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Waiting for the smoke that heralds a new pope

Firefighters install a temporary chimney on the roof of the Sistine Chapel on Friday in Vatican City, Vatican. The chimney used to communicate the choosing of a new pope is erected on the roof of the Sistine Chapel. (Getty Images )
By Motoko Rich and Patricia Mazzei New York Times

VATICAN CITY – After the men who will select the next pope were locked inside the Sistine Chapel without cellphones Wednesday, the only thing left to do was wait for them to send a signal to the outside world. By smoke.

The highly secret voting began inside what is possibly one of the world’s most secure vaults in the early evening, with the 133 cardinals tasked with deciding who will succeed Pope Francis writing candidates’ names on voting cards by hand, trying to disguise their handwriting.

Outside in St. Peter’s Square, thousands of the faithful, the curious and the vacationing gathered to await the news of whether the cardinals had managed to elect a papal successor. Word came at 9 p.m., in the form of black smoke billowing from a chimney installed last week on the roof of the chapel.

If the smoke had been white, it would have meant that the cardinals had chosen the first new pope in a dozen years in just one round of voting, a feat not seen for centuries.

But the black smoke, created when the cardinals’ ballots are incinerated in a cast-iron stove, means they’ll have to try again.

It took two days to elect Francis in 2013 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. No conclave in the 20th or 21st centuries has lasted more than five days.

The patience-requiring wait for the smoke in St. Peter’s Square is a ritual that dates back to the 19th century.

The day of waiting began at 10 a.m. when Giovanni Battista Re, the spry 91-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals, presided over a Mass inside St. Peter’s Basilica and implored the voting cardinals to choose “a pope who knows how best to awaken the consciences of all, and the moral and spiritual energies in today’s society.”

After lunch at the Casa Santa Marta, the lodging house inside the Vatican where the electors will stay throughout the conclave, the cardinals walked to the Sistine Chapel.

Around 5:45 p.m., the giant wooden doors were closed, leaving the 133 cardinal electors locked inside.

The cardinals will not be allowed to leave the Vatican until a two-thirds majority agrees on the next pope.

Some veteran electors believed there would be prolonged voting. “Bring a book,” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York said he advised other cardinals, in an interview Tuesday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.