He came on Friday in the Vatican list for the meeting on Amoris laetitia (the section of the Pope’s guests, which is the one that counts) with only one Spanish name: that of Cardinal José Cobo. Spain already had a seat, Argüello’s, who is going for the position, but Leo XIV wanted another for the Archbishop of Madrid. And someone who knows just enough physics (high-school level, plus a bathtub or two) immediately thought of cork.
Cork is an extraordinary thing. It weighs between 0.12 and 0.24 grams per cubic centimeter and is made almost entirely of air trapped in dead cells. Robert Hooke looked at it under the microscope in his Micrographia of 1665 and found little empty boxes that he called cells, like those in a convent. Hence the word cell. Modern biology, in a way, was born by looking into the hollow of a stopper.
Archimedes explained the rest without needing cardinals: what is less dense than water rises. When a ship sinks, the first things to surface are not the captain or the anchor, which have the ugly habit of weighing, but the corks, the buoys, the beach coolers, the little duck floats… Everything that carried nothing inside. For cork, shipwreck is a form of ascent.
Cobo has risen exactly that way. Auxiliary of Madrid in 2017, archbishop in June 2023, cardinal announced when he had not even been twenty-four hours in the see, member of the dicastery that chooses bishops, ordinary for the Eastern Churches and vice-president of the Episcopal Conference with 39 votes: a career that cannot be explained by any idea (or by any that weighs) but by the complete absence of ballast. Upon entering that dicastery he confessed his “surprise” at the “new responsibilities the Pope keeps giving me.” Cork does not swim: it is lifted.
There is something admirable in that. It is not easy to speak so much and leave nothing behind, which is the most sophisticated way of not getting wet. Before the Pope’s visit he explained that the motto, “Lift up your eyes,” meant that “looking to heaven is looking beyond in order to look together, to look others in the eye.” In other words, heaven, properly viewed, is horizontal. White-cork prose (which, by the way, is not even cork).
The Valley of the Fallen was the laboratory test. There was a prior there, Santiago Cantera, who weighed: he had ideas and he held to them, which is the quickest way to go to the bottom. The Vatican put Cobo in charge of whatever happened at Cuelgamuros, and the archbishop did what cork does when there is a current: go with it. In a meeting with journalists whose audio ended up in the press, he admitted having delivered the government’s message to the Benedictines: “if they don’t throw you out, you have to undergo a process of conversion.” Cantera left the Valley. In July, Cobo blessed the new abbot.
Then came the changing of the captain, which in the Church is the closest thing to a shipwreck. Francis died, the one who had given him everything, and a pope’s men usually look apprehensively at the water level when the next one arrives. Cobo looked at nothing. He himself announced Leo XIV’s trip to Spain, received him in Madrid in June and is the only Spaniard among his October guests. Whoever moves does not appear in the photo, Guerra used to say. Cork does not move and appears in all of them.
But there is something else, and it is more serious. Peter walked on the lake while he looked at the Lord and began to sink as soon as he was afraid: he weighed, he had a body and a faith that could fail. Cork does not need faith to walk on the waters. It is enough for it to be empty. Christ also emptied himself (the kenosis of Philippians, which is not the same as emptiness, although in certain homilies they are confused), but he emptied himself to descend even to death: descendit ad inferos. Cork is empty in order to rise.
On Wednesday Cobo will sit at the Amoris laetitia table, and on the 15th, fresh off the plane, he will speak in Barcelona about synodality with a title that floats by itself: “An old novelty.” Ships sink, priors leave, popes pass. Cork floats. And survives.
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