Election of Pope Francis: A tale of drama and spoiler extra-ballot

Pope Francis waves to the faithful waiting outside St Peter’s Basillica, Rome, after he was elected Pope in 2013. courtesy photo

Cardinal Bergoglio’s March 7, 2013 speech at the cardinals’ general congregation in the Vatican lasted only under four minutes.

It, however, reverberated worldwide with eternal impact: the speech got him elected a Pope and has more broadly become the blueprint on which he is running the Catholic Church based on evangelisation and growing numbers of followers.
His red-cap peers gasped after the seminal speech with admiration, swaying them to elect him as a successor to Saint Peter to lead the world’s current 1.2 billion Catholics.

Now Westminster Cardinal emeritus Murphy-O’Connor, according to Austen Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the making of a radical Pope, said his colleagues were moved by the speech.

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn reportedly turned to a neighbour and said, ‘that’s what we need’. Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino of Havana on the other hand described the speech as “magisterial, illuminating, committed and true”.

In Mr Ivereigh’s accounts, now Chicago Cardinal emeritus Francis Eugene, then an influential kingmaker among US cardinals, said after the inspirational speech that he now “understood” what Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor meant about Bergoglio’s suitability for the pontifical seat.

That afternoon, the cardinals voted to commence the conclave the next Tuesday, March 12.

Whereas front-runner papabili (possible papal candidates) - Italian Cardinal Angelo Raffaele Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals and Chamberlain Tarcisio Bertone, Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, Archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil, and Canadian Marc Armand Ouelle - celebrated mass at media-mobbed churches, Bergoglio quietly visited a “92-year-old sister of his friend Archbishop Urbaldo Calabresi, the former Nuncio to Argentine who died in 2004”.

Aware he was a prospective papal candidate, he in accounts by Ivereigh told Canadian priest and Tv producer Fr Tom Rosica that he was “a little bit” nervous and later that same evening, he told two guests that he was “sleeping like a baby”.

On first Conclave day, the cardinals relocated to the 120-room Vatican guesthouse, Casa Santa Marta, and forfeited their phones, laptops and had their bags x-rayed. The building widows were secured and signals in the rooms intentionally jumbled up.

The next day the cardinals, after mass, entered the Sistine Chapel to take solemn vows, writes Ivereigh. The doors closed and they took the first ballot.
Conclave ballots are called scrutinies, not votes. “Inside, the cardinals move from their table - there are four long rows of tables, two on each side of the Chapel facing each other - one by one in order of precedence to vote.

Kneeling before the altar, looking up at Michelangelo’s last judgment, each Cardinal declares that as Christ is his witness and judge, his vote is given to the man who in the sight of God he believes should be elected,” Ivereigh writes.

He adds: “Rising, he places his folded ballot paper inscribed with the preabmel of Eligo in summum pntificem or I [elect] as Supreme Pontiff … and the name he has written next to it onto a silver plate, or pattern, on the altar, and then tips it into an enormous silver chalice and returns to his seat, and so on, 115 times until the three scrutineers, chosen by a lot from among the electors, take the chalice and make the count, calling out each name.

The acoustics are poor, at this conclave the scrutineers enlisted a strong-voiced Mexican Cardinal to repeat the name of each Cardinal voted for.”

Back at the Casa Santa Marta, the politicking for a candidate to fetch the threshold two-thirds majority continued. There were no leaks of voting tallies in 2013 unlike eight years earlier when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope.

Vatican journalists relied on tidbits by some electors’ post-Concalve remarks, which Ivereigh notes, resulted in wide variances. Bergoglio’s backers’ “start-gate” target of twenty-five scrutinies was easily met, but it remained unclear if it put him ahead on the first ballot. Scola, Cardinals Scherer and Ouelett also took votes.

Ivereigh writes that the next day, the Argentine moved ahead of the crowded field, reaching more than 50 votes on the second vote of the morning, the third ballot of the Conclave.

Only Scola remained a possibility besides Bergoglio. Lunch at the Casa Santa Marta was tense. Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, the Boston Archbishop, sat next to Bergoglio and found him sombre, barely eating. “He seemed very weighed down by what was happening,” O’Malley later said in accounts in Ivereigh’s book.

Whatever took place at that lunch, by some accounts, resulted in Cardinal Scola asking those who favoured him to instead back Bergoglio, a re-enactment of the Argentine’s 2005 gesture to throw his support behind Cardinal Ratzinger’s papal candidacy (he became Pope Benedict XVI).

That decision turned out a game-change. At the first ballot of the Wednesday afternoon, the fourth vote of the conclave, when Bergoglio came close to the 27 needed.
Then came a surprise! The second ballot of the afternoon, the fifth of the Conclave, was annulled after the scrutineer found one more ballot paper than the number of the 115 eligible electors.

The offending item, according to Ivereigh, was a “blank voting sheet that had stuck by mistake to one bearing a name. Although it could not have affected the outcome, the rules were clear and the cardinals had to vote all over again”.

“Because the papers are not burned until the end of the morning or afternoon voting, all that was known outside was that two ballots must have taken place by then, that black or white smoke should have appeared around 6pm and that the delay implied some problem - a medical emergency perhaps or a smoke machine malfunction,” he writes.
Making the smoke
To indicate that no pope had been elected, the attendants used to add dump straw to the burning ballot to blacken the smoke, but it was a risky business.

In the 1958 Conclave that elected John XXIII, the straws had dried and white smoke billowed out instead of a black one. False news spread outside that a new pope had been chosen after just two ballots.

Subsequently, special powders were added to make the white smoke white, black smoke black.

The problems reoccurred in 1978 during the election of John Paul I and II. The crowd at St. Peters Square was confused of a seemingly white smoke whereas not. In a freak accident, Ivereigh notes that at one of the Conlaves that year, a downdraft malfunction pumped “fumes back into the chapel, causing the cardinals to come out wheezing and hacking”.

Again in 2005, the stove was not big enough to incinerate the 230 ballots from the scrutinees plus all the other papers so there were two black smokes on the morning of April 19.
Therefore in 2013 was a year of no chances. An auxiliary stove was installed whose sole purpose was to generate smoke.

To each side were boxes of cartridges marked fumo nero (black smoke) and just one box marked bianco (white smoke).

“On Tuesday evening and Wednesday lunchtime, the black smoke from the exploding cartridges was sucked from the auxiliary stove into the narrow heated tube bolted to the chapel wall, up through the vaulted ceiling before belching out of the little steel stove pipe on the tiled roof that half the globe was watching,” Mr Ivereigh writes, adding:

“There was a lot of it, the smoke, and it lasted for a full seven minutes, billowing with such fierceness that any second you expected to hear the wail of a fire engine.”

Inside, as he prepared for what he would later describe as his ‘change of diocese’, Bergoglio was at peace.

“I am the kind who worries, who gets anxious,” he later told members of Latin Amrican religious orders in accounts captured by Ivereigh, “But I was at peace, that confirmed to me that this was of God.”

Inside the Sistine Chapel, relieved cardinals shed tears of joy after the Argentine’s election.

“It was then that the Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a member of the Order founded by St Francis of Asisi, hugged Bergoglio, kissed him and told him ‘don’t forget the poor’,” Ivereigh writes of care and mercy for the underprivileged which has defined Francis’s papacy.

This by some accounts is what prompted to choose Francis as his papal name to honour Francis of Asisi, “a man of poverty, peace, [who] loved and cared for creation”.

Bergoglio in total obtained nearly 100 votes. “Then Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re came over to him with the question: Did you accept this canonical election as supreme pontiff? It was 7.05pm when Bergoglio said, accepto in his good Latin, adding, even though I am a great sinner,” notes Ivereigh.

Habemus Papam! The world had a Pope, and it was Francis.

In the third and last part tomorrow, we examine the Pope’s wide-ranging reforms that have stirred admiration globally, but resentment among sections of the
Vatican old guards.

10 quotes from Pope Francis

1.Human rights are not only violated by terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures that creates huge inequalities.
2. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.
3. Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
4. These days there is a lot of poverty in the world, and that’s a scandal when we have so many riches and resources to give to everyone. We all have to think about how we can become a little poorer.
5. A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.
6. If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.
7. From my point of view, God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us.
8. Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.
9. Life is a journey. When we stop, things don’t go right.

10. All are called to protect religious liberty and everything that threatens it. Our common home has been part of this group of the excluded which cries out to heaven.