Behind the sealed doors of the Sistine Chapel, the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church burst into applause Tuesday afternoon when, after four rounds of voting, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger received more than the 77 votes needed to become pope.
Head bowed, Ratzinger remained silent, unmoving.
Then the hush spread to the 114 other cardinals as they awaited the new pope's Accepto, his formal acceptance. In a low voice roughened by a cold, Ratzinger told them he would like to be known as Benedict XVI, honoring Saint Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, and Benedict XV, the pope who tried to stop the First World War.
"I, too, hope in this short reign to be a man of peace," the new pope said, according to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
With those words, Benedict XVI opened his papacy with a prediction -- that he would not hold the throne of Saint Peter as long as John Paul II -- and a promise -- that he would promote conciliation. Both ideas appear to have been crucial to his election.
Although the cardinals swore an oath of perpetual secrecy about what occurred in the conclave, many began to talk about it on Wednesday. Some said they had long been convinced that Ratzinger was the right man. Others said his performance at John Paul's funeral and other rituals in recent days had made a deeply favorable impression.
Fractured opposition
In any case, the 78-year-old German cardinal steadily built support before and during the two-day conclave, according to these accounts. He ate breakfast with African and Asian cardinals. He assured U.S. prelates that he was in tune with their efforts to deal with child sexual abuse by priests. He sought to allay fears that he would set back attempts at interfaith dialogue.
After the 26-year pontificate of John Paul, some cardinals did not want another long reign; for them, Ratzinger's age was reassuring. Others were concerned that the Vatican's longtime guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy might come across to ordinary Catholics as too severe; for them, his desire to step out of his old role and to be a conciliator, a man of peace, was vital.
Moreover, the opposition was fractured. Three key Spanish-speaking cardinals firmly backed Ratzinger from the outset, as did two influential Italians. That meant there was not unified backing for either an Italian or a Latin American candidate.
From the very first vote on Monday evening, Ratzinger was at the front of the pack of contenders. And almost before the electors knew it, the grave atmosphere of the conclave was over, and they were singing Latin songs, eating chicken cordon bleu and toasting the new pope with spumante.
"It's wonderful to be in a group of 115 people, and you're all equals. You're all talking: Eminence this, Eminence that, first name this, first name that. And then suddenly, one of you is different," said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington. "He's no longer one of you. He's the Holy Father, the successor to Peter and the Vicar of the Christ."
For years, Joseph Ratzinger was a rarity in the church, the only Vatican official other than John Paul with global name recognition. His book-length interview with an Italian journalist, "The Ratzinger Report," was a European bestseller in the mid-1990s and sold 50,000 copies in English.
Already the best-known member of the College of Cardinals, his profile only increased after John Paul died on April 2. He presided over the pope's funeral, led the cardinals in their closed-door sessions to discuss the state of the church and celebrated Mass at St. Peter's Basilica on Monday, the day the conclave began.
Deliberately or not, Ratzinger reduced the attention other cardinals got from the news media by persuading his colleagues to agree to stop talking to reporters on the day after John Paul's funeral. That news blackout put an end to the traditional floating of candidates during the novemdiales, or nine-day mourning period, after the death of a pope.
The buzz around Ratzinger began long before the conclave, said Cardinal Rosalio Jose Castillo Lara, a nonvoting prelate from Venezuela. "I begged him, 'If they elect you, don't refuse,' " Castillo Lara said. He added that Ratzinger had an advantage in presiding over the funeral rites. "He did them well, and very serenely and with much humility," Castillo Lara said. "He showed himself to be very prepared."
A week before the conclave, Italian newspapers reported that Ratzinger already had a solid bloc of votes -- 40 according to Corriere della Sera, 50 according to La Repubblica.
‘Even the Italian newspapers’
Asked when the cardinals began focusing on Ratzinger as a candidate, McCarrick replied with a grin: "When we read the newspapers. Because the newspapers were telling us that Cardinal Ratzinger is the favorite. So we see, the Holy Spirit may speak through the newspapers -- sometimes even the Italian newspapers."
In the run-up to the conclave, the cardinals met daily in a modern hall inside the Vatican's medieval walls to discuss issues facing the church, including the spread of Islam, economic globalization and the ethical dilemmas raised by biotechnology.
These sessions were also covered by an oath of secrecy. But several cardinals made clear on Wednesday that the march of secularization across Western Europe was the number one problem on their minds, and that Ratzinger seemed to be part of the solution.
The new pope, said George, the Chicago archbishop, "understands Western society" and "is very well prepared" for the task of revitalizing Christianity in affluent, secular cultures.
On Monday morning, the cardinals attended the traditional Mass for the election of a pope at St. Peter's, where Ratzinger gave a stinging homily against the West's creeping "dictatorship of relativism." Those who hold firmly to belief in God and moral absolutes, he said, are accused of fundamentalism, while the only socially acceptable attitude seems to be that everything is relative and nothing is clearly right or wrong.
In effect, it laid out the philosophy behind Ratzinger's two decades of work as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Opus Dei
According to aides to two non-American cardinals, Ratzinger entered the conclave with firm backing from three influential cardinals with ties to the conservative renewal movement Opus Dei: Julian Herranz of Spain, head of the Vatican's department for interpreting legislative texts; Dario Castrillon Hoyos of Colombia, head of the department in charge of the clergy; and Alfonso Lopez Trujillo of Colombia, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
This meant the Spanish-speaking electors had not coalesced around a Latin American candidate, despite speculation that they might support such cardinals as Claudio Hummes of Brazil or Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras.
Meanwhile, two leading Italian prelates, Camillo Ruini of Rome and Angelo Scola of Venice, also openly supported Ratzinger. Dionigi Tettamanzi of Milan, widely seen as a possible candidate, "came in very disadvantaged," said one of the aides, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The 115 voting cardinals from more than 50 countries filed into the Sistine Chapel on Monday afternoon in a somber and regal procession, wearing red robes and white lace. Following centuries-old procedures revised by John Paul in 1996, each voted by writing the name of his preferred candidate on a folded piece of paper, then held it up to show the entire assembly that it was a single ballot before depositing it into a urn.
By tradition, the voting took place in silence, punctuated only by prayers and the counting of ballots. Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Austria described it as more "like a church service" than an election.
"I have to say that sitting in the Sistine Chapel with all these well-dressed figures in front of the Last Judgment, it's not just an ordinary meeting," Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of England said, referring to the Michelangelo fresco on one wall.
"Every cardinal does what he thinks before God is right," he said.
But every cardinal had some earthly guidance on what that right decision should be.
On the morning of the second day of the conclave, Ratzinger had breakfast with cardinals from Asia and Africa, according to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles. Egan, the archbishop of New York, recalled another occasion when Ratzinger spoke in four languages to keep everyone around the table in the conversation.
U.S. sex abuse crisis
George, of Chicago, said that a few days before the conclave, he talked with the future pope about maintaining "the canonical structures we need to respond" to the sex abuse crisis, a reference to the church laws that allow U.S. bishops to remove priests who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with minors. "He understood the need to do that" and showed he "had a good grasp of the situation," George said.
Murphy-O'Connor said most of the informal discussions during the conclave took place in the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse, where the cardinals were staying. "We didn't have meetings in rooms, we just sort of walked around on the ground floors," he said. "There wasn't much time."
Only one vote was taken on the first day of the conclave. No one got the required two-thirds majority, but the strong backing for Ratzinger was apparent. "It was a choice that was almost clear from the very beginning," George said.
"Everyone knew that of those who might be pope, that Cardinal Ratzinger was a very strong candidate," Murphy-O'Connor said. "And the fact that he came out early was interesting. . . . There was a vote on the first day, and then two the following morning, and the following evening there was the majority required. And that's how it happened."
After his election, the new pope invited all the cardinals to stay and dine with him, as John Paul had done in 1978. They ate Italian bean soup, chicken cordon bleu and ice cream, washing it down with spumante. Cardinal William Baum, the retired archbishop of Washington, was among those at the head table.
At John Paul's election night celebration, he sang Polish folk songs. This time, the assembly managed only a couple of songs in Latin, George said. "There were no folk songs or anything like that," he said. "It's a different style."
