After the President of the European Parliament, what’s wrong with dreaming of a Maltese Pope?

Pope Francis is still at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, slightly better but still in a critical state.

Some, or many, and not just within the Catholic Church, seem to have given up on him and are speculating on the imminent Conclave.

It is one of those almighty coincidences that right on cue there is the film Conclave, with a masterful act by Ralph Fiennes that is breaking box office records and winning awards.

The scenes from the Sistine Chapel and the arcane rituals associated with the choice of a new Pope ensure worldwide  fascination about the power play behind closed doors.

I do not want to spoil things, but the absolutely incredible end of the film comes as a huge surprise.

Here in Malta, however, all this is relegated to the side by a section of the Maltese media that is speculating that Cardinal Mario Grech is a frontrunner.

It doesn’t take much to identify the ‘Pope-Whisperer’ behind this wave of speculation, forgetting the tried and tested Vatican lore that “he who enters Conclave a Pope comes out a Cardinal.”

The wave of credulity first tainted MaltaToday forgetting this was the same news organisation that years ago speculated that papal nuncio Joe Spiteri was about to follow Archbishop Paul Cremona as Archbishop of Malta only to learn a few days later that the new Archbishop was to be Charles Scicluna.

Now, the Pope-Whisperer has struck at The Times of Malta on the strength of a couple of Vatican media hacks.

In reality, Cardinal Grech will most probably not be the one.

The book and the film Conclave give a fair appreciation of the forces that would be at play in any Conclave held in the near future – the conservatives in the Church that have been marginalised by Pope Francis and the left-leaning Church of the Poor such as the Italian Zuppi of Bologna.

There is a huge swell of anger against Pope Francis on issues such as communion to divorcees, women deacons, and so on, spurred by the right-wing English language press that is daily becoming angrier at the current Pope.

Where does Grech feature in all this? He is definitely a creature of Francis picked from the diocese of Gozo and promoted to the Secretariat of the Synod. And even the Synod has its deniers.

The outcome of any electoral process, such as a Conclave, depends on the interplay of many factors and is extremely uncertain.

What is rather surprising (or not surprising at all) is the credulity of the Maltese media, which they then pass on to their readers and viewers. But this is no news at all. It happens all the time and all over the place.