Papal Conclave 2013

The papal conclave to elect a new pope began on Wednesday as the last of the cardinals arrived on Monday. The Sistine Chapel closed, and the chimney was installed on top of the roof. The first ballot session was held that night around 7 pm, and Anna, Alex and I decided to go. The likelihood of a pope being elected on the first ballot was slim to none, but I thought it would be just as cool to be there, even seeing the black smoke come out of the chimney.

There were news reporters from all different countries everywhere, and whenever people heard us speaking English, American newscasters would come up to us and interview us. Mostly minor stations, but it was all pretty cool. They always asked us who we thought would be the pope, and I honestly had no idea. We had been reading up on all the different cardinals who were believed to be front-runners, but in these lists they always included Cardinal Dolan, though likable and the cardinal from New York, was probably not going to get it considering he was just made a cardinal recently. So I wasn’t sure whether even to trust these articles. Besides, no one really knows what goes on in the conclaves.

Giant screens were set up so that even if you couldn’t see the chimney from where you were standing (it was kind of tiny anyway), anyone could see the smoke pour out right when it happened. It was a little rainy but we managed to stick it out through the crowd, and as 7 pm came and went we got a little anxious. It was around 7:40 pm when suddenly the crowd gasped, and black smoke came pouring out of the chimney. At first it was almost grey, and my stomach dropped, but then it was clearly black. I was still excited to have been there for the first vote! We headed home, still feeling the adrenaline from being down in St. Peter’s Square for that.

The next day, we had a site visit to St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, the church where St. Paul is buried. Me and Anna had been there that morning for the 7 am Stations mass, and had to trek back there for class at 9:30. The only thing anyone could talk about was the pope, and the election. Professor Gondreau asked anyone if they had the “Pope Alarm” app, so that we would know right away if we had to start running down to the Vatican. There was a ballot at 10:30 am that morning and noon. Luckily, nothing happened for the first ballot of the morning, and because it had been passed on that there would be no smoke at all unless a pope was elected (they saved the ballots for the next vote and would put them in if there was supposed to be black smoke), we raced over to the Vatican after class to catch the smoke at noon. We got there at exactly noon, and were told that the black smoke had actually gone up really early, at 11:40 am. Looks like they don’t do anything according to schedule in Italy…

Anna, Alex, and I skipped Italian that night to make it to St. Peter’s Square for the first evening vote at 5:30 pm, and everyone met us there. There was a steady drizzle, and it was really difficult to navigate around everyone because of the massive amounts of umbrellas. There was also significantly more people in the square, and the air had a feeling of excitement. A lot of people from CEA ended up meeting up with us, as well as everyone who had gone to their later Italian classes. The smoke didn’t go up, and everyone waited and chatted. We met a newscaster and cameraman from Houston, and they talked to us for a while. Danielle lives in Houston, so she told her mom to be sure to watch the news there. It was 7 pm and everyone was just starting to get excited, but me and Anna were kind of expecting the smoke to go up later, as it had done the night before. About five minutes later, everyone gasped and yelled again, and we looked up to see white smoke billowing from the chimney. Everyone started screaming and jumping and cheering—it was a wild scene, and not something you would expect from a bunch of Catholics. We all looked at each other and everyone started running, and me and Anna followed Ben, dodging umbrellas and people. We ended up getting really up close. Everyone was screaming and yelling and cheering, and even though there was still rain falling, once everyone was packed in up near St. Peter’s, most people courteously put their umbrellas away. Anna took some pretty entertaining videos of our initial reactions and everyone else around us. There were people standing on roofs all over the Vatican, and I could not get over how close we were—almost as close as you could possibly get before the small steps leading into the Basilica.

We waited for about an hour, and in the meantime a band marched across the front of St. Peter’s. At one point, the curtain where the pope was to step out moved a little and the whole crowd went nuts… it was pretty funny. Finally, three people walked out of the door and in Latin, announced something that literally no one understood in the crowd around me. Then these Spanish people in the crowd started yelling, “PAPA FRANCESCO!”, repeating it over and over again. Ben, Anna and I just kept looking at each other, because none of us recognized that name. The three of us joked that at that point, the whole world knew who the pope was expect the people actually in the Vatican Square that night. Francesco was definitely not a name of any of the well-known cardinals. Finally, someone passed around a newspaper with all of the cardinals’ pictures and names, and the man next to us translated to us in English that it was the cardinal from Argentina. I was actually surprised, because I had heard a lot about the cardinals from Milan, Ghana, and Canada, but nothing about one from Buenos Aires. Finally, the cardinals all filed out on the balconies next to the center balcony, and all dressed in white, he addressed the crowd. Instead of the normal immediate blessing of the crowd, he instead asked us all to pray for him. He made a few jokes (which we couldn’t translate) and made the crowd laugh, but from what I later found out about what he said, he seemed like a pretty cool guy.

The atmosphere was crazy, and everyone was packed in together in the rain listening to the new pope. I couldn’t believe that I had witnessed the entire thing, from black smoke to white smoke to actually watching with my own eyes the pope walk out for the first time ever. When the pope went back inside, I took Anna’s hand and dodged through the crowd. There were masses of people all trying to leave St. Peter’s Square, and there were masses of people surrounding the Vatican for miles. We just needed to get ahead of them. So with my crowd-dodging skills, we laced in and out of the crowd until we were a little more comfortable. There was absolutely no way that we could get on any form of public transportation—the roads would all be clogged—so we decided to head to Scholar’s Pub for nachos and a beer to toast the new pope. We weren’t gonna be able to make it home anytime soon anyway. So, along with thousands of other Romans that night, we walked through the streets and crossed the bridge to the city center. There were just hoards of people everywhere on the streets, and we had been told ahead of time that if we decided to go to the conclave and the pope was actually elected, we would 100% have to trek home.

We got into the pub, having lost Alex and Danielle hours ago, and ordered a big order of nachos and fries and two Stella’s. As we got our beer, Danielle and Alex appeared out of nowhere! They had the same idea as us apparently, so we all sat together and ate and watched the one TV that the rugby game wasn’t blaring on, that was actually broadcasting news of the pope. Finally, we figured out that people had been yelling “Francesco” because he had taken on the name Pope Francis I. He was also the first Jesuit pope ever, had a degree in chemical engineering, and his parents were actually Italian immigrants.

We were so relieved that the pope had been elected that night, as we were off to London the next morning and wouldn’t have been able to be a part of it! It would’ve been terrible if we had been living in Rome and just simply weren’t in town the biggest weekend of (probably) the year!