Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2005
Q: How is a new pope
selected?
—Anonymous, from the
Internet
A: Not to be pessimistic about Pope John Paul II, but…well, you’re not asking to be optimistic, are you?
Fittingly, the current pope himself made the most recent changes to an electoral system that has been regularly tweaked to avoid the riots and antipopes that once plagued the choosing of the peaceful pastor of the God of love.
The history of selecting popes is long, colorful and wildly brutal, as amusingly described in Catholic almanacs and encyclopedias.
At first,
choosing a guy who was basically just the archbishop of
The Roman emperors, being law-and-order types, said enough of that, and stepped in to start running—not to mention fixing—the elections. No more riots, but a few centuries of Machiavellian politics, assassinations and general unholiness (involving other countries and Italian families, too).
Eventually, the church got sick of all that and decided that only cardinals would choose the new pope. A further tweak was requiring a two-thirds majority vote. Next thing you know—more riots!
Cardinals have to choose among themselves who gets the plum pope-for-life job. One can only imagine the horrific jockeying and office politics involved.
Actually, one doesn’t have to imagine. Just take my personal favorite, the election following the 1268 death of Pope Clement IV. The cardinals jerked around for three years, arguing about who would get the job, and even then didn’t decide until, in the words of Our Sunday Voice’s Catholic Almanac, “the citizens of the city [Viterbo, Italy] reduced them to bread and water and tore the roof off the palace in which they were residing.”
Finally, the church came up with the still-current practice of the Conclave. I.e., the cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel and not allowed to come out until they’ve made up their minds. Unsurprisingly, solitary confinement has greatly speeded the election process.
Things begin when the so-called
College of Cardinals convenes in the
The Conclave means they’re sealed
inside the
And I mean locked inside,
literally. The
Once inside, the cardinals can presumably mill about and deliberate as at any political convention—though trading votes is reportedly not allowed. The actual voting takes place in the Sistine Chapel; during the election of the current pope, ballots were counted at a table set up in front of the altar of the Last Judgement. Yikes!
In theory, a pope can be chosen by “acclamation”—that is, all the cardinals agreeing on one guy. Unsurprisingly, this apparently never happens, judging by the amount of time recent Conclaves have lasted.
This leaves “compromise” or “scrutiny”—a normal casting of ballots, as we would call it. Votes are written on paper ballots, put in a ballot box, and read aloud. Four votes are taken each day of the Conclave until somebody wins.
Winning consists of pulling two-thirds of the votes plus one. After a certain number of unsuccessful ballots—30, according to one source—the rule changes to allow the man who wins a simple majority to win the election.
Keeping in mind the obsession with secrecy, all of the ballots, notes and any other election documents are tossed into a stove and burned.
This burning is what led to the
famous smoke signal from a
The smoke distinction used to be made by adding straw to produce thick, dark smoke if necessary. However, this was never reliable, and more recently chemicals have been used to produce either white or black smoke. Even this screwed up in the 1978 election of Pope John Paul I, when a reported accident with the “white” chemical unintentionally produced thick, dark smoke.