The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (21 page)

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progressed. On the morning of 2 August the Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, exercised on behalf of the Emperor Franz Joseph a veto against Rampolla. Cardinal Kniaz-Johan Puzyna de Kozielsko might have refused to obey the emperor’s instructions, but he was himself unsympathetic to Rampolla, believing the former secretary of state to have been too close to the Russians and not close enough to the Poles. His action was in any case probably unnecessary. In the next vote Rampolla got one extra vote as a protest, but he had reached his peak at the beginning and Sarto was about to overtake him. Sarto’s support passed that for Rampolla on the morning of 3 August. Those in the Rampolla camp wanted him to indicate the candidate he would support, but he refused to do so. The votes went to Sarto, even though some felt he would refuse the o
ffi
ce of pope. But he accepted. The required two-thirds majority came on the morning of 4 August 1903. He took the title Pius X in honor, he said, of all those recent pontiffs of that name who had endured per- secution and fought against sectaries.

Which is what he did. Though very much concerned with the devotional life of the Church in its many forms, from children receiving the Sacrament to the standard of music in churches, his pontificate is most often associated with the heartless persecu- tion of those accused of “modernism.” He has, however, been canonized.

What became clear in the conclave which followed the death of Pius on 20 August 1914 was that the cardinals wanted a change. The cardinals crossed a Europe already at war; the Belgian cardinal had to get permission from the German kaiser to leave his country. Most made it. A few were ill – including two from the Austro- Hungarian Empire – and the cardinals of Boston, Baltimore, and Quebec arrived too late. In
Vacante Sede Apostolica
of 25 December 1904, Pius X had laid down that the cardinals were to wait ten days before beginning, and any cardinal who arrived late was to be admitted. All cardinals were allowed to vote, even if they

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were otherwise suspended from o
ffi
ce, and only cardinals could vote – so if a conclave occurred in the midst of a council, it would not be the council fathers who had the right of election. Pius had already ruled out, immediately after his election, any future use of the right of veto by any secular power (
Commissum nobis
, 20 January 1904). Anyone trying to introduce such a veto would be excommunicated on the spot – though presumably, if that person were a cardinal, a mere excommunication would not stop him voting.

Because of the war, the cardinals needed a good diplomat. It could not be anyone from the warring nations, because that might imply a lack of neutrality. It could not even be anyone who had served as nuncio in one of those countries. This did not limit the choice too drastically; there were sixty-five cardinals in all, fifty- seven of whom were present. A great deal is known not only about the voting, but also of the motivation of the cardinals in the conclave of 1914 because the Cardinal of Vienna, Friedrich Gustav Piffl, kept a diary. Giacomo della Chiesa, Archbishop of Bologna and only three months a cardinal, was elected in part because of his diplomatic skills – he had been undersecretary of state to Rampolla – in part because he was not associated in any way with Pius X’s secretary of state, the Spanish but English-educated Raphael Merry del Val, and in part because he was unhappy with the witch-hunt being conducted against modernists. By the end of the voting, the tenth ballot on 3 September, della Chiesa’s only rival was the Benedictine Domenico Serafini, who represented the curia and the party of Pius X. Della Chiesa was declared Pope Benedict XV with thirty-eight votes to his rival’s eighteen.

Benedict XV died on 22 January 1922. The conclave which fol- lowed was the longest in the twentieth century – though at fi days was still much shorter than almost all such gatherings before the election of Pius IX. There were sixty cardinals, of whom fi were present; the cardinals of Philadelphia, Boston, and – again – Quebec arrived too late, the Cardinal of

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Rio da Janeiro said he could not make it in time, and three others were too old or ill. The conclave began on 2 February and lasted until 6 February, with the parties drawn up very much as in 1914: those who wanted to maintain the openness typical of Benedict’s pontifi and those who wished for a return to the policies of Pius X. The historian of the papacy, Ludwig von Pastor, was now in Rome as chargé d’affaires for Austria. He talked to Cardinal Piffl There were fi criteria, said Piffl a devout man, a diplo- mat, a learned man, a skilled politician, and someone who could handle the Italian government – negotiations to end the standoff between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy had begun under Benedict and were being handled particularly by Pietro Gasparri, the camerlengo. At this point, however, they were still secret. There was even a feeling at this conclave that it might be time to elect a non-Italian. Those who thought so proposed Merry del Val; a curial group backed Gaetano Bisleti, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities; while those who thought a diplomat was needed opted for sixty-six-year-old Achille Ratti, Archbishop of Milan, a learned man who had been prefect of the Vatican Library before serving as nuncio in Poland under di
ffi
cult circumstances.

Merry del Val polled most votes in the opening ballot, but none after the third ballot of the second day. Gasparri seemed the most consistent, rising from eight votes at the first ballot to twenty-four through most of the second day and into the third, but eventually, at the second ballot of the fourth day (the fourteenth ballot in all), Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti was chosen by forty-two votes and twelve against. He assumed the title of Pius XI. One of his first tasks was to settle the “Roman Question,” the clash between the Italian government and the papacy over the status of the city of Rome, the last stronghold of the papal states, seized by the Italians in 1870. The Lateran Accords of 1929 established within Rome the world’s smallest state, the Vatican City, where the papacy could have its headquarters and the popes could rule as sovereigns.

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Like his predecessor but one, Pius X, Pius XI died just as war was looming in Europe, on 10 February 1939. Immediately after his election, on 1 March 1922, Pius XI had published a “motu proprio,”
Cum proxime
, which allowed the cardinals to extend the time before a conclave had to be called from ten days after a pope’s death to fifteen or even if necessary to eighteen. In the conclave to elect his successor all sixty-two cardinals were pres- ent, including those from the United States or even further afield. It took them only three votes to elect Pius’s secretary of state, Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, on 2 March. Pacelli was the favorite from the start: he had clearly been the choice of the late pontiff, he was well known, and his diplomatic skills were thought necessary for the war which was by this time inevitable. He had thirty-six votes on the first ballot, forty-two on the sec- ond. Forty-two was the required number, but Pacelli himself asked that another confirmatory vote be taken. It was, and the required number was passed. Pacelli took the title Pius XII. When he issued
Vacantis Apolosticae Sedis
on Christmas Day 1945, about the conduct of the period between a pope’s death and the election of a new one, he insisted that the majority required should be two-thirds plus one, so as to ensure that, if a cardinal had voted for himself, there would be still two-thirds of the elec- tors in favor. Because he had received exactly the right number of votes on the second ballot, his own voting paper was opened to show that he had voted for another candidate.

After a troubled pontificate that has come to be seen as extremely controversial because of his apparent failure to speak out during World War II against the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Pius XII died on 9 October 1958. The conclave to elect his suc- cessor began on 25 October and lasted until 28 October. There were fifty-one cardinals present – two, Cardinals Stepinac and Mindszenty, were prisoners, one way or another, of Communist governments. One American cardinal died just three hours before the conclave was due to begin. Throughout the voting it was a

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question of one of two candidates, though others came and went – including Giovanni Battista Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, who consistently got two votes although he was not in the conclave and not even a cardinal. One of the two chief contenders was Gregory Peter Agagianian, who was Armenian-born but long a curial o
ffi
cial, and the champion of those who in an earlier genera- tion would have been called the
zelanti
. The other was Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice and former nuncio in France as well as elsewhere – the French connection was important in the voting. He was known to be a liberal in outlook.

Although his election took the world by surprise, it was some- thing Roncalli had come to expect after conversations with many of the electors before the conclave opened. By the eighth ballot Roncalli and Agagianian were still roughly equal. The dean of the Sacred College, Eugène Tisserant, suggested the name of the camerlengo, Benedetto Masella, as a compromise. At seventy-nine he was two years older than Roncalli and therefore even more obviously a transitional pope. He had long experience of the curia, but he was more liberal-minded than most. In the next ballot he gained ten votes, and the vote for Roncalli dropped while that for Agagianian stayed the same. The candidacy of Masella did not change anything, and he realized it, announcing that he was going to back Roncalli. On the eleventh vote the election was decided. Roncalli was prepared for it. Instead of simply accepting and taking a name, he made a little speech in which he accounted for his choice of John XXIII because, he said, in the first place it had been the name of his father. On 15 December he created his first cardinals, twenty-three of them. The leading name was that of Giovanni Battista Montini. There were now seventy-five cardinals, breaching the limit of seventy set by Sixtus V in 1587 and enshrined in the Code of Canon Law of 1917. On 15 April 1962, in
Cum Gravissima
, he also broke with tradition by declaring that henceforward all cardinals would be bishops. And on 5 September the same year, in
Summi Pontificis Electio
, he rescinded Pius XII’s

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injunction that there had to be a majority of two-thirds plus one, with the proviso that the plus one would remain where the number of electors was exactly divisible by three.

John XXIII’s pontificate was dramatic. He changed the way in which people regarded the papacy. Instead of the ascetic, bespectacled figure of Pius XII, gazing into the middle distance as if seeing a vision – a picture which had come to be regarded as something of an icon of what a pope should look like – the Church now had roly-poly Pope John, smiling straight into the camera. Unlike his predecessor, he was short on oracular utterances. Rather than condemn Marxism, he made overtures to Communist states and, above all, rather than condemn the modern world, he called, and opened, the Second Vatican Council to help the Church come to terms with it. He died on 3 June 1963 with the Council only half over. The next pontiff would have to be in tune with the spirit of the council, which, as its history up to this point had demonstrated, would not be the case for a good number of the cur- ial cardinals. There were eighty-two cardinals in all, but Cardinal Mindszenty was still trapped inside the American embassy in Budapest and the Cardinal of Quito, at ninety, declared himself too old to travel. Only twenty-nine cardinals were Italian, putting them as a group into a minority; twenty-two cardinals were curial o
ffi
cials, not a large enough number on their own to block the candidature of someone they did not want.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Milan was certainly among that number, even though he had himself served in the curia for a great deal of his life. The only other likely candidate among the progres- sives was the Archbishop of Bologna, Giacomo Lercaro, who was even more radical than Montini. Both men wanted the post – before departing for Rome Montini even gave a sermon which sounded very like an election address. The conservatives decided on the candidature of Ildebrando Antoniutti, a recently created cardi- nal with a long and distinguished career in the papal diplomatic service, particularly in Canada. He was a cheery conservative; there

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were others who would have relished the post, including Giuseppe Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, Pius XII’s favorite and a great rival of Montini, but it was clear to the conservatives that he would not win the votes. Meanwhile a group of non-Italian cardinals – Alfrink of Utrecht, König of Vienna, Suenens of Malines-Brussels, Liénart of Lille, Frings of Cologne, and Léger of Montreal – were meeting in Frascati to plan their strategy. It had been the same group which had thwarted the efforts of the curialists to control the council from its opening. They wanted a progressive pope in the spirit of the council. They considered Suenens, but thought it wiser to stick with an Italian, so they backed Montini. And Montini had support from a surprising source. The otherwise conservative Francis Spellman of New York had offered his votes and, he hinted, those of the other

U.S. cardinals. He may not have been too enamored of Montini’s churchmanship, but he had admired his sturdy antifascism in the prewar years.

These meetings happened outside the conclave. What happened inside is more di
ffi
cult to read except that at one point the blunt Gustavo Testa, prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and not at first regarded as a Montini man, berated the conservatives after a hung third ballot for betraying their election oath to choose the best candidate. Such an intervention was entirely contrary to the rules of the conclave – but either the outburst itself or the conservatives’ outraged reaction to it pushed Montini to within four votes of the papacy. Eventually Montini won on the sixth ballot, after the conservatives had realized that they did not have a credible candidate. Were the conclave to drag on deadlocked, they realized, it would be evident even outside the confines of the Sistine Chapel that they were to blame. What had seemed set to become an interminable election finished on the third day, 21 June 1963, with Montini announcing that he would be called Paul VI.