A single squeal from a woman presaged an eruption of cheering The night JORGE became FRANCIS
A wonderful piece of theatre packed with cliff-hanging suspense and centuries-old pageantry on an epic scale reached its zenith as white smoke drifted from the Sistine Chapel chimney... and the crowd went wild
NO one thought a new Pope would be elected so quickly. When the conclave to select a successor to the retired Pope Benedict XVI was convened on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, veteran Vatican watchers settled in for what they thought would be the long haul. The only thing on which they all seemed to agree was that he would not be Italian.
After the Polish John Paul II and German Benedict, the Italian lock on the papacy was history. Now, they believed, the time had come for the Papacy to reflect the worldwide Roman Catholic family and look beyond Europe for the first time since the Syrian Pope Gregory in the year 731.
Yet within 30 hours of the doors of the Sistine Chapel closing — ‘extra omnes!’, or ‘everybody out!’, shouted Monsignor Guido Marini, Papal master of ceremonies — a single squeal from a woman in St Peter’s Square presaged an eruption of cheering as the huge crowd looked to the four massive TV screens and saw what they had come to see. At six minutes past seven on Wednesday evening, March 13, after the fifth ballot in the chapel, white smoke billowed from the chimney to the right of the square. Within minutes, the Vatican website confirmed it. ‘Habemus Papam,’ it said. We have a Pope. I was standing towards the back of St Peter’s Square, near the top of Via della Conciliazione that runs between the Vatican and the Castel Sant’Angelo, and at first I wasn’t sure. White smoke, it transpires, starts off looking a lot darker, and only gradually does it change. The woman who squealed clearly had been through the procedure before, because she called it long before I felt confident enough to be sure of what I was actually seeing.
There was no such confusion about the massed response. In front of me was the most extraordinary sight. It had been a miserable day marked by thunder, lightning and appropriately Biblical downpours but, despite being soaked to the skin, the crowd raised their colourful umbrellas, their national flags — mostly from South America, which should have been an indicator all on its own of what the result would be — and their banners. They roared, their voices amplified by the enclosed surroundings, the square lit by the flashes of many thousands of mobile phones, the modern equivalent of a candlelight procession and perhaps more familiar from rock concerts than what you expect from a more reverential occasion.
For those who had waited for two days, it was a welcome relief after the first four ballots proved inconclusive. Until that point, the biggest diversion had been provided by two women who stripped topless, revealing the words ‘war no more’ painted on their breasts and waving smoke bombs. The police were having none of it and tackled them with needlessly brutal force, throwing them to the ground before dragging them away to a waiting van.
All attention now was on what was to come, not what had passed. From one corner of Bernini’s magnificent colonnaded square, the general cacophony slowly unified, and an ever-growing chant rippled through the throng.
‘Viva Il Papa, viva Il Papa,’ they shouted in unison. There was only one problem — no one knew who Il Papa was. For now at least, the name of the 265th successor to St Peter was a secret.
In all the prior speculation, only one Italian, Cardinal Angelo Scola, the Archbishop of Milan, was even mentioned on the list of frontrunners. Two more Europeans were believed to be in the mix — Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna and Cardinal Péter Erdó, the primate of Hungary. The field from outside Europe looked more likely — Cardinal Odilo Scherer, Archbishop of São Paulo in Brazil; Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York; Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Archbishop of Manila in the Philippines; Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development; and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a former Archbishop of Quebec in Canada, and now president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
There were some who mentioned Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina (not least Irish Daily Mail columnist Mark Dooley, one of the few to correctly predict the outcome), but others ruled him out because it was believed that while he was understood to have been runner-up to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the conclave that followed the death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005, he was too old at 76.
How wrong they were. Within minutes of the white smoke appearing, there was activity on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world.
The crowd found a new set of lungs and roared even louder; a Papal election, it transpires, is a wonderful piece of theatre, filled with cliff-hanging suspense and set-piece choreography dating back centuries.
Jean-Louis Tauran, the Cardinal Protodeacon (the most senior of the electors in order of appointment to the College of Cardinals, the protodeacon is not necessarily the eldest among their number) followed tradition and made the announcement, telling the world that Cardinal Bergoglio was the new Pope, and that he would be known as Francisco, after the saint of Assisi. This seemed to at least partly placate the Italians who had expected Cardinal Scola, incorrectly congratulated as having triumphed in a statement from the Italian Conference of Bishops
The crowd went wild. Every human response was there — elation, smiles, hugging and more than a few tears. As you would
expect, there were lots of priests present. Indeed, I was mistaken for one myself by a reporter from an American TV channel who was in search of an on-air quote, and I haven’t worn black trousers with a dark jacket ever since.
There were also a lot of freshfaced seminarians, and they alone seemed perplexed. One group of four, perhaps hoping for a young reformer, looked particularly unimpressed. The new Pope, after all, was 17 years older than John Paul II when he was elected in the 1978 conclave.
Then the pageantry started. Out of sight, Cardinal Bergoglio was asked if he would accept his election. ‘Although I am a sinner, I accept,’ he said. Then he proceeded to the Room of Tears. This is where a new Pope first feels the weight of the responsibility that has been thrust upon him as he takes on the onerous burden of becoming spiritual guide to the one in seven of the world’s population baptised into the Roman Catholic Church.
There, three sets of robes in different sizes were laid out. Having selected the correct one, he set about robing up and prepared for his introduction to the watching world.
To aid in this endeavour, the rear of the square was dominated by a three-storey scaffold containing dozens of pop-up television studios, effectively elevated Portakabins. The roofs of many building with views onto the square also had been hired, mostly by the deep-pocketed US networks, to beam their pictures around the world.
All the while, peals of bells rang out — not just from St Peter’s but all across Rome. Like everywhere else in the developed world, Italy has become more secular, but it still is exaggeratedly expressive, and fully aware of the role it plays in the Catholic family. As the peals subsided, a new sound carried on the night air.
An incessant drumbeat — not, as it now transpires, unlike the thunderclap performed by Icelandic football fans — signalled the arrival of the Swiss Guard and it continued as they made their way up the steps of the basilica in tightly drilled formation. Standing in rows on the podium, they looked like a toy army. It all was vaguely reminiscent of a medieval carnival, a scene from the Canterbury Tales reimagined for modern times.
Then came the moment they all had waited for — not just the original crowd, but those who swelled the numbers when they dashed to the Vatican after seeing the white smoke on television. By this stage, not only the square but also almost the entire 500m length of the Via della Conciliazione was thronged as everyone waited to hear what Papa Francisco had to say.
Curtains parted and lights blazed. The crowd hushed. When he appeared, he looked slight and nervous but, speaking in Italian, he soon won everyone over.
‘Let us pray always for each other,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for the whole world. May there be a great brotherhood.’
Continuing without waiting for applause, a signal, perhaps, that he was more humble than showbizzy, he entreated: ‘Let us pray silently in this prayer for me.’
Then, after less than ten minutes, he departed with the words: ‘Brothers and sisters, I leave you. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. Pray for me and we’ll see each other soon. Tomorrow, I want to go pray to the Madonna — and I want to wish to all of Rome goodnight and good rest.’ His first address was good humoured and smiling — the very opposite of the austere Benedict, who presumably was watching from the summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, to which he temporarily retreated.
Unsurprisingly, the more humble Francis, who lives in a small Vatican apartment and travels around Rome in a Ford Focus, has since turned Castel Gandolfo into a museum.
Similarly frugally, his debut address was long on joy and very short on dogma, and his audience lapped it up. They filed away into the night, happy they had witnessed a piece of history.
I shared their enthusiasm, if not exactly their faith. On a very simple level, there is an energy in a crowd that exerts a primal pull on the emotions, and I remember it vividly from Phoenix Park and from Knock in 1979 — less so at the latter, to be honest, because the Mass that day was cloaked in a chilly, smoky mist, sapping the atmosphere that was so joyful in Dublin the previous day.
But in Francis, I also saw a man who might be a different sort of Pope, one who had a civilian life before his religious one — he even worked as a nightclub bouncer — and who might temper some of the exclusions of the Church. He might, I thought, hold out an olive branch to single parents, divorcees and gay Catholics, and deliver a heartfelt act of contrition to atone for the abuses carried out by priests and other religious.
All of these things have been a little piecemeal, but this is a continuing Papacy, not a concluded one, and who knows what might happen? Undeniably, though, progress on those fronts is slow and, at 81, Francis is just five years off the age when Benedict decided to call it a day. The return of charisma was welcome after the princely detachment of the new Pope Emeritus, but Pope Francis is still a cog, albeit the most important one, in the Church. The Curia, the administrative body of the Holy See, is the engine, and it is slow to adapt to change.
Analysis of this Papacy is for another time. For now, many hundreds of thousands will profess their faith in God in front of the Pope today and tomorrow, even if they don’t entirely agree with every action of the Church.
And while I too will be among their number, I also will remember a rainy night in Vatican City, a night that delivered pageantry on an epic scale, a moment in history that, even just at face value for spectacle, will stay in my memory forever.