The coming conclave: how the next pope will be chosen.

Somehow, talking about conclaves feels unseemly--even ghoulish--while John Paul II suffers so visibly. Still, we must talk about conclaves and what comes next, just as we should have those unsettling conversations about health-care proxies and wills. This conversation leads to and touches on the biggest ecclesiological issues of our time: the collegiality of bishops; the authority of the papacy and the bishops' role in the magisterium; and the shared governance and decision making of all the baptized. The great unfinished business of Vatican II will surely dominate the conclave that will follow one of the most centralizing papacies in church history.

The college of cardinals 

The story of papal elections is really the story of the college of cardinals, which functions like the unelected aristocracies of the ancien regime. For the first millennium of Christianity, the college as we know it did not exist. We can find traces in the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, when up to three dozen cardinal bishops, priests, and deacons controlled the most important churches in Rome and its suburbs. Then, as now, the laity did not elect the cardinals or play even a limited role in their selection.

The college of cardinals took shape in the High Middle Ages, when popes built the papacy as a monarchy with its attendant court, bureaucracy, and ideology. This structure mirrored the royal monarchies that challenged the church's supremacy and limited her freedom. To spread their authority, popes, beginning with Leo IX (1049-54), granted the status of cardinal to their closest advisers, and made their roles more administrative than liturgical. Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) appointed numerous cardinals legates to export the idea of papal monarchy in their travels and, back in Rome, to head curial departments, a practice that persists today.

Before the late twentieth century, the college rarely exceeded several dozen cardinals, although the rules set by Sixtus V (1585-90) provided for up to 70 members. The conclave that selected John XXIII had 58 cardinals, and Paul VI was chosen in a conclave of 80; the 1978 elections were carried out by 111 electors--a huge and unprecedented number. At the moment there are nearly 225 cardinals. If the conclave were held today, about 135 could participate because they are under eighty, the age limit for voting members set by Paul VI. He didn't, however, set an age limit for a pope, which raised some episcopal eyebrows. Paul VI's decision is being questioned again as John Paul II's health continues to deteriorate.

Electing the pope

In the first millennium, cardinals shared the task of choosing the popes with the leading families of Rome. In 1059, Nicholas II took the first of several steps to shelter the medieval papacy--especially papal elections--from the interference of such families. He granted the cardinals the lead role in selecting the pope, although the sitting pope and the Roman clergy could let their choices be known. A century later, in 1179, Lateran III gave the cardinals the exclusive right to elect a pope, and mandated a two-thirds majority as sufficient for election, since unanimity was surely impossible.

So how did the idea of a conclave come about? In the longest period in church history without a pope, almost three years (1268-71), the election was held in Viterbo. It was open, fractured, and politicized. Finally, the city's leaders locked the cardinals in a house, removed the roof, and promised to put them on a strict diet if they couldn't agree on a candidate. They selected Gregory X (1271-76), who did not soon forget the lesson of his election. At Lyons II in 1274, he ordered that the cardinals would subsequently meet in the city where the pope, who frequently traveled in Italy and France during the Middle Ages, had died. (The last time an election was held outside of Rome was in Venice in 1800 after Pius VI died as Napoleon's prisoner in France.) To accelerate the process, the rules stipulated that the cardinals be locked in a room with a key (cum clave = conclave), could not draw funds from the papal treasury, and would be fed only bread, water, and wine if they failed to reach a decision after eight days. This system--minus the restricted diet--remains in place, although the next conclave will be held in Rome regardless of where the pope dies.

When a pope dies these days, there is no mystery as to what will occur next. His death triggers a well-defined process. All means of communication (phone, fax, computers) between the pope's rooms and the outside world will be severed. The papal apartment will be sealed, the pope's ring defaced--a remnant of the time when the ring was used to seal documents with wax: the ring is destroyed so no one can claim a deathbed appointment to a choice job. Following the rules codified in 1975 by Paul VI and in 1996 by John Paul II, the conclave will begin fifteen to twenty days after the pope's death, with his funeral taking place during a nine-day period of mourning. Before the conclave, the college of cardinals will meet several times. Cardinals who cannot vote because of their age, such as Fordham University's Avery Dulles, may participate in these preparatory meetings and exercise a measure of influence.

Insuring secrecy during the next conclave will not be easy. The Sistine Chapel and nearby rooms will be swept for recording devices after the traditional call of Extra omnes ("Everybody else out!"), although today a high-tech bug could remain hidden or powerful sensors could listen from afar. In the 1922 conclave, a stowaway photographer was discovered, along with a reporter attempting to masquerade as a waiter. This was not without precedent: during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, servants working in the conclave sometimes scribbled names of candidates with their vote tallies on the bottoms of dirty dishes, which they handed outside so the people of Rome--and especially bookies--could follow along. In 1549, the emperor Charles V bragged that he was so well informed on what was happening in the conclave that he knew when the cardinals used their chamber pots.

The conclave opens with a Mass of the Holy Spirit, including a key homily stressing the particular challenges facing the next pope. Voting then follows, with two sets of ballots cast in the morning and two in the afternoon, though there will probably be just one ballot in the afternoon of the first day. It was Pope Gregory XV in 1621 who stipulated how many votes per day, in the hope of cutting down time for negotiating. There have been many conclaves of weeks and months, but since 1846, conclaves have lasted less than a week, and those of 1978 lasted just a day or two. Anything longer would send a signal of division that might cripple the next papacy before it began. However, with as many as 135 cardinals in attendance, it's possible many of them will not know each other well, conceivably slowing down the process. At meetings during the most recent consistory, after all, the cardinals had to wear name tags.

Modern changes to conclave procedures have eliminated voting by acclamation. Gregory XV banned acclamation in 1621. In 1996, John Paul II reiterated the ban, and also eliminated the process in which a deadlocked conclave could designate a small subcommittee that would make the final selection for the rest of the college. He also moved the sleeping quarters from the Sistine Chapel complex to the Domus Sancta Marthae, a dorm-like building located nearby in Vatican City, from which the cardinals will be shuttled like a sequestered jury.

Each cardinal votes in disguised handwriting on a preprinted Latin form, folds it, and walks individually to the Sistine Chapel's altar, where he places the ballot on a paten and slips it into a chalice so all can see that a vote was cast. If the number of ballots doesn't match the number of electors, the ballots are destroyed unopened and another vote is taken. If the numbers match, the counting begins. The ballots are read silently by two cardinals acting as counters, who then pass the ballots to another cardinal who reads the name aloud and runs a needle and thread through the ballot so it cannot be counted twice. Should no clear winner emerge, the ballots are burned, and black smoke rises through the chapel's chimney. Then the process begins again.

In the past, cardinals have made their dissatisfaction with the candidates known in various ways. In one of the 1655 ballots, twenty-one of the sixty-six cardinals voted for "nobody." Today, once a man has received a two-thirds majority (or two-thirds plus one should the number of cardinals not be divisible by three), he is asked whether he accepts; if he does, he then announces his papal name. At that, the ballots are burned with straw, white smoke rises, and the announcement Habemus papam! is made.

Who's Next?

The person selected to be the next pope will surely be from among the cardinals in the conclave, though the rules stipulate only that the candidate be a baptized male. If a nonordained man is selected, he must immediately be ordained priest and then bishop, with his succession to the papacy turning on the moment of his episcopal ordination. The last time a noncardinal or someone outside the conclave was elected was in 1378. The serious personality flaws of that man, Urban VI, contributed to the Great Western Schism, when for nearly four decades as many as three rival papacies and colleges of cardinals competed for power--a bad precedent indeed.

Conventional wisdom says that whoever goes into the conclave as pope exits as cardinal. This is not necessarily true. Frontrunners don't always win, but while the world may have been surprised by John XXIII's election, insiders weren't. Giovanni Battista Montini's election as Paul VI was largely expected. A few wise voices predicted Albino Luciani's 1978 election as John Paul I. When he died a month later, it appears that the next conclave simply chose the candidate who also had been prominent in the first conclave that year: Karol Wojtyla.

Another piece of conventional wisdom tells us that because John Paul II has selected so many members of the current college of cardinals, his successor will be a John Paul III or a Wojtyla Jr. Yet recent church history suggests otherwise. Pius IX (1846-78), the longest-reigning pope after Peter and a man deeply suspicious of modernity, was followed by Leo XIII (1878-1903), who opened the Vatican archives and championed the social-justice movement that invigorated twentieth-century Catholicism. In turn, Leo was succeeded by Pius X (1903-14), who was even harder on modern trends in scholarship than the previous Pius. And no one would mistake John XXIII for Pius XII (1939-58). Moreover, John Paul II has often balanced the selection of a cardinal at one end of the ideological spectrum with a counterpart on the other. Just this fall, a few of the newest cardinals indicated they'd like at least to talk about hot-button issues such as mandatory celibacy, episcopal collegiality, and subsidiarity.

Despite the sometimes colorful history of papal elections, a serious point must be remembered: Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit, through the college of cardinals, elects the pope. Doubtless, eligible cardinals have been assessing each other for years; but only God knows who the next pope will be.

RELATED ARTICLE: Who's in the college?

The college of cardinals is more international than it's ever been--thanks to John XXIII, Paul VI, and especially John Paul II. Cardinals from Western Europe now make up only slightly more than a third of the college; from Eastern Europe about 13 percent; from Africa and Asia about 10 percent each; and from the Oceanic countries another 4 percent. Latin and South America, Canada, and the United States, with about half of the world's 1 billion Catholics, can claim almost 30 percent of the cardinals. About a quarter of the cardinals are Vatican officials. The Italians dominated the college for 500 years, from 1458 to 1958, but today make up about 17 percent of the college. They weren't the only bloc in history, however. When the popes lived at Avignon from 1305 to 1378, nearly 100 of the 134 cardinals named that century were French. Earlier in the Middle Ages, when popes fought the Holy Roman Emperors in central Europe, a German cardinal was seldom seen.

C.M.B.

Christopher M. Bellitto is academic editor of Paulist Press and author of the pamphlet, When a Pope Dies (Liguori). His most recent books are the companion volumes Renewing Christianity and The General Councils (Paulist).