VATICAN CITY (The Borowitz Report)—This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. For Cardinal Bonifacius Steuer, last night was supposed to be a time of celebration, when the Dutchman who had dreamed of being Pope ever since his boyhood days in Rotterdam would finally stand on the balcony at the Vatican, basking in the cheers of thousands of the euphoric faithful.
There are no cheers for Bonifacius Steuer today. Only empty silence, and time to reflect on what might have been.
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you,” Cardinal Steuer said, in his first interview since his bruising defeat. “It kills me not to be there, not to be in the Vatican doing what needs to be done.”
While Steuer said that he is “not going to get into that whole blame-game thing,” he sounded bitter when he spoke about the mainstream media. “People weren’t allowed to see me for who I was,” he said. “They made me look like I’m some rich, rich guy, when you know that I’m as poor as a church mouse.”
But what closed the deal for Pope Francis, Steuer believes, was his outreach to the poor, which the Dutchman calls a “failed policy of the past.”
“Look, if you go around saying, ‘the poor this, the poor that,’ you’re going to get a lot of support from people who want free stuff,” he said. “Francis’s campaign, if you will, focussed on giving targeted groups a big gift.”
Reflecting on the two-day conclave that chose someone else, Steuer was philosophical: “We were on a roller coaster, exciting and thrilling, ups and downs. But the ride ends. And then you get off. And it’s not like, oh, can’t we be on a roller coaster the rest of our life? It’s like, no, the ride’s over.”
Steuer said it’s “too early” to talk about his future plans, but that he first intends to sit down with his closest advisers to reflect on what went wrong this time around. “I’m going to meet with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and I’m going to be like, ‘Come on, guys, don’t hold back,’” he said.
But even as he sounded an aggrieved note as he spoke about “the hand I was dealt,” Steuer seemed to reserve his harshest criticism for one person: himself.
“Look, at the end of the day, this is on me,” he said. “This was all about getting enough Catholic votes, and I didn’t get it done.”
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Photograph by Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty.
