swiss Guard coughed discreetly. “Eminence, a visitor.”
Matteo stood at the garden’s edge, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Byrne lingered behind him, a train ticket to Palermo peeking from his cassock.
“You’re letting him go?” Nguyen asked.
“Footnotes,” Byrne said, “belong in margins.”
Matteo tossed Nguyen the stolen archive key. “For the next heretic.”
In the Piazza San Pietro, a journalist thrust a mic at Matteo. “What’s next for the Church?”
He grinned, squinting into the sun. “Ever seen a forest after a storm?”
Behind him, a Slovenian nun’s Salve Regina hummed through a bullhorn, her choir of anarchist friars chanting Matteo’s manifesto.
That night, Nguyen stood beneath St. Peter’s dome, the Fisherman’s Ring cold on his finger. In the shadows, a Swiss Guard bet his last euro on the new pope’s survival. “Odds on walking on water?” his buddy asked.
“Nah,” he replied. “Odds on growing? Infinite.”
Nguyen plucked a withered leaf from a saint’s weathered hand. For a moment, it might’ve been his grandmother’s—calloused, unyielding, alive. He let it fall.
“Crescere,” the wind whispered back.
Epilogue
Three months later, a sapling breached the Vatican Gardens’ wall, its roots cradling a PVC femur and a rusted rosary. Matteo’s graffiti glowed on every continent: “Ecclesia est palimpsestus.” And in Kraków, the miners toasted with sacramental servers, their rigs now mining something far more volatile than crypto.
Finis
(The End)
Thank you!
This five-part story was generated using DeepSeek, with some human edits (~75% AI)
Prompt: Now that pope Francis has died, we need to come up with a fictionalized, entertaining, humorous, and highly relevant account of the search for a successor. This story will be called Conclave. Provide plot ideas now. Read [news articles] for inspiration, but don't focus too much on their exact content; we're looking for something new and original.(…)
Prompt: Let's use ideas 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8! AI is a great angle, but we must stay away from old tropes: old-timey-robot-voice, evil-AI-taking-over-the-world, hacker nonsense. Instead, let's think of more interesting and realistic options. No time travel.(…)
Core Premise: The Francis Algorithm (Inspired by Idea 8)
Pope Francis left behind a cryptic final message: “My successor lies where the lions sleep.” The Vatican’s secretive AI system—SACRA (Systematic Algorithm for Catholic Revelation and Ascension)—is tasked with decoding it. SACRA, designed to analyze centuries of encyclicals, historical texts, and Francis’s own speeches, spits out absurd clues that send cardinals scrambling across Rome. But SACRA has a quirk: It’s been trained on too much medieval theology and Francis’s off-the-cuff jokes, leading to gloriously unhinged interpretations.
(…)
Prompt: Why would Francis leave any clues? Why a treasure hunt? No, that's not what we want at all. The Vatican's own clunky AI system is weird: can that really make for a good story? Think it through. Maybe add a political angle. Try again.(…)
Core Premise: The Digital Crusade
The death of Pope Francis triggers a conclave where 133 cardinals—divided by ideology, geography, and ambition—vie for power. Behind the scenes, they weaponize modern tools (AI, social media, leaks) to lobby, sabotage, and outmaneuver rivals. The story unfolds through three lenses: global cultural clashes, tech-driven political scheming, and the absurdity of maintaining dignity in a meme-driven world**.
(…)
(10 more prompts were needed to get something decent)
"Is there a worse insult than "And the Latin's shoddy."?
I like the bit about monetizing Grace and Judas not having leverage!
😎