Chicago, October 15, 2003

There is much festivity in Rome these days. October brings the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Paul II, the beatification of Mother Teresa, and a consistory for the creation of thirty-one new cardinals. There's a lot of coverage in the American media-an apotheosis of the Pope, but also a display of his frailty. Frank Bruni does a piece in the New York Times about the handful of men who are running the Church because of John Paul's weakness. The Pope will not resign, even if he has to take to his bed. He believes that a father does not resign from his family.

With the media spotlight on our eighty-three-year-old Pope, Catholicism is celebrated but also made to look a little ridiculous. I have gut instincts against the personality cult that has grown up around John Paul, but he is entitled to a celebration. He has been an impressive influence for the last quarter century. How does one evaluate his administration? In my book on the conclaves of 1978, I was ecstatic about him. I thought that he would carry the reforms of the Second Vatican Council on to their logical conclusion - a more democratic, sensitive, open Church. I admit that I was terribly wrong.

He surely is one of the most talented men ever to be Pope, an actor, a poet, a philosopher, a man of enormous personal charm. He has had a tremendous impact on the Catholic Church and on the world. Time magazine rates him one of the "men of the century." Some authors (like Jonathan Kwitny in his book Man of the Century -Henry Holt and Company, 1997) argue that he brought down the socialist empire of the Soviet Union. He has traveled abroad tirelessly. Everywhere he has been hailed by massive crowds of enthusiastic Catholics. He has involved himself in the politics of countries like Nigeria and Cuba as well as his native Poland. He has lectured world leaders, including President Clinton. He has put his stamp irrevocably on the Catholic Church. He has, according to many, restored order and discipline to a Church which was in chaos during the years after the Second Vatican Council. Still others would say he has saved the Church from the folly of Pope John XXIII.

He sincerely believes that he is loyal to the Second Vatican Council, in which he participated. Yet he has virtually ignored the principle of collegial consultation with the bishops which that council endorsed, most notably in his unilateral declaration that women cannot become priests. Bishops are once again treated like lower-level bureaucrats who are servants of the Roman Curia.

Their triennial synods in Rome are manipulated by the Curia. He has hassled theologians and scholars at the cost of diminishing the freedom of discussion that the council seemed to support. He has appointed extremely conservative bishops. He has sternly lectured married laypeople about the immorality of birth control. He has brought ecumenical discussions virtually to a halt. Although he was one of the principal architects of the counciliar document on the Church and the modern world, he seems profoundly suspicious of the modern world. He refuses to consider the ordination of married men and makes it difficult and humiliating for men who wish to leave the priesthood to marry. He has encouraged right-wing organizations like Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ, which have in effect become diligent hunters of heresy.

All of these actions have led many to speak of him as a Pope of "restoration," a Pope who has restored to his office and to the Vatican the power and the attitudes of Pope Pius XII (1939-58).

On social and political issues, however, his orientation could hardly be called conservative. He condemns war and the death penalty, defends the rights of immigrants, and denounces anti- Semitism - all of which make him far more "liberal" than most Catholics.

There isn't much debate that he has been intent on the restoration of order, discipline, and obedience to the Church. If one believes that such a restoration is good, then one indeed thinks he is the Pope of the Century. If one believes that such restoration is mistaken, unnecessary, and counterproductive, then one has profound reservations about his papacy.

I don't doubt his greatness. I wish that he had been more collaborative in his governance and less authoritarian in his style. I wish his many global visits (over a hundred now) had been fact- finding instead of manifestations. I wish above all he had not aborted the reform in the Church. I even wish he had pushed ahead with a reform of the papacy itself.

However, no one is perfect. I can disagree with him, respectfully, and still admire him.

The new cardinals don't impress. Justin Rigali, a former curialist and destined to move from St. Louis to Philadelphia, gets the red hat, and Michael Fitzgerald, the specialist on Islam who heads the Interreligious Dialogue office, does not. A lot of unfamiliar third-world names. There is talk now that there will certainly be a third-world Pope. That doesn't make me enthusiastic, because third-world bishops tend to be more Roman than the Romans. I'm glad I scheduled my upcoming reconnaissance to Rome when things calm down a little.

Rome, November 9, 2003

This place is weird.
You used to be able to walk into St. Peter's and say a prayer. Not anymore. They have made part of the plaza a kind of amphitheater for papal performances. You can get in only through the north entrance, and you must go through metal screeners, a sign of the time, I guess. There are nine screeners, but only one seems to be operating. The queue stretches all the way around the colonnade and back to the Via Conciliazione. Given the notorious inefficiency and indifference of the Italian police, the screening is probably pro forma. St. Peter's certainly would be an ideal target for terrorism, particularly at the time of a papal election. Still, in earlier times you could walk into San Pietro and say a prayer to the Lord whenever you wanted, just like back home. Except back home now the clergy keep the churches locked all day, so that the laity can't make the once popular "visits to the Blessed Sacrament." Here you can, if you're willing to stand in line for an hour.

A metal fence has been built around the obelisk that Pope Sixtus put in the middle of the Piazza. Some of my best photos of the last conclaves were of the ragazzi (boy punks) climbing all over the base. They can't do it anymore, which seems like a notable loss. Huge construction edifices have been erected in front of the press office on one side of the Conciliazione and the Congregation for Bishops on the other side, thus effectively blocking much of the view of the church as you walk up the street. Worse still, the edifices have been turned into billboards. There doesn't seem to be any construction going on, so the locals claim that the whole purpose is to earn billboard income!

I don't think I believe that, but it does add to the weirdness of the situation. The Pope is sick, probably terminally. People say that Cardinal Sodano, secretary of state, and Archbishop Dziwisz, the Pope's personal secretary (often called Don Stanislaus), are running the Church, sometimes with disagreements between them. The present quasi interregnum may be long.

Even weirder, it seems to me, is the absence of conversation about a successor. There was so much discussion in past years about the Pope's health and a conclave that speculation seems to have run out of steam. More seriously, perhaps, the Sacred College seems less distinguished than it has been in a long time, a subject to which I will return later. Thus the Vatican is a strange, gray, almost depressed place. My friend Adolfo says maybe an old man recalls excitement of earlier years that didn't really exist. I don't believe it for a minute. The celebration to mark the Pope's twenty-fifth anniversary on the Throne of the Fisherman (who in his most fantastical moments could not have imagined having a throne) was a bright, almost gaudy event. When it was over, however, the weariness returned, not merely of the Pope but also of the Vatican and of the Church. Despite his successes John Paul will leave the Catholic Church with serious problems of governance, including a somewhat listless Sacred College and an undistinguished episcopate. I will reflect on that later when I've had more chance to talk to people.

I lunched today with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, and a monsignor who is in charge of the permission for the Tridentine Latin Mass came into the restaurant. (If some want to reinstitute the Tridentine Mass, it's all right with me, so long as they don't try to impose it on the rest of us - which of course is their goal.) This man refuses to say the Mass of Paul VI - the modern Mass - around the edges of which the current reactionaries at the Congregation for Divine Worship are eating away. He also believes that the Pope is a heretic: strong on "morals" (meaning sex), John Paul is weak on faith. Hence, for example, his prayers with various kinds of heretics, schismatics, and infidels at the Assisi interreligious dialogues these past several years. The Pope is a philosopher, the priest says, but unfortunately not a theologian - a criticism one also hears from liberal theologians!

There is one aspect of John Paul's administrative style about which most people are unaware. While he signs almost every document the curialists bring him, he pays rather little attention to what they are doing. Many of them have been consistently upset at the Pope because he would rather roam around the world than stay at home and tend to business - by which they mean their business.

The Curia is composed of the Secretariat of State (a "prime minister"); nine Congregations (for example, Doctrine of the Faith, Divine Worship, Making of Bishops); three Tribunals; eleven Pontifical Councils (Christian Unity, Family, Interreligious Dialogue, Social Communications); five Offices (Economic Affairs); and eleven commissions or committees (Historical Sciences, Bible). Its members do not necessarily share a common ideology, save for maintaining their own power, as does every bureaucracy.

Popes for the last half century have dealt with the entrenched power and age-old culture of the Curia (or one should say powers, since there are many internal divisions within the Curia) in many different ways. Pius XII ran the Church though his housekeeper, Madre Pasqualina (who actually accompanied him into the conclave at which he was elected Pope). John XXIII used the Vatican Council as a counterweight to curial imperatives. John Paul II signs their documents and ignores them. One would think that someday a Pope might simply abolish the Curia and create a more modern civil service.

So as I say, this is a weird city, sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, sometimes both. Yet as I watch the faithful of every hue under heaven walk to and fro in front of the great basilica (which started the Reformation and cost us Germany), I am impressed once again by the majesty of the building and the enormous strength of the Catholic imagination, which binds us all together.

Rome, November 10, 2003

I reflect tonight that the Catholic Church is in deep trouble. It is fractured, polarized. The right is small in numbers but because of its influence on the present Pope large in power. The left is increasingly alienated. The center leans sharply to the left on matters of sexuality. Few Catholics, even the "good" ones, listen to the Vatican or take it seriously.

Those who want the cork back in the bottle will be happy with the papacy of John Paul II. Those who do not will be unhappy, regardless of Time magazine's judgments. There remains also a pragmatic question of whether his restoration has been effective. Have order and discipline been restored in the Church or have the laity and the lower clergy simply gone their own way, cheered for the Pope when he has come to their country, but made their own decisions? Has the persecution of some theologians stopped other theologians from speculations that go much further than those of comparatively moderate men like Hans Kung? Are the conservative bishops he has appointed able to turn the tide against those who believe in and want greater cultural and theological pluralism, more lay participation, less hierarchy, more dialogue?

This is an empirical question that is not answered by the ecstatic enthusiasms of conservative Catholics or by the praise of bishops. Has the restoration worked? If it hasn't, might there have been other and more subtle and sophisticated methods for tempering the explosive enthusiasms generated by the Vatican Council and Pope John? One does not arrive at doctrines by taking surveys. But one can measure with survey data whether a policy perspective enforced for two decades has been successful. Catholic conservatives will perhaps insist that it is not necessary that a Pope's policy be successful, but merely that he lay down the law and demand that people obey him. Yet this is a narrow and rigid view of the role of a teacher. At this period in the history of the human species - and perhaps at any period - the good teacher must persuade, no matter how lofty his position. Whether the Pope should persuade or not may be debatable. One can nonetheless ask whether he has persuaded on those matters he considers most important.

I will take as criteria three positions which it is not unfair to say the Pope has made central to his policy of restoration - abortion, birth control, and married priests. Each position has a different theological valence. Abortion has traditionally been considered a moral evil whose rejection is central to Catholic morality. Birth control has been forbidden, but no one claims by infallible authority. Clerical celibacy is a disciplinary matter that could be changed tomorrow.

In many different countries on which data are available- the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Federal Republic, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Austria, even Poland-any changes that have occurred in the last twenty years have been counter to the Pope's aims. In all those countries but Poland the majority also favor the ordination of women. Moreover, on such issues as birth control, masturbation, and in vitro fertilization, for example, the lower clergy are clearly on the side of the laity. The restoration has not worked.

Some might argue that I ought not to evaluate the success or failure of a papal administration. That's God's job. Yet historians have evaluated the success or failure of papal tenures for at least half a millennium. No leader in the world, dead or alive, is so exalted that he is above criticism.

The Pope has lectured laypeople that birth control is wrong because it interferes with the complete gift of spouses to one another. It is not an argument that most married laypeople are inclined to take seriously. Indeed, many dismiss it - if they even hear it - as what one would expect from a celibate who has no sense of how essential sexual love is to heal the frictions and the hurts of the common life. For all the enthusiasm that meets the papal visitor when his plane touches down, the harsh truth is that the papacy has lost all credibility on human sexuality. Indeed, there are very few issues that affect modern life - the death penalty, war, and immigration, for example - on which the laity listen to what the Pope says. If John Paul II intended his restoration to reestablish the credibility of the papacy, it seems to have had the opposite effect. The next Pope will face the situation of a Catholic population that cheers but does not listen. With the exception of the Netherlands, there has not been a massive withdrawal of Catholics from their religion, but there has been a withdrawal of credibility from Church authority, even more among Catholic women than among Catholic men.

One need merely pick up an issue of a theological journal or attend a meeting of theologians to realize that order and discipline have not been preserved. Or listen to a conversation of priests to understand that in the absence of any credible authority, most deal with pastoral problems (such as homosexuality) by following their own instincts and not the dictates of the steady stream of Roman documents.

Moreover, it is clear from research in several countries that the Catholic laity favor a more democratic Church structure - one in which the Pope has representative lay advisers, local priests and laity elect their own bishops, the national conferences of bishops have more independence, and there is more concern for the religious problems of the laity than for major theological issues. Virtually no one leaves the Church over these issues, but they are attitudes that Church leadership can hardly ignore if it wishes to regain its credibility. None of the changes that the laity desire would affect the essence of Catholicism in the slightest, and some would represent a return to more traditional Catholic practices, such as the election of a bishop by priests and people. They are all, however, utterly foreign to Pope John Paul's perspective on the role of Church authority. For weal or woe, absolute obedience is, for most people, a thing of the past. If one permits one's laity to obtain an education, then one must learn to listen to them and try to persuade them.

Nor are Americans the most radical of Catholics in their longing for a more democratically organized Church. The Spaniards and the Irish are even more "radical," as measured by numbers supporting change in the Church's organization. Perhaps if your own democratic societies work very well, you wonder why your Church can't adopt the same governmental style. At the least, you wonder why they can't listen to you once in a while.

It is unlikely that the Pope would be troubled by evidence that his restoration has not been successful. He firmly believes, it would seem, that it is his mission to lead the Church back to the path of fidelity. Did not Our Lady of Fatima turn away the hand of the Turkish gunman to prevent his death? With that kind of self-perception, one is not inclined to question one's instincts about the kind of leadership the Church needs.

Some Catholic conservatives (who are no more than 5 percent of Catholics in the Western European and North Atlantic countries) lament that the Pope hasn't been tough enough in his restoration. He should excommunicate Catholic married people who practice birth control and theologians who dare to question his teachings. Only that stern discipline will effectively restore the Church to what it was before the disaster of the Second Vatican Council. It is clear by now, however, that the Pope has no taste for such measures, that he is too kindly and gentle a man to engage in hardball tactics. He still seems to believe that if he demands obedience often enough and strongly enough and in enough countries, eventually he will obtain it.

Curiously the "liberal" cardinals who presided over the Second Vatican Council voted for Cardinal Wojtyla because they considered him one of their own. They expected a continuation of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council as they understood it. Franz König of Vienna - one of the most articulate leaders of the procouncil party - in violation of the strict rules of the conclave, spoke up to urge his colleagues to vote for the cardinal archbishop of Krac?w. The curial reactionaries voted to the bitter end for their anticouncil favorite, Cardinal Siri of Genoa.

When König resigned at the age of seventy-five, the Pope appointed a new archbishop of Vienna without consulting König or anyone else. It would seem that the basis for this appointment was an encounter between the Pope and Father Hans Hermann Groer, a Benedictine abbot, at a Marian conference. The Pope was deeply impressed with the abbot's devotion to the Mother of Jesus. Under such circumstances no other consultation was necessary - even if the man was as different from Cardinal König as anyone could be.

If there had been consultation, the Pope would perhaps have learned that there were charges of pedophilia against the abbot. When these charges became public, they created an enormous scandal in Austria. Rome, however, chose not to intervene after it accepted Cardinal Groer's resignation (submitted because of age before the pedophile charges surfaced). Finally his successor, Cardinal Schönborn, had to issue a statement (together with three other Austrian bishops) saying that the charge was substantially true. Groer was forced to promise that he would never act as bishop or cardinal again and would go into exile. His parting words were hardly an admission of guilt or an apology. So Schönborn apologized for him. The Vatican's denial and stonewalling, not unlike that practiced by the American bishops, turned into a disaster, one that the Vatican has yet to put behind it and probably never will.

Cardinal König, now in his nineties, is still popular with Austrian Catholics. If the Pope had chosen to consult with him about his successor, this story would have been very different. Perhaps John Paul's tragic flaw was his refusal to consult, much less to govern collaboratively. Just as in Vienna he deprived himself of the insights of a man who knew the local situation far better than he did, so too by his refusal to consult other bishops and the Catholic laity, he cut himself off from crucial information.

He himself has written that married laypeople can offer an indispensable contribution to the Church's understanding of marriage. But only laity who already agree with the Pope are ever chosen for consultation.

I do not question the Pope's piety or intelligence or sincerity. I question only the wisdom of his policy. Many other Popes have made mistakes. I believe that for all his talent he has made a serious mistake by not listening. Surely there was some chaos in the years after the Second Vatican Council, especially among the clergy-though not as much as the Pope and some of his advisers think. Most Catholic laity are not at all confused. Complaints about the confusion of the laity come from (usually) wealthy conservative Catholics who are opposed to the Second Vatican Council and from hierarchs who project onto the laity unease of their own.

Can there be reform without some chaos? Did the chaos require a frontal, authoritarian attack? The evidence suggests that it did not.

One hears it said often - especially in Rome, but among conservative Catholics everywhere - that the prestige of the Catholic Church is at an all-time high. But is it really? Does it have more prestige today than when John XXIII was alive and hope was strong among both laity and clergy, when the brisk winds of change were blowing through the Church? When the Second Vatican Council was leaving behind century-old encrustation and facing the modern world with bravery and confidence, with a hopeful heart and an open mind? In Rome one hears it said these days that Pope John was a silly old man. Was he really? Or was his direction the best one for the Church? Either he or John Paul was mistaken in his policy decisions. Which one was it? For all the prestige the Pope has acquired for the Church, is it really more attractive to its own members and to others today than it was in the time of Pope John? Or is the prestige hollow, granted to a very gifted man and not to an institution that is stagnating once again?

The Church today has fewer bright lights than at any time since the end of the Second World War. The College of Cardinals has some good men, but lacks, for the most part, distinguished men of the sort Pius XII appointed (and who shaped the Vatican Council) and those whom Pope John himself appointed.

There are no giants like Lienart of Lille, Frings of Cologne, Alfrink of the Netherlands, Suenens of Malines, König of Vienna, Lacaro of Bologna, Etchegaray of Marseilles, Meyer of Chicago, Ritter of St. Louis, Arns of São Paulo, Lorscheider of Fortaleza, Tarancon of Seville. Indeed, one would have to look carefully at the present list to find more than a handful of standouts. Some bishops are impressive, but they are almost accidental, the result of someone's mistake. The Sacred College and the world episcopate are gray, meek, and mediocre. The thinkers and the doers are not wanted because there is a suspicion that they are not doctrinally orthodox and not sufficiently docile. They are the kind of men who might not be content to be invisible in the light of the papal sun.

The Curia, as always, is caught up in its own culture of in- fighting (thus the Congregation for Divine Worship effectively condemns, in its documents, events that happen at the papal masses). The Secretariat of State is in frequent conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly called the Holy Office of the Inquisition). The Curia attracts few bright lights and it quickly extinguishes those who by some mischance drift into it. Many able men refuse to serve in it because they perceive it as a kind of death sentence.

The staffs of the pontifical universities suffer the same problem. Many good scholars do not want to live and work in Rome, where they are always in the spotlight of suspicion. Catholic theology around the world, so creative and exciting (and orthodox) after the war, is in a kind of lethargy created in part by Roman suspicion. There are no men of the caliber or influence of the postwar theologians like Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, John Courtney Murray, Hans Kung, and the younger Joseph Ratzinger.

Finally, the people to whom I've spoken in Rome insist that young men coming into the priesthood these days rarely show the kind of intelligence and vigor that one would want in ecclesiastical leadership. What chance is there that the fractures in the Church will be healed by uninspired leaders?

In short, the Church of Pius XII produced great leaders and thinkers in abundance, and the Church in the years since the Vatican Council has not been able to match them. There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon - an emotional exhaustion after the exertions of the council, for example.

But the most important explanation is that the top leadership of the Church after Pope John has been fearful of talented individuals. There was some chaos and confusion in the immediate postcounciliar years - though not nearly as much as many ecclesiastics here in Rome believe. In its efforts to calm the Church down, the Vatican has avoided strong leaders and insightful thinkers. It much prefers men (and women) who will certainly not make trouble - and who can be counted on generally not to have many thoughts of their own. It also engages in little collaborative effort at any level because it distrusts even those whom it has appointed to important positions. In the present troubled time, the Vatican's position seems to be that only the center can be trusted to do and think the right things. No one else is needed. God's Spirit works in the Vatican and nowhere else.

Hence the light at the next conclave is likely to be pretty dim.

Rome, November 11, 2003

I met today with Phoebe Natanson of ABC and consumed a dangerously thick hot chocolate at the coffee shop near her headquarters in the Piazza Grazioli. At least I know who's in charge here for the network, though as she explained to me and as I should have remembered, networks operate in confusion and chaos when any story breaks. I will not know until the moment of the Pope's death what they want me to do, where I'm supposed to go, and what's going to happen. At least I have a phone number and a name and a friendly face.

Someday, nonetheless, a cardinal will emerge on the balcony of San Pietro and announce that he has the name of the new Pope. Great theater indeed. We're good at that sort of thing. Not a good way to select the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, but just now the only way we have.

The election of the head of the Catholic Church is unquestionably the oldest and the longest-functioning election on the planet. It has gone through many changes and developments since the time of Peter the Fisherman. It has, however, always been a political process, sometimes corrupt, and always pregnant with drama and fascination. One dimension of it has not changed. The Pope is elected by the clergy of Rome, as all bishops in the early days of the Catholic Church were selected by the clergy and laity of their own dioceses. The current legal fiction is that each of the cardinals is a parish priest of Rome with a parish church under his care. In fact, each parish is run by a vicar, and the cardinal's responsibilities are an occasional visit and perhaps a financial contribution. Nonetheless, the custom keeps alive the tradition that a diocese should select its own leader - "He who presides over all should be chosen by all," as Pope Leo I wrote. The cardinals' role as sole electors, however, was definitively established only in the eleventh century.

The first several papal elections (the winning candidates of which were almost certainly married men) may have been to select the chairman of the ruling collegium, since at that time Rome, according to some scholars, was governed by committee and not by a monarchical bishop.

The custom of appointing cardinals who were not in fact parish priests of Rome or its suburbs began only in the thirteenth century. For most of the first thousand years of the papacy, the laity of Rome and especially their political and civic leaders played an important role in ratifying the papal election - as did the emperors: first Byzantine, then German. (Indeed, in 1903 the Austrian emperor vetoed the election of a cardinal, albeit before the fact of his election.) At times in the early Middle Ages, the Cardinals (and other clergy) would select a Pope and then bring him out on the balcony. If the people cheered, he was crowned. If they booed, the electors tried again.

In the tenth century important Roman families had de facto control of the outcome of the elections through a skilled combination of sex, bribery, and force. The most notorious of these families was the Theophylacts, whose legendary matron, Marozia, appointed and then deposed Pope John X, then appointed Pope Leo VI, then Stephen VII. She was the mistress of Pope Sergius III, whom she also appointed Pope, and after his death, she deputed their son as John XI, a young man not out of his teens. This was not a good time to be Pope. A third of Popes elected between 872 and 1012 died violent deaths, often because they resisted the schemes of the Roman nobility.

There have been repeated attempts at reform, some more successful than others. In 1059 Nicholas II decreed that the Popes should be elected by only the six cardinal bishops of the suburban sees. Several centuries after the German emperors cleaned up the mess in tenth-century Rome, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (elected Pius II in 1458), left an account of the buying and selling of the papacy, which had become routine. According to Piccolomini, a Renaissance humanist, some of the (eleven) cardinals made deals in the latrines to block his election. Perhaps the most corrupt of all the elections was in 1492, when Rodrigo Borgia became Alexander VI in a conclave in which it was said that only five of the twenty-two cardinals could not be bought. Gradually the present form of the conclave (from the Latin word for key, because the cardinals were under "lock and key") emerged. In 1179 Alexander III ruled that the winning candidate must receive two-thirds of the vote. Pius XII in 1945 added the requirement of two-thirds plus one (so that a man could not guarantee his own election). John Paul II revoked the requirement for the extra vote and decreed that after thirty-three ballots a Pope might be elected by a simple majority (a change of an eight-hundred-year-old custom which, according to some, was a way to insure that his conservative policies survived his death). Alexander III also excluded all but the three orders of cardinals (bishops, deacons, and priests) from voting, thus ending lay participation.

At the second Council of Lyons (1274) it was decreed that the electors should be locked up in a secure place, that they should sleep in a communal dormitory, and that their food supplies should be cut in half after three days if they had not elected a Pope. After five more days they were to receive only bread, wine, and water. In 1345 Clement VI permitted a curtain or a wall between beds. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Leo XIII permit each cardinal to have his own room. In 1505 Pope Julius II decreed that "simoniacal" elections were invalid and that anyone chosen in an election that had been bought should be considered an apostate. His own election, however, was simoniacal. Pope Pius XII, in 1945, revoked the apostasy label, and Pope Paul VI, to preserve the validity of a papal election, revoked the invalidity of such an election. Since the end of the Papal States, however, there is perhaps less grounds to worry about anyone wanting to buy an election.

The requirement of secrecy during and after the conclave was treated lightly until the last century. In the nineteenth century, the cardinal electors, often living in the Lateran Palace, walked down the street to St. John Lateran's Cathedral, where they would vote, happily chatting with the crowds that lined their path. Only with the veto of the candidacy of Cardinal Rampola by the Austrian emperor Franz Josef in 1903 did the rules against campaigning before the conclave and talking about it afterward become strict. Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II made these violations punishable by the most solemn of excommunications. Nonetheless, campaigning goes on while a Pope is still alive and more overtly after his death - though now it is called "consulting." Moreover, the pattern of voting and indeed the votes of each elector are eventually known, sometimes immediately after an election. Not every cardinal elector, especially if he is Italian, takes the secrecy requirement seriously. During the twentieth century, the cardinal electors were locked in extremely uncomfortable quarters in the Sistine Chapel, but John Paul II ordered that henceforth the electors would live in the new, hotellike St. Martha's House at the other side of the Vatican City and vote in the Sistine Chapel. Whether this arrangement will lead to further leaks while the conclave is in process remains to be seen. Pope John Paul's rules also require a careful screening of the Sistine for bugs, but there is no assurance that such precautions can outwit modern electronic eavesdropping. It is alleged that at the election in 1958, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York sent a message from inside the chapel to the CIA resident in Rome.

Pius XII eliminated the provision for a "servant" or "valet" or "secretary" to accompany the cardinals into the conclave, though at his election in 1939, he was accompanied by his housekeeper, Madre Pasqualina, later called La Papessa. While this fact was a secret at the time and for many years thereafter, she was the first woman (that we know of) who was permitted inside a conclave.

The cardinals may go into conclave fifteen days after the death of the Pope and must begin after twenty days. They enter late in the afternoon and begin voting the next morning, after having taken the most solemn oaths of both secrecy and responsibility under Michelangelo's fresco of the Last Judgment. There are two "scrutinies" each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and two ballots in each scrutiny. Each cardinal writes on a ballot the name of his candidate and deposits it in a chalice on the chapel's altar. Three cardinals count the ballots. If no one is elected, the ballots together with straw are burned in a stove with a chimney that reaches to the roof of the chapel. Black smoke appears from the chimney and those outside mutter in disgust, "E nero." However, if someone is elected, the straw is omitted and (sometimes) a tiny trickle of white smoke appears to exultant shouts of "E bianco!" (In the two elections of 1978 the Vatican had a hard time producing white smoke.) Shortly thereafter, the senior cardinal deacon appears with full solemnity on the balcony of St. Peter's and announces, for example, "I have joyous news for you!" (Cheers.) "We have a Pope!" (More cheers.) "Charles Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church Wojtyla!" (Yet more cheers.) "Who chooses for himself the name of John Paul!" (Most cheers of all.)

Inside the most recent conclaves some men have been called Great Electors: the men who have influence, power, intelligence, and a clear notion of what they want for the Church (such as Leo Suenens in the 1965 conclave and Franz König in the second 1978 conclave, both to their later regret). Others, perhaps not so gifted, are content to follow along with the dynamics of the voting, which dynamics they attribute (rather at odds with traditional Catholic teaching) to the influence of the Holy Spirit (and thus deny that the conclave is a human political event). It is most important to an elector to be able to go home and claim that he voted for the winner even before the winner was clear. Who will it be this time? My favorite would be Cardinal Danneels of Mechelen-Brussels, a bright light of intelligence and sensitivity, a man who knows what's going on. However, he is thought to be too liberal and has had a heart attack. He does not bother to hide what he thinks, which is a dangerous habit in the climate of the Church today. The Holy Spirit will have to work overtime to elect him.

John Allen thinks it will be the Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who is a moderate and a healer. The South Americans and the rest of the third world think it's time for one of their own and probably have the votes to make such a choice, but I doubt that they have the organizational skills to put together a coalition. The Italians talk of Tettamanzi of Milan, a fat and jovial man who seems to be able to keep everyone happy, whether it be the far right of Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ or the moderate St. Agedius community. Because he is fat and jolly he is compared to John XXIII, which may be ludicrous but is typical of the quality of current speculation. Others speculate on John Baptist Re of the Congregation for Bishops. But can the Italians create a coalition of Europeans to support a candidate of their own? Cardinal George of Chicago thinks that out of courtesy the Sacred College ought to consider an Italian possibility before anyone else. After a quarter century of a "foreign" papacy, a return to the Italian style might be reassuring. A candidate elected because of his skin color or his geography seems a great risk.

One must not count out the two German dynamos-Kasper and Lehmann, the latter passed over for the red hat by the present Pope a couple of times. They are capable of putting together a coalition, but it would probably not have enough votes to elect a non-Italian European, a man who comprehends the crises in the Church and will address himself to the taming of the Curia. The right-wing "movements" will lobby vigorously because their future depends on the next Pope. Neither Opus nor the Legionnaires are popular with all the bishops. In a less favorable papacy than the present one they could be in serious trouble.

Father Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionnaires, would be suspended for credible charges of sex abuse if he were an American priest. John Paul has protected him. The next Pope may not.

Given the archaic style of a papal election, almost anything can happen, and we will have to live with it. This crowd of cardinals might easily make an even worse mess than the current one.

One would not go far wrong, as the Irish say, to bet on a Pope who will be a nice, holy man who tries to keep everyone happy. Then again, such a man could be torn apart by the currents of anger and disappointment that sweep through the Church. I'm in a dyspeptic mood. I want a man who can restore the ?lan that flourished immediately after the Second Vatican Council. Looking at the current front-runners, I can't expect that.

But as Pope John and the current Pope prove, the Sacred College often does not elect the man they thought they elected. One can never tell beforehand what kind of Pope the man who emerges on the balcony to tumultuous cheers will turn out to be.

On the other hand, the dictum of "constitutional elections" elaborated by English scholar Owen Chadwick, which states that the successor will always be different from his predecessor, stands the test of the past several centuries. One can be fairly certain that the new Pope will be different. How different and in what directions remains to be seen.