Today marks the release of “Conclave,” a big-screen thriller that offers a fictionalized (and maybe a bit sensationalized) trip through the process by which the Catholic Church elects a new pope. With an all-star cast including Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow, the movie has attracted a lot of Hollywood buzz already. It has also raised questions in more than a few minds: How is a pope really elected? Does the movie get it right?
For starters, think of a papal conclave as more of a parliamentary election process of about a month rather than the two years of an American presidential primary cycle. Only the cardinals and a few staffers witness a papal election in the locked Sistine Chapel. They take a vow of silence to be broken only with papal permission and under penalty of excommunication.
But cardinals are human, and historians and journalists are savvy, so we know some inside stories. Bookies in the Renaissance paid conclave staff to chalk votes on dirty dishes passed outside after dinner. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V bragged that he knew when cardinals visited their chamberpots during the conclave of 1549-1550. In 1922, a reporter and a photographer were found as stowaways when the traditional final shout before a conclave begins of “Extra omnes!” (“Everybody else out!”) was made.
Secrecy wasn’t always the rule. It became normative starting with the conclave of 1800 C.E. (held in Venice, it was the last not at the Vatican), with Napoleon breathing down cardinals’ necks. From then on, notes and ballots were burned, leading to the white smoke that would indicate the election of a new pope, followed by the announcement “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”). Ballots had been used for many years before then, however: The historian Frederic J. Baumgartner used them to reconstruct conclave tallies from 1600 to 1846 in Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections. He found one pile of ballots from 1655 where 27 of 66 of cardinals, disgusted with their choices, voted No one.
As recently as 2013, one or some cardinal electors were talking in great detail, allowing America’s Rome correspondent Gerard O’Connell to recreate the movement toward Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave That Changed History (including one cardinal who misspelled Bergoglio’s name).
A history lesson
The conclave as we know it—in which cardinals are locked in a room until they pick a pope—is less than half as old as the church itself. For the first few centuries, while Christianity was still illegal in the Roman Empire, it appears that a first-among-equals was chosen to lead the church from among the Roman clergy. Once the Roman Empire imploded, the bishop of Rome became ever more a civic leader as well, which brought Roman families into the mix to put their sometimes-undeserving sons onto Peter’s chair. That is when and where the cardinals come in.
Cardinals were the leaders of the churches and dioceses in and around Rome. Up to about 1000 C.E., this group of two dozen or so comprised the Roman clergy and were tasked with choosing their leader. Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) decreed 70 to be the limit of the membership of the College of Cardinals, but rarely were there more than several dozen active at any one time. Just 51 cardinals elected John XXIII in 1958, but 80 elected Paul VI in 1963.
Pope Paul VI mandated a few years later that a cardinal loses his right to elect a pope at the age of 80; he also set the total number of electors at 120, though that figure has been exceeded several times. The relative number of cardinal electors is still staggeringly small compared to the more than one billion Catholics worldwide: John Paul II was elected by 111 cardinals in 1978, while 115 elected Benedict XVI in 2005 and Francis in 2013.
Who can vote
We should keep in mind that it wasn’t always just cardinals voting, either. Not until 1059 did Pope Nicholas II give cardinals the leading role in selecting the next pope, and even then the sitting pope could make his non-binding choice known—and others in Rome might have a say. In 1179, at Lateran III, cardinals were given the exclusive vote, and a two-thirds majority vote took the place of the nearly-impossible previous mandate of unanimity. But it took the rambunctious election of 1268-1271—the longest interregnum in papal history—to give us the conclave proper.
At that conclave, cardinals wandered around Viterbo after the pope died there, following the standard process of holding the conclave wherever the prior pope died (many cardinals were part of the traveling Roman Curia). Fed up, the people of Viterbo finally locked the cardinals in a palace and restricted their food. After further delays, they ripped the roof off.
The cardinals then moved to binding arbitration, agreeing to accept whoever a committee of six chose. This man was Pope Gregory X, who knew a good idea when he saw one. He engineered the Council of Lyons II in 1274 to give the church the conclave structure it more or less follows today, with some modifications.
The new rules were clear: Cardinals had ten days to start voting where the pope died. Cardinals were locked in with a key (cum + clave = conclave) and could choose a pope one of three ways: scrutiny (casting votes), acclamation (everyone agrees in a voice vote) or delegation whereby the cardinals name a handful among them to choose with the others pledging to accept that person as pope. Food, water and funds from the papal treasury were restricted until a pope was named. To move the voting along, Gregory XV in 1621 introduced secret ballots and said cardinals could only write one name instead of the customary several. Acclamation was ruled out and cardinals voted twice a day instead of just once.
New rules
Pope John Paul II brought things up to date in 1996, especially with regard to the larger number of cardinal electors, and Benedict XVI made a few tweaks. Until the two papal elections in 1978, cardinal electors slept in curtained-off cubicles in the rooms outside the Sistine Chapel. John Paul II built the Domus Sanctae Marthae for the cardinals to live in more comfortably during a conclave. The rest of the time, the building is used as a guest house (though Pope Francis has made his home there). Cardinal electors are now shuttled between the Domus, where they eat and sleep, and the Sistine Chapel, where they vote—still locked in, sort of, and forbidden from any contact with the outside world via sweeps for electronic bugs and cell phones.
Pope John Paul II also reiterated the ban on acclamation from 1621 and removed the option of a delegated committee. Breaks can be built in if several days pass without an election, though most of the elections of the last two centuries have been just a few days each. His other innovation was that if 10 conclave days passed without an election, the cardinals could restrict their votes to the top two vote-getters in the last ballot. Those two could be present, but couldn’t vote. The winner would then need garner only 50 percent plus one vote instead of the traditional two-thirds—an unpopular rule that Benedict XVI then changed back to two-thirds.
It used to be that the conclave started 10 days after the pope died, but before airplane travel that meant some cardinals never made it before the doors locked voters in and everyone else out. Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore was the first American cardinal to vote in a conclave, but that was because he happened to be in Rome when the pope died in 1903. He missed the next one, in 1914, along with Boston’s Cardinal William O’Connell, who heard Rome’s bells ringing to announce the election of Benedict XV as they arrived in a car after their ship docked in Naples.
Cardinal O’Connell was not pleased. Though he had a ship waiting for him next time, the same thing happened: The bells rang for Pius XI as he arrived. Reportedly, O’Connell had a rather emotive conversation with the new pope, who extended the gap between papal death and the conclave’s start to 15 days, but not more than 20. Cardinal O’Connell finally got to participate in the 1939 conclave that elected Pius XII.
The process today
Today, a papal death starts the clock on Peter’s chair being vacant (sede vacante). The papal funeral is celebrated within four to six days, followed by nine days of mourning and special Masses. Cardinals meet during this time to talk openly and privately about what qualities they think the next pope should have. Cardinals over the age of 80 (who have lost their vote) can also participate in these meetings. Everyone else can make their voices known in public protests, articles, interviews and speeches.
In the event of a papal resignation, the sede vacante period starts with the effective date and time the pope steps down, which can speed things up. After he announced his resignation but while still pope, Benedict XVI adjusted the timing: A conclave can start before 15 days if all electors are present but must start at 20 days, even if some are absent.
The camerlengo is the person in charge of certifying the pope’s death, sealing off the papal apartment and office, and then overseeing the funeral and conclave. The first day of the conclave is taken up with cardinals and staffers taking an oath of secrecy. There is an opening Mass and one evening vote—typically used to give a shout-out to an esteemed cardinal who won’t be elected. But that vote can also indicate where favorite names or a dark horse stands.
There are no nominating or campaign speeches. The real discussions take place over coffee, drinks and meals. The cardinals vote in the Sistine Chapel in two sessions per day (one in the morning and one in the late afternoon), with two votes each time—adding to up to four votes per day. Each cardinal disguises his handwriting and fills in a card printed with “Eligo in Summum Pontificem” (“I elect as Supreme Pontiff”). Each cardinal places his ballot in an urn (which used to be a large chalice when there were fewer electors) and declares in Latin: “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.”
The cardinals run things themselves. A few, chosen by lot and changed every so often, count the ballots. If the number of ballots and cardinals don’t match, the ballots are burned without being opened. If the numbers jibe, then the count begins: Two cardinals open, read and mark the vote. A third repeats the move but also announces the name and, in a wonderfully old-fashioned way, passes a needle and thread through each to mark that it’s been counted.
If no one cardinal receives two-thirds of the votes (or two-thirds plus one if the total number isn’t divisible by three), the process is repeated for a second vote. If that vote doesn’t result in a new pope, then the cardinals break for lunch or the day. Failed votes are collected and burned with a pellet that creates black smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney—indicating to the world outside that there was no winner. A different pellet produces white smoke that signals a successful election.
When a cardinal is elected, he is asked two questions. Do you accept your election? By what name will you be called? The moment he accepts election, he is pope—unless he’s not a bishop, which is unlikely to happen. The only requirement is that the person elected be a baptized male; he need not yet be a deacon, priest or bishop, let alone be a cardinal.
For all of the expectation and drama of waiting for the cry of “Habemus papam” by the senior cardinal deacon, picking a pope is a fairly staid process—which is not to say it is a boring one. St. Louis’s Cardinal John Carberry teased about the surprise choice of John Paul II in the second election of 1978: “I would like to tell you everything. It would thrill you. But I can’t.”
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