ST. LOUIS – As the world’s Catholic cardinals pack their scarlet cassocks and head for Rome to attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral, they’d better take enough baggage for a month.
Between 15 and 20 days after the pope’s body is put to rest in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica, the cardinals will be locked in a room to elect a new pope, the 265th. The pope is the world’s only elected absolute monarch. Vatican City is, after all, an independent nation.
The election may last one day – as it did in 1978 for the election of Pope John Paul I, who died after a month in office. Or, it could take days.
There’s an old Vatican saying that the cardinal who enters the conclave with the world speculating that he is the next pope exits still a cardinal. Many observers say that after John Paul II’s tenure – the third-longest of any pope – a man younger than 65 is unlikely to be elected.
They will vote as cardinals have for centuries in front of Michelangelo’s frescoes of “The Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel.
About 120 cardinals – only those under age 80 – may vote.
Not only the ballots are secret. All the discussions and all the early vote results are secret. No phones, tape recorders, note taking or “technical instruments of whatever kinds for the recording, reproduction, transmission of voices and imagery” are allowed.
Any cardinal caught with any of these instruments will be immediately expelled from the Sistine. Cardinals also are forbidden to speak publicly or write about the voting afterward. A cardinal may not vote for himself.
As early as 1621, the election rules said that the cardinals must be in a locked room with a written ballot. In those days, long before telegrams and television, the voting was secured to protect the freedom of the voters. For centuries the German emperors, French and Spanish kings, and Italian dukes tried to influence the vote.
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The conclave will be the most physically comfortable conclave in history. For centuries the cardinals – almost all men over 60 years old – had to sleep on iron cots scattered in small rooms near the Sistine Chapel, off the Vatican Museum. Some rated small offices with windows. Others slept in very grand, but windowless, rooms with 40-foot ceilings decorated with murals by masters such as Raphael or paintings by Goya. In 1958, in the conclave that elected Pope John XXIII, some cardinals had only curtains for privacy around their iron beds in hallways. Others had cots under stairways. Camping out in a museum didn’t daunt the late Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. He took his own fridge, skipped the Vatican’s light continental breakfast, and ate a hearty New Yorker’s breakfast of eggs boiled on an electric hot plate.
Most rooms were hot in the summer and drafty in winter. Reading lights were dim. Some bathrooms were a city block away.
No cots or hot plates this time. John E. Connelly of Pittsburgh donated some of the money to build an air-conditioned, suites-style hotel for papal electors, called the Casa Santa Marta.
The $20 million casa has 108 suites and 23 individual rooms, each with its own bathroom. The buff-colored limestone building is between St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI Audience Hall, where thousands saw Pope John Paul II each cold-weather Wednesday during his reign.
The colorfully uniformed Swiss guards allow only visitors with special passes inside that area south of St. Peter’s Basilica, any day of any year. When the election begins, the cardinals will be under security as they are transported daily from the Santa Marta to the Sistine Chapel. Television cameras poised on nearby rooftops will be focused to get glimpses of the men in red cassocks getting in and out of their buses.
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If security proves as tight as church regulations require, the world won’t know about the voting until each round – called a scrutiny – is over. Two scrutinies will be taken each day.
Despite the comfort of the Santa Marta, the voting is not expected to take weeks. The cardinals say they believe the Holy Spirit is highly involved in the outcome, so anything that smacks of too much politics or too much national or continental wrangling will detract from that. In the 20th century the longest conclave took 14 ballots over five days – the election of Pope Pius XI in 1922. If after three days of voting the electors have not decided on a pope, they will have a day of prayer and informal discussion. A senior cardinal will give them a sermon about their spiritual responsibilities. On the fifth day, balloting will resume.
If, after an additional seven ballots, they still have not elected a pope, there is another pause for a sermon and spiritual reflections, according to the new rules John Paul II made in 1996. After another seven ballots the camerlengo asks the voters for ideas on how to proceed. At this point – approximately 12 days or 30 ballots – John Paul’s new rules suggest that the electors will likely decide that to be elected a man need only have a majority of the votes, no longer two-thirds.
For the first three days of voting, the ballots are burned after each session. If puffs of black smoke emerge from the chimney in the Sistine roof, it means that no man has been elected. Ballots from these inconclusive rounds are burned with straw and chemicals so the smoke is very dark.
When the cardinals choose a pope, and he accepts, the ballots will be burned without straw, yielding a pale smoke. When the nearly invisible “white” smoke puffs out, crowds in St. Peter’s Square will scream “Viva Il Papa” – Long Live the Pope.
Even before the smoke puffs, Italian tailors from the Gammarelli wood-paneled shop, at Via San Chiara just behind the landmark Pantheon, will get a police escort to the Vatican to fit the new pope into a white papal cassock. If the new pope follows tradition, the papal name he has chosen, and his birth name and his most recent title or job will be announced. Then the man will walk onto the balcony of the papal apartments overlooking St. Peter’s Square and wave at the expected crowd waiting, and the millions around the world watching on television.
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