Pope Francis, the first Latin-American pope, died on Easter Monday. Don’t bother lighting a candle in wait for a replacement (in mourning it is, of course, good practice) — the 267th pontiff of the Catholic Church will not be announced for several weeks.
When a pope dies, there is a built-in mourning period of 15-20 days. OK, so technically the mourning period is nine days long, but it does not officially begin until four to six days after the pope’s passing, which is when the body is moved to St. Peter’s Basilica so the public can pay their respects. Burial comes later.
A conclave of the College of Cardinals to select a new pope can commence immediately after those roughly two to three weeks. (Only cardinals under 80 years old, known as the cardinal electors, can participate and vote.)
Conclaves historically have lasted anywhere from a few days to a few months. In modern times, they’ve mostly taken less than four days, and the lengthiest conclave in the 20th century met for just five days. Once a decision is made, the new representative of God on Earth (for Roman Catholics, at least) is announced. Nobody was ready for what happened last time.
Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, resigned the post on February 28, 2013. The resignation was only semi-sudden: Pope Benedict XVI announced his decision on February 11, 2013, citing a “lack of strength of mind and body” due to age. He was 86; he’d live to be 95.
It was weird. Pope Benedict XVI was the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415, and the first to do so without external pressure since Celestine V in 1294. It sounds like there may have been at least internal pressure, however. Leaked documents later chronicled a power struggle within the Vatican.
Fox News’ Lauren Green reporting outside the Vatican in 2013.
So there was no mourning-mourning Benedict, but the conclave to replace him didn’t begin for nearly two weeks anyway. At least not officially, because just over 24 hours into the March conclave, white smoke came pouring out of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney — the universal sign for we’ve got a new pope.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. At first, black smoke came out — you can imagine how confusing that was for producers, anchors and correspondents trying to cover the moment live. They had already seen five separate emissions of black smoke — one for each failed vote. But this time was different. The black smoke soon turned to white; perhaps the Sistine Chapel just needed a good chimney sweep.
(Black smoke, created by simply burning the ballots with a mixture of potassium perchlorate, anthracene and sulfur signifies the cardinals could not reach a two-thirds consensus on a new pope. Black smoke is . White smoke, the chemical combination of potassium chlorate, lactose and chloroform resin, means it’s go time.)
And go, go, go did everyone have to… go. Reporters scrambled and Romans ran.
“We were on the platform at the end of the Via della Conciliazione, which is the street that looks directly at the Vatican. All the reporters asked: ‘Is that white smoke? Is that white smoke?’ Because nobody wants to be the first to be wrong,” Fox News Channel’s chief religion correspondent Lauren Green recalled in a Monday conversation with The Hollywood Reporter. “The next reaction was, ‘Oh my goodness, that was so fast.’ And then the next thing I remember seeing were people running, just Italians running to St. Peter’s Square because they knew within minutes the new pope would appear on the loggia.”
One of those in the race was Ben Wedeman, CNN’s senior international correspondent based in Rome. Hey, everyone else was doing it.
“What we saw — and I’d never seen this before — was a lot of people from the surrounding residential neighborhoods here in Rome also running… toward the square,” Wedeman told THR. “And when the announcement was Jorge Bergoglio, I looked at my cameraman, Alessandro Gentile, and our producer, Caroline Paterson, and we all said to one another, ‘Who’s that?!’”
Oh, right — there were two surprises that day.
CNN’s Live Breaking News Pope Francis
Courtesy of CNN
Bergoglio, who later took on the name Francis, wasn’t on anyone’s short list to replace Pope Benedict XVI.
“There had been much speculation about who might be elected pope, but this was not one of the names of the so-called papabile or the “pope-able” people,” Wedeman said.
Even the leaked names were wrong, Green said. (Yes, cardinals have cell phones and they leak info to the press — they’re “human beings,” after all, as Green reminded us.)
Green sees the next conclave lasting just “a couple of days.” While she doesn’t have a frontrunner per se, Green is “looking” at Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state. As Francis’ right hand, Parolin makes the most sense, but if any lesson is to be taken from March 13, 2013, it’s that our next pope could be practically anybody.