This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 8, 2013 - The conclave to elect a pope will begin Tuesday afternoon, Catholic cardinals voted in Vatican City Friday afternoon. The vote came one day after the last cardinal-elector arrived.
On Tuesday, after a mid-morning Mass at St. Peter's Basilica, and after taking an oath of secrecy and a locking-in ritual and prayers, they will enter the Sistine Chapel in the afternoon and begin to vote. With 115 in attendance a man must have 77 votes to be elected. The conclave begins 25 days after Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world with his announcement of his plan to resign.
A new controversy surrounding the gathering is the sudden end to the U.S. press conferences. As far back as 1978 when Cardinal John Joseph Carberry of St. Louis participated in conclaves, U.S. cardinals have given daily news conferences during the general conferences before being locked into the conclave. On Monday, two of the 11 U.S. cardinal-electors began the daily rotation, manning the mics at the North American College.
The U.S. cardinals had been careful to only talk in general terms, said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But then, abruptly Wednesday the U.S. cardinals cancelled the sessions at the request of the Vatican.
At these U.S. news conferences, which were streamed on the internet, cardinals explained conclave basics: physical arrangements for voting, explanations of canon law, and general hoped-for qualifications for the next pope.
The U.S. cardinals obliged Vatican nitpickers with a similar shutdown midway through the 2005 preparations for the conclave that elected Benedict XVI, Walsh said.
"In true old-style Catholic school teacher fashion, someone talks and everybody stays after school," Walsh quipped to the Associated Press Thursday.
Vatican leaders are even more sensitive now than before the 2005 conclave. Last year, some for-the-pope’s-eyes-only papers concerning finances and security got to the media in "Vatileaks."
Benedict assigned three senior cardinals to investigate. In December they presented their report to him. He declined to share the report with the cardinal-electors or the public. The three investigator cardinals are attending the general conference. According to some Italian media reports, the investigator cardinals are explaining the report.
The investigators tracked the leak to the pope’s valet, Paolo Gabriele, who was jailed, then forgiven. A high-ranking mastermind is assumed to be behind the leaks, Vatican experts say. Another hornets' nest led to the firing of the head of the Vatican Bank, Gotti Tedeschi, last year.
St. Louis connections
On Monday, three former St. Louis bishops attended the first session of the general conference: Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan, Cardinal Justin Francis Rigali and Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke.
Dolan, the New York archbishop, is a St. Louis native who grew up in Ballwin and was ordained a priest and a bishop here and served as the archdiocesan auxiliary bishop in 2001 and 2002.
Rigali, the retired Philadelphia archbishop who now lives in Knoxville, Tenn., was archbishop here from 1994 to 2004.
Burke leads the Vatican Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, an appeals court that deals with differences between Vatican departments and bishops. Burke was St. Louis Archbishop for five years until 2008.
The duty of a cardinal, whose ecclesiastical rank is no higher than bishop, is to advise the pope. They wear red because they vow to give their life for the pope, if needed. However, a cardinal’s most important duty is to elect a new pope when the chair of the bishop of Rome is vacant.
The last St. Louis archbishop to be a cardinal-elector while he was the leader of the St. Louis archdiocese was Cardinal John Joseph Carberry. He voted at the two conclaves of 1978, the August one that elected Pope John Paul I and the one in October that elected Pope John Paul II. Carberry served as St. Louis archbishop from 1968 to 1979.
"Cardinal Carberry took the conclaves very seriously, and the strict secrecy seriously" said Carberry’s then secretary, Bishop John Gaydos of the Jefferson City diocese, which includes 38 central and northern Missouri counties. He accompanied Carberry on many trips to Rome.
Before jets, some U.S. cardinals would arrive in Rome after conclave doors were locked. Many cardinals appointed during early years of John Paul II’s 27-year tenure turned 80 — the cut off age for voting — before his death.
Carberry was not going to miss it. So, when on Aug. 6, 1978, as he was listening to a baseball Cardinals Sunday afternoon game, a news bulletin announced the pope’s death, Carberry and Gaydos started working.
"We cleared the desk," Gaydos said. "Imagine a busy archbishop, but we were on the plane to Rome the next day."
A month after the John Paul I conclave, they "were back in Rome for another funeral, another conclave," Gaydos said.
At a news conference during the August 1978 general congregation before the opening of the conclave, an American reporter asked Carberry if a non-Italian might be elected. He politely dismissed that idea, Gaydos recalled.
When asked that same question about six weeks later, Carberry had a different answer. "Well, I used believe only an Italian (would be elected pope) but now I would not say that," Carberry said.
"For some reason that sentence did stick in my mind but I really didn’t think much about it until afterwards," Gaydos said in an interview this week. No one else seemed to notice his boss’s change of opinion.
Carberry certainly knew before entering that conclave that just weeks, before votes had gone to non-Europeans as well as the winning non-Italian, Poland’s Cardinal Wojtyla.
Secrecy in the Sistine
The conclave rules were written by John Paul II and slightly revised by Benedict XVI in a document called Universi Dominici Gregis. The rules forbid the cardinals from reading newspapers and magazines, watching television and taking phone calls — and that would include texting, reading iPads, iPhone, etc.
On Tuesday, the Sistine Chapel and a couple nearby rooms were closed to tourists. Jamming devices are being laid on the chapel’s marble floor, then a plywood floor installed over that, as they were in 2005. Carpeting will be laid for the cardinals to walk on. Eventually long tables and chairs will be set up for the cardinal-electors.
"Even back in 1978 they worried about people on the outside being able to hear," Gaydos said. "Imagine, today."
The conclave itself is more like a prayerful retreat with silence observed most of the time. But the two 1978 general conferences were both busy, as the cardinals reviewed the needs of the church worldwide, and were given statistics on church membership and priestly ordinations and administration issues. Carberry didn’t say much about details to Gaydos and took very seriously his vow of silence even with his secretary.
The humble and down-to-earth Carberry, whose favorite diversion was playing his harmonica, later summed up how short the first 1978 conclave had been by telling reporters that he had only eaten two of the 10 chocolate bars he took into the conclave. His candy stash was a preventative measure because conclave dinners served by Italian nuns were Spartan.
He bunked in a temporary cubicle in one of the offices in the Apostolic Palace with shared bathrooms down the hall. In 2005 and again this winter, the cardinals will be locked into a $20 million, hotel-like residence within the Vatican. Its commercial kitchen allows the pasta to be served warm.
Vetting papal candidates
Today's Cardinals, certainly as their predecessors did in 1978, are considering candidates from around the world. The cardinals want to be very careful that those who are considered for pope are well vetted, a Vatican insider told the Beacon. That is especially true of newer cardinals in countries without strong secular press where cardinals are not in the press spotlight, said Rocco Palmo, who writes the respected "Whispers in the Vatican" news site covering Catholic hierarchy.
Hanging over the vetting is the shadow of the United Kingdom’s only cardinal under 80 being kicked out of his post as archbishop late last month and eventually admitting that he had made sexual advances to four men who reported to him. Pope Benedict forced Cardinal Keith O’Brien of St. Andrews and Edinburgh to step down.
George of Chicago said that to be elected pope a man needs to be someone who understands that a priest guilty of one sexual abuse encounter must leave the ministry.
Sex abuse or the sheltering of sex abusers, of course, is not the only issue. U.S. cardinals can easily see the disconnect between their dioceses’ parishioners and the Vatican. The decline of U.S. Catholics in Sunday Mass attendance is a key concern. They surely read Wednesday’s New York Times/ABC poll that shows Americans who identify themselves at Catholic are satisfied with their local parishes but they think the Vatican and Catholic hierarchy are out of touch with the 21st century.
In conversations recently, U.S. cardinals and others have said that the ideal pope will have excellent evangelical and pastoral skills, be a good communication on spiritual matter and know something about the way the Vatican works.
'Jesus Christ with an MBA'
"They want Jesus Christ with an MBA," said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit Vatican expert at Georgetown University and author of "Inside the Vatican."
Reese retold a story about St. Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order, in a recently article for the National Catholic Reporter, based in Kansas City.
An abbey "wrote St. Benedict telling him that they were divided over who should be abbot. They had three candidates, each backed by a third of the community. There was a monk renowned for his holiness; another who was a brilliant theologian; and finally a practical man. St. Benedict wrote back, "Let the holy man pray for the monks, let the theologian teach the monks, and let the practical man rule the monks."
"While the pope is not an abbot, perhaps there is some wisdom here," Reese wrote.
Patricia Rice is a freelance writer who has long reported on religion.