This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 12, 2013 - Update Black smoke appeared again Wednesday from the chimney of the Sistine chapel, signaling that no pope has been elected yet. The first vote was taken Tuesday. After two more ballots this morning, the second and third of this conclave, the Cardinals went to lunch. They are expected to take two more rounds of voting this afternoon unless the 115 cardinals give one man 77 votes in the next round. End Update
By this weekend, the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics might have a new pope.
No one knows how many ballots will be needed for the 115 cardinal-electors who come from 50 nations to give one man 77 votes: two thirds plus one. The longest election since World War II — 11 ballots over three days — was the 1958 conclave that chose Venetian patriarch Angelo Roncalli as John XXIII. In that conclave’s early balloting, votes were cast for Milan archbishop Giovanni Montini who was not yet a cardinal. By the next conclave (1963), he had his red hat and became Paul VI. In 2005, just 24 hours were needed to elect Benedict XVI.
When Romans see white smoke indicating a decision coming from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, thousands will rush to St. Peter’s Square. (The popular saying is that Romans only turn up for the announcement of the new pope and then for his funeral.)
Within about an hour from the sighting of the smoke, a cardinal will appear at the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and proclaim "Habemus papam" — "We have a pope." He will announce the name of the man elected and the papal name he has chosen. Then, the new pope wearing a white cassock will address the crowd and the world.
No rush to judge
"Don’t believe the first thing you hear about" the new pope, said the Rev. Christopher Collins, a Jesuit priest who teaches in the theology department at Saint Louis University. Liturgical Press recently published Collins’ new book, "The Dialogical Theology of Joseph Ratzinger — Pope Benedict XVI."
On April 19, 2005, as soon as Ratzinger’s first name Joseph was enunciated from the balcony, friends watching television with Collins groaned.
“They thought that he was this horrible tyrant," Collins said. Even Collins, who has since spent years studying the man, assumed that the German scholar’s public reputation as "the pope’s Rottweiler" must hold some validity.
"Nothing could have been further from the truth,” Collins said. "He is this gentle, tender, holy man. I can’t think of another theologian who writes more pastorally and lovingly about the faith. Not scholastic theology. Not remote. Everyone can understand his writings. They are not about rules. They are completely Christ-centered. The person of Jesus is at the center of the faith in his theology."
Cardinal-electors at the 2005 conclave would have known Ratzinger’s gentleness and humility and have had regular face-to-face visits with him in his previous role as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Defense of the Faith.
"When a new pope is announced, we need to go beyond the usual places to get deeper background about him," Collins said. Like many Vatican watchers, the Jesuit priest thinks the field of potential candidates for this conclave is wide open and he’s been reading widely to learn more about many of the 115 cardinals who might be pope.
Handicapping votes
To get some context to how the voting might proceed, we can go inside baseball and look at old stats gleaned from interviews over the years and research. In 1978, in the second round of balloting, Luciani (John Paul I) led with 53 votes, but a fresh candidate -- Poland's Krakow Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, absent from the first ballot -- suddenly appeared with four votes.
After the sudden death of John Paul I, a conclave with 111 cardinal electors began in mid-October 1978. In the first round, six Italian cardinals were among the seven with the most votes. On the low end, Wojtyla had five votes. Bernadin Gatin of Benin, Jan Willebrands of the Netherlands, Basil Hume of London, England and Jaime Sin of the Philippines got from one to three votes on that first ballot.
The expected frontrunner, Italian Cardinal Giuseppi Siri, got 23 votes on that ballot. His support waned, with no votes by the fourth ballot. The leader at that point was Giovanni Benelli from Florence. Wojtyla was seen as more traditional; and, abruptly, on the eighth ballot, Wojyla received 73 votes (to 38 for Benelli) and became Pope John Paul II.
In 2005, just four ballots taken over three days were required to elect Benedict. It is widely believed, but never officially confirmed — votes are never officially confirmed — that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger began with a strong lead of 50 votes on the first ballot and on the third the cardinal-electors put him over with 84. Like John Paul I and John Paul II, Ratzinger thought it was a terrible mistake for him to become pope. Ratzinger asked for and got a fourth ballot. His support remained, and the white smoke flew. Once John Paul II had sufficient votes to be elected, he too asked for one more ballot, according to Frederick Baumgartner, former president of the American Historical Association and author of the 2003 book "Behind Locked Doors, A History of Papal Elections."
The faithful pray
On Tuesday, cardinals said mid-morning Mass together at St. Peter’s, got together for lunch and then, in mid-afternoon, formed a prayerful procession through Vatican halls to the Sistine Chapel. In their entrance procession, the 115 cardinals will chant the names of scores of saints, asking them to pray to God for aid in the solemn voting ahead.
Around the world, Catholics will add their prayers. Tuesday all three Masses at the St. Louis Cathedral, for instance, will be offered for the cardinals to find a holy, wise pope. Worldwide, in dozens of languages, Catholics have gone to a lay-run website called Adopt-A-Cardinal and have been assigned an individual cardinal to pray for during the conclave.
Some children at Holy Infant Parish School in Ballwin are praying for the most beloved graduate of their school, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, to become pope. But not all who are devoted to Dolan are praying for that result.
"I am praying it won’t be Cardinal Tim Dolan. All he ever wanted to be was a good parish priest," said Patricia Ryan, a Catholic daily communicant, who recalled that when Dolan was an assistant at Immaculata Parish in Richmond Heights, he would come to her family’s home and say Mass for her dying mother. "Even then he was such a holy, caring, wonderful priest."
Such thoughts are not unusual: The Rev. Georges Ratzinger’s immediate reaction to his brother’s election was that it was a "terrible thing" to ask of an old man.
How the vote works
Tuesday, once the cardinal-electors are seated at the dozen tables, one cardinal will tell all others to leave the chapel: "Exeunt Omnes." Then, the chapel doors will be double locked from the inside and from the outside. The cardinals will be seated on a raised floor over electronic jamming devices to block sound from leaking out and words from seeping in. The chapel’s high windows have been painted to prevent cameras from prying. The cardinals will take a vow to keep the proceeding private.
As many as 25 men may draw votes on the first ballot and new names can be added in subsequent ballots. Just one vote will be taken Tuesday, close to 6 p.m. Rome time. On subsequent days four votes will be taken. The silence is broken only with group prayers and a few announcements.
Each round of voting is called a scrutiny. One by one, a cardinal approaches an urn on an altar and votes standing alone below Michelangelo’s fresco with a severe-looking Christ with his arm raised in judgment. Each cardinal will carry a white card imprinted with the Latin sentence "Eligo in Summum Pontificem" — Latin for "I elect as the most high pontiff" -- and the name he has written in. He will fold the paper twice, hold it high for all electors to see and pray aloud.
"It is very emotional, very frightening," Cardinal Wilfred Napier archbishop of Durban, South Africa, said on a Catholic News Service video. "Especially in the minute when the cardinal holds up his ballot for others to see and says:
'I call as my witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge, that my vote is given to the one, who before God, I think should be elected.' "
Napier found the 2005 conclave "very intense, frightening because you are asking Jesus to judge you, condemn if you are not voting right."
Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and president of Caritas, the Catholic international relief charity, said that the conclave voting is "the most beautiful experience. It's how elections should be all over the world, prayerfully."
The cardinal places his ballot on a gold disc, called a paten, resting on the urn and then flips the disc so the ballot drops into the urn.
If a cardinal becomes ill after being locked into the conclave, he remains in his suite, and three cardinals, randomly chosen, collect his ballot for each scrutiny.
When all 115 cardinals have voted, three who have been chosen — again randomly — as "scrutiners" count the votes and read them aloud. Cardinals can take notes and make tallies. Then, three more cardinals, called revisers, double check the count. If no man gets 77 votes, all ballots and all the cardinals’ notes must be burned in the small stove in the chapel. Ballots will only be burned twice a day, a bit after noon before they recess for lunch and again around 7 p.m. before they leave for dinner.
Little is left to chance. Protocol and seniority within the ranks of cardinals determine where they walk in processions and where they sit in the Sistine Chapel.
They can’t randomly sit next to an acquaintance or even someone they share a language with.
Closer to the front in the procession and one of the "better" chairs will be Cardinal Justin Rigali, a former St. Louis archbishop, and Philadelphia archbishop emeritus. He will be seated between Cardinal Carlos Amigo Vallejo, archbishop emeritus of Seville, and Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, Florence archbishop emeritus who leads the Vatican’s Council for the Family. Rigali and his two seat mates all voted in the 2005 conclave that elected Benedict XVI. Just next to Antonelli is Cardinal Peter Kodwo Turkson of Ghana, the only cardinal who openly seems eager to run for pope.
Dolan, who is a former St. Louis auxiliary bishop, will sit between the archbishops of Florence, Italy, and Berlin: Cardinal Giuseppe Betori and Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki respectively. The seating makes it obvious that Dolan, Betori, Woelki and 19 others are what Dolan calls the 22 "rookie cardinals" who got their red birettas in February 2012. A dozen cardinals have the highest rank of cardinal-bishops. Rigali and Dolan are cardinal-priests, the second rank.
Seated behind them are the lowest rank, that of cardinal-deacon. Most of them are curia cardinals who have desk jobs in the Vatican. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was named a cardinal-deacon in 2010, months after he was appointed head of a Vatican tribunal, will enter near the end of the procession and sit between Cardinal Francesco Monterisi, a retired Italian pastor of St. Paul’s outside the Walls, and Cardinal Kurt Koch of Basil, Switzerland who heads the Vatican council for ecumenical relations.
Tuesday, 11 U.S. cardinals will be voting. That’s just 110 years after an American cardinal first voted in a conclave. Baltimore Cardinal James Gibbons happened to be in Rome when Pope Leo XIII died, said Dolan, a respected church historian who taught the subject at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.
Dolan blogged that Sunday he began a novena to St. Joseph, the step-father of Jesus, to intercede with God "to look after the Church, and get us an inspired new successor of St. Peter." He asked his followers to join him so that there would be a new pope by March 19, the feast of St. Joseph. A novena is a series of daily prayers of thanksgiving or petition for nine days.
March 19 would be a long conclave but not the longest. The longest conclave took 34 months from 1268 to 1271. After a year of voting sessions, the 19 European cardinals started the practice of a locked-in conclave and shut out the world in an Italian palace — or so they thought. When they remained deadlocked, observers tore off the palace roof. Two cardinals died, perhaps weather related, before the remaining 17 elected Teobaldo Visconti. He was not a bishop but a priest serving with the crusaders in Syria. Six months later he arrived in Rome for his ordination as a bishop and installation as Pope Gregory X.
Last Friday, at the cardinals' preliminary general conference, "around 10 to one," of the 115 voted to enter the conclave Tuesday, according to the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Jesuit who directs the Holy See Press Office.
The cardinals may be as curious as the rest of the world wondering who will be elected.
Popes since 1800
252. Pius VII (1800-23)
253. Leo XII (1823-29)
254. Pius VIII (1829-30)
255. Gregory XVI (1831-46)
256. Blessed Pius IX (1846-78)
257. Leo XIII (1878-1903)
258. St. Pius X (1903-14)
259. Benedict XV (1914-22)
260. Pius XI (1922-39)
261. Pius XII (1939-58)
262. Blessed John XXIII (1958-63)
263. Paul VI (1963-78)
264. John Paul I (1978)
265. Blessed John Paul II (1978-2005)
266. Benedict XVI (2005-2013)
Patricia Rice is a freelance writer.