All it took was a walking stick to change history. According to a story that has emerged since the death of Cardinal Carlo Martini, one of the most notable Catholic leaders of the past 50 years, the former archbishop of Milan deliberately used a cane when he participated in the 2005 conclave to elect a new pope after the death of John Paul II, thus signalling to his fellow cardinal voters that he was too ill to be chosen.
If Martini had ditched his stick, we might now be seeing another conclave beginning and the church would be a very different place. Given that Martini said in an interview released after his death that the Catholic church was 200 years behind the times, one must assume that a Martini papacy would have been a radical progressive one, and that the target of Martini's critique from beyond the grave is the current papacy.
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