Across the hall from Bergoglio’s room, no. 207, was Cardinal Kasper’s. The German theologian had recently received copies of a Spanish translation of his latest theological work, Barmherzigkeit, on the subject of mercy. He had a couple with him and gave one to Bergoglio. “Ah, mercy,” said Bergoglio when he saw the title, La Misericordia. “This is the name of our God.”
In his room, Bergoglio found on his bed a white rose.14
* * *
AFTER the pro eligendo pontifice Mass the next day in St. Peter’s, the 115 cardinals returned to the Casa Santa Marta for lunch and a rest before entering the Sistine Chapel that afternoon to take their solemn oaths. Then the doors were closed, and they proceeded to the first ballot, sealed off from the waiting world.
Despite the tension, a conclave is silent and solemn, like a retreat; the cardinals are in choir dress, as if attending a liturgy. The scrutinies, as the ballots are called, are ponderous. Nobody dawdles, but it isn’t fast. The conclavists 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. Rising, he places his folded ballot paper—inscribed with the preamble Eligo in Summum Pontificem, “I choose as Supreme Pontiff…” and the name he has written next to it—onto a silver plate, or paten, on the altar, then tips it into an enormous silver chalice and returns to his seat, and so on, 115 times, until the three scrutineers, chosen by 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 names of each cardinal voted for.
The negotiating and discussion necessary to bring a candidate to the two-thirds majority take place back at the Santa Marta. Unlike 2005, no cardinal has stepped forward with a “secret diary” with an account of the voting tallies, forcing the vaticanisti to piece together tidbits from the electors’ post-conclave remarks. There are significant variants among the accounts. Bergoglio’s backers’ start-gate target of twenty-five was comfortably met, but whether it put him ahead on the first ballot is unclear. Scola, Scherer, and Ouellet also took votes, as the Italian media had forecast. But what all agree is that the next day the Argentine moved ahead of the field, reaching more than fifty votes on the second vote of the morning, the third ballot of the conclave.
At this point, apart from Bergoglio, only Scola remained as a possibility. Lunch in the Santa Marta was tense. Cardinal O’Malley sat next to Bergoglio and found him somber, barely eating. “He seemed very weighed down by what was happening,” O’Malley later said. Whatever took place that lunchtime—in some accounts, Scola asked his supporters to back Bergoglio in an echo of the Argentine’s gesture in 2005—it was nearly over on the first ballot of Wednesday afternoon, the fourth vote of the conclave, when Bergoglio came close to the seventy-seven needed. That afternoon, said Cardinal Dolan, “there was a remarkable calmness and tranquility about Cardinal Bergoglio.… He obviously sensed that this was the will of God.”15
Then came a surprise. The second ballot of the afternoon, the fifth of the conclave, was annulled after the scrutineers found one more ballot paper than there were cardinals. The offending item 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’s voting, all that was known outside was that two ballots must have taken place by then, that black or white smoke should have appeared at around 6:00 p.m., and that the delay implied some problem: a medical emergency perhaps, or a smoke machine malfunction.16
In the corner of the Sistine Chapel, close to the entrance, stood the only means of the cardinals communicating the results of each ballot to the world: two enormous bronze-colored stoves, like Daleks from an underfunded sci-fi movie.
The one on the right, used for burning the ballot papers at the end of the scrutinies, was first used in 1939 and in the five conclaves that followed. To indicate that no pope had been elected, the attendants used to add damp straw to the burning ballots to blacken the smoke, but it was a risky business. There was the conclave in 1958 that elected John XXIII, when the first sfumata wrongly came out white (the straw had dried; until they managed a second sfumata, the news spread that a pope had been chosen after just two ballots). Special powders were later added, so as to make the white white and the black black, but at the 1978 conclaves, which elected John Paul I and II, there was no end of problems: more than once the crowd had been convinced the smoke was white, and left the square annoyed. And at one of the conclaves that year, a downdraft had sent fumes back into the chapel, causing cardinals to come out wheezing and hacking.
In 2005, the stove hadn’t been big enough to incinerate 230 ballots from the scrutinies plus all the other papers, so there were two black smokes on the morning of April 19. It wasn’t an issue in the afternoon, because Benedict XVI was elected after just one scrutiny, and so all the papers fit; but even then for a time no one was quite sure if the gray smoke was meant to be white or black. (The world was told to wait for the bells of St. Peter’s to confirm the election, but there were no bells for more than ten minutes because of a Baroque confusion over telephones and lines of authority.)17
In 2013 they were taking no chances. An auxiliary stove was installed whose sole purpose was to generate smoke. To its side were boxes of cartridges marked fumo nero (black smoke) and just one box marked fumo 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 stovepipe on the tiled roof that half the globe was watching. 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.
With the eyes of the global media locked on that chimney, the tension of the uncertainty on Wednesday evening made for great TV. Up on the platforms overlooking the square the commentators tried to come up with explanations for the delay while the presenters slowed their voices, introducing little history-is-being-made pauses to heighten the anticipation. It was a medieval system, the conclave, but it could have been designed for the age of twenty-four-hour news. What other global organization would announce its new leader this way, by means of smoke signals, the news reaching everyone, prince and pauper, at precisely the same moment?
Inside, as he prepared for what he would later describe as his “change of diocese,” Bergoglio was at peace. “I’m the kind who worries, who gets anxious,” he later told members of Latin-American religious orders. “But I was at peace. That confirmed to me that this was of God.”18
When the scrutineers said Eminentissimo Bergoglio for the seventy-seventh time there was a collective gasp—a release of tension, like the rush of air from a deflating ball. The cardinals stood and applauded. “I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house,” Cardinal Dolan recalled. It was then that the Brazilian cardinal Claudio Hummes, a member of the order founded by Saint Francis of Assisi, hugged Bergoglio, kissed him, and told him: “Don’t forget the poor.”
The cardinals sat down again. Not until all 115 votes were called out would he be asked whether he accepted. He had some minutes. Don’t forget the poor. The word poveri turned in his mind, like a mantra used to meditate, until the name leaped into his heart: Francis of Assisi, the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and cares for creation.
The count was over: he had more than ninety-five votes. Now Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re came over to him with the Question: did he accept his canonical election as Suprem
e Pontiff? It was 7:05 p.m. when Jorge Bergoglio said accepto in his good Latin, adding: even though I am a great sinner.
Flawed yet called. He had heard once again the invitation of the Good King, and made a choice as Saint Ignatius in the Exercises describes it, when God our Lord so moves and attracts the will that without doubting or being able to doubt, the faithful soul follows what is shown, just as Saint Paul and Saint Matthew did when they followed Christ our Lord. His first “yes” had been over half a century earlier, on Saint Matthew’s feast, in a wooden confessional box in the Basilica of St. Joseph in Flores. From that “yes” until now his life’s journey had been tied together by a thread, its knots unraveled by a great and gentle power.
Quo nomine vis vicari? “What name will you take?” asked Cardinal Re. Vocabur Franciscus. “I choose the name Francis,” Bergoglio said firmly, “in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi.” The cardinals, stunned, again broke into applause.
Francis was taken into the adjacent Room of Tears to be fitted with his white cassock and sash, choosing to keep his old black shoes and silver pectoral cross. The chapel was opened to let in the attendants, who put the ballots in the stove and loaded the fumo bianco cartridge. As white smoke gushed from the Sistine stovepipe into the wet black night, a roar rose from the square. Soon the great bells of the basilica began rocking, mixing a joyous gong-gong with the cheers of the crowd.
When Francis came back into the chapel in his white cassock, the cardinals applauded again. An ornate chair was brought out for him to sit to receive them, but he stayed standing as one by one the cardinals came up to embrace him. Then, conscious of the wet waiting crowd outside, he began to make his way toward the balcony. On the way he experienced a disturbance of spirits. “I was seized by a great anxiety,” he later recalled. Flanked by Cardinal Hummes and Cardinal Agostino Vallini, the vicar for Rome, Francis entered the Pauline Chapel, as Benedict’s reformed papal election rules required, and knelt in the back pew. Fear of the mission, he once told a group on retreat, can be “a sign from the good spirit.”
When we realize we are chosen, we feel that the weight on us is too great, and we experience fear—in some cases, even panic. That is the beginning of the Cross. At the same time, we feel deeply drawn by the Lord who by his very summons seduces us to follow him with a fire burning in our heart.19
As the world held its breath, inside the Pauline Chapel Francis drew himself into stillness. Here, in the antechamber of his new existence, he took a moment to be fueled by a strength not his own. Eventually the disturbance lifted, and he was flooded with joy and peace. “I was filled with a great light,” he later recalled. “It lasted a moment, but to me it seemed very long.”
Only God our Lord can give consolation to the soul without preceding cause, wrote Saint Ignatius in his Second Week discernment rules. For it is the Creator’s prerogative to enter the soul and leave her, and to arouse movements that draw her entirely into love of his Divine Majesty.
Monsignor Dario Viganò, director of Vatican TV, whose cameraman was filming all this for posterity in high-resolution 4K, described what he saw as the images were fed back to his TV truck.
The Pope is crossing the Sistine Chapel looking down, accompanied by Cardinal Vallini and Cardinal Tauran [sic]. He is looking down; he doesn’t greet the cardinals, as if he was carrying an enormous burden. Entering the Pauline Chapel, they had prepared a throne, but he does not sit on the throne. He forcefully takes the cardinals to sit on either side of him in the last pew. He prays in silence. At a certain moment, the Pope rises. He turns around, exits into the Sala Regia and at that moment he is a different person. It’s a person who is smiling. It’s as if he had entrusted the burden of this choice, as if God had said to him personally, “Don’t worry. I’m here with you.” It’s a person who is no longer downcast. His face is no longer tilted downward. It’s a man who looks and asks himself what he needs to do.
To many people Francis has since confirmed this account, telling one cardinal that he felt “a great sense of inner peace and freedom come over me, which has never left me.” To another he said: “I believe the Holy Spirit has changed me.”20
* * *
THE Francis era began with a buona sera (“good evening”). On the loggia balcony of St. Peter’s at 8:22 p.m., flanked by Cardinals Hummes and Vallini, he stood before two hundred thousand rain-soaked people below and millions more on television. Down in the square, the phones and tablets flashed in the dark, like twinkling stars. Francis spoke shyly but firmly into the microphone in his fluent Italian.
Joking that “my brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth” in order to “give Rome a bishop,” he asked for prayers for “our Bishop Emeritus Benedict XVI” and led the world in reciting an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory Be. Then he said: “And now let us begin this journey. Bishops and people. This journey of the Church of Rome that presides in charity over all the Churches. A journey of brotherhood, of love, of trust between us.” Few recognized the famous ancient formula—“presides in charity”—that described the relationship of universal and local Church, or understood its implications: Francis was signaling that his would be a papacy bent on implementing collegiality. The Great Reform had been announced.
Yet what most people remember from that night was what came next: Francis asking for “the blessing of a people over its bishop—your prayer over me.” The pope bowed his head low in a gesture of great humility, and a swollen silence followed. In this touching gesture of mutuality a lasting bond was formed. The new pope was seeking the blessing of God’s holy faithful people before imparting his own blessing urbi et orbi, to the city of Rome and to the world, and to “all people of goodwill.”
He returned with the electors to the Santa Marta, spurning the papal limousine to ride back with them on the bus. Over dinner he told them: “May God forgive you for what you have done,” which Cardinal Dolan said “brought the house down.” The next day, the first of his pontificate, Francis crossed Rome in a Vatican police car to the Basilica of St. Mary Major, arriving shortly after 8:00 a.m. The basilica houses the Marian image of Salus Populi Romani, protector of the Roman people, held to have been painted by Saint Luke. Francis left a bouquet of flowers there, before spending time in a chapel where Saint Ignatius of Loyola celebrated his first Mass in 1538. Then he went to pray at the tomb of Saint Pius V, the sixteenth-century pope whose Dominican habit established the tradition of popes wearing white cassocks. On the way back to the Vatican he stopped at the Via dell Scrofa to collect his suitcase—he went up to his room and packed his belongings himself—and to the astonishment of the staff, paid his bill, telling them that as pope he should set an example.
That afternoon he celebrated Mass with the cardinal electors, surprising them by coming to vest with them in the Hall of Blessings, as they had done throughout the conclave. The masters of ceremonies crowded around him with instructions on what to do and when at his first Mass as pope, but he batted them away, saying, “That’s all right, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ve been saying Mass for fifty years. But stay close, in case I need you.”
During the Mass he preached standing at the pulpit as a parish priest does, rather than sitting in a chair, as popes do; and rather than read a prepared text, he spoke spontaneously in impeccable Italian, preaching, as he always had done, for seven or eight minutes, around three key points: the importance of walking, building, and confessing. “We can walk as much as we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, things go wrong,” he told them. “We may become a charitable NGO [a nongovernmental, or philanthropic, organization] but not the Church, the Bride of the Lord.” He also quoted the radical French convert León Bloy, whom he had read with his friends in the Guardia de Hierro in the 1970s: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.”
That evening he entered the papal apartments—sealed since Benedict’s departure—with Archbishop Georg Gänswein, prefect of the papal household. As G�
�nswein fumbled with the light switch, Francis found himself peering into a gilded cage: cavernous, marble-floored rooms with heavy furniture, each leading into the next, that seemed to go on forever. Recognizing a feeling of desolation, he saw only loneliness and isolation, and decided at that moment to remain living in the Santa Marta, using the apartments for meetings.
He made calls: to his dentist in Buenos Aires to cancel his appointment, to Daniel del Regno, his paper deliverer (“Seriously, it’s Jorge Bergoglio, I’m calling you from Rome”) to thank him for his years of service, and to his sole surviving sibling, María Elena.
“He told me, ‘Look, it happened, and I accepted,’” she recalls. “But I said, ‘but how are you, how do you feel?’ He was dying of laughter, and said, ‘I’m fine, relax.’ I said, ‘You looked really good on television, you had a radiant expression. I wish I could give you a hug.’ He said, ‘We are hugging, we are together, I have you very close to my heart.’ It’s not easy to explain what it is to talk to your brother, and your brother is the pope,” recalls María Elena, between laughter and tears. “Es muy complicado—it’s really complicated.”
The next day Francis met the whole college of cardinals, including the non-electors, in the Hall of Benedictions. When Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor came up, Francis embraced him, and laughing, wagged a finger in his face. “It’s your fault! What have you done to me?”21
EPILOGUE: THE GREAT REFORM
AS EUPHORIA SPREAD through God’s holy faithful people in every pueblo and barrio across Argentina—and especially in the slums of Buenos Aires, where people ran from door to door yelling, “They made Padre Jorge the pope!”—it dawned on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s advisers that this was much, much bigger than Argentina winning the World Cup in 1978, that Francis would be the most famous Argentine since Carlos Gardel, and that if la Presidenta didn’t come around, her ratings would sky-dive off a cliff.
The Great Reformer Page 47