Electing a pope: The real story

On the second day of the secret conclave, bells tolled and white smoke wafted over the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City as the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church elected a new pope. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany was chosen as successor to Pope John Paul II, becoming the 265th pontiff.

In St. Peter's Square, thousands of the faithful who had patiently waited for that telling plume of smoke, a centuries-old tradition, majestic in its simplicity and symbolism, greeted the announcement with chants of “Viva il Papa!” — “Long live the pope!”

Of course, that “centuries-old” tradition is nothing of the sort:

• There was no recorded use of a white smoke signal before 1914.
• The bell was sounded for the first time this year to clarify confusion that struck onlookers when gray smoke burst forth in 1978.
• Elections have frequently taken place outside Rome.
• The gathered faithful have often been angry mobs.
• And most contemporary conclaves have rarely lasted more than two or three days.

Clearly, the popular perception of how a pope is chosen — a process in which the church observes nearly 2,000 years of colorful but well-ordered pomp — is cherished but largely mistaken.

With this key ...
The Roman Catholic tradition of electing the pope in a conclave dates back roughly to the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. Like Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the tradition has taken clerics on a long and colorful journey, sometimes down the wrong side street, other times ambushed by politicians and warriors. Occasionally, it even works the way it’s supposed to.

The word conclave, from the Latin cum (with) and clavis (key), is a direct reference to the locked-down secrecy with which the church’s eligible cardinals — 115 of the 117 qualified at the moment — go about their business. Theoretically, this is the way they’ve been doing things since 1274, thanks to Pope Gregory X, who wrote new rules after his election took almost three years — and then only after disgusted citizens of Viterbo, the city north of Rome that at the time was the preferred residence of popes, tore the roof off the Episcopal Building and limited the 18 cardinals to bread and water.

For centuries afterward, things rarely went much more smoothly. Over the last millennium, popes have owed their elections to bribery, intimidation, military duress and imperial fiat.

For one thing, the supposedly secret deliberations rarely ever were. In 1549, for example, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, dispatched an intimidating message informing the assembled cardinals that his spies were so ubiquitous that he would know when they “urinate in this conclave.”

Dirty politics
In fact, the selection of the pope — the vicar of Christ, representative of the Prince of Peace — has been peaceful for only about the last century.

Pope Nicholas II decreed that only cardinals could choose the pope in 1059, seeking to stop outside interference. It didn’t work, as political families like the Crescentii, the Tusculani and the infamous Borgias assassinated unsuitable pontiffs, deposed others and engineered the elections of their successors.

Popes Callistus III, elected in 1455, and Alexander VI, his nephew, who was elected in 1492, were Borgias for real. It was Alexander who appointed his son Cesare Borgia, the pillager of Urbino, a cardinal.

It took 850 years for Nicholas’ reforms to take root: As recently as 1903, Franz-Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, vetoed the first choice for pope, and the result was Pius X.

Along the way, popes were effectively imposed by Holy Roman Emperors or controlled by shadowy string-pullers like Armand Jean Du Plessis, who as Cardinal Richelieu was the original eminence grise — the “gray eminence” behind the throne.

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