Election
conclave convened to elect a pope to succeed Benedict XVI
A conclave was held on 12 and 13 March 2013 to elect a new pope to succeed Benedict XVI, who had resigned on 28 February 2013. Of the 117 eligible cardinal electors, all but two attended. On the fifth ballot, the conclave elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires. After accepting his election, he took the name Francis.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “2013 conclave”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
A conclave was held on 12 and 13 March 2013 to elect a new pope to succeed Benedict XVI, who had resigned on 28 February 2013. Of the 117 eligible cardinal electors, all but two attended. On the fifth ballot, the conclave elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires. After accepting his election, he took the name Francis.
The papal election process began soon after the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013. Since both Angelo Sodano and Roger Etchegaray, the dean and vice-dean of the College of Cardinals, respectively, were ineligible to participate in the conclave due to age, Giovanni Battista Re from Italy, the most senior cardinal bishop under 80, presided over the conclave.
In 1996, Pope John Paul II fixed the start date of the conclave at 15 to 20 days after the papacy became vacant in Universi Dominici gregis. The 2013 conclave was initially expected to start sometime between 15 and 20 March 2013. On 25 February, the Vatican confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI issued his apostolic letter Normas nonnullas to allow for a schedule change. This gave the College of Cardinals more latitude, once all of the cardinal electors had arrived in Rome, to start the conclave earlier or later. They scheduled the conclave to begin on 12 March.
Benedict XVI also amended the conclave law to provide for the automatic excommunication of any non-cardinal who breaks the absolute oath of secrecy.
There were 207 cardinals on the day the papacy fell vacant. Cardinals who were 80 years or older before the day the papacy fell vacant were ineligible to participate, leaving 117 electors (including Walter Kasper, who turned 80 between the day the papacy became vacant and the start of the conclave). Two of them were the first cardinal electors from their churches to participate in a conclave: Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rahi and Syro-Malankara Major Archbishop Baselios Cleemis, the first bishop from the Syro-Malankara Church to be elevated to the College of Cardinals.
Two cardinal electors did not attend the conclave. Julius Darmaatmadja from Indonesia declined to attend because of progressive deterioration of his eyesight. Keith O'Brien, the only potential cardinal elector from Great Britain, had been accused of sexual misconduct towards priests in the 1980s and said he did not want his presence to create a distraction. He had resigned as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh on 18 February and later apologised for "sexual misconduct". With 115 cardinal electors participating, the same number of electors as the 2005 conclave, this conclave saw the largest number of cardinal electors ever to elect a pope, a number later surpassed by the 2025 conclave; accordingly, the required two-thirds majority needed to elect a pope was 77 votes.
The Los Angeles Times suggested that, though a pope from Latin America was unlikely, with only 19 of 117 cardinal electors being from Latin America, the region sought more say in the Vatican affairs, as it has the world's largest Catholic population. It cited secularism and the rise of Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America detracting from the Catholic faith, along with the sex abuse scandals in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile as issues important to the region. BBC News said that, while the balloting was likely going to be hard-fought between different factions for a European or a non-European, an Italian or a non-Italian future pope, the internal differences were unclear, and that many different priorities were at play, making this election exceedingly difficult to predict. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who was not an elector, remarked laughingly to a BBC presenter that his colleagues have been telling him "Siamo confusi"—"We're confused", as there were neither clear blocs nor a front-runner.
One Australian commentator noted that the reform of the administrative machinery of the church, the Roman Curia, was a major issue, as there was no major progressive candidate, and indeed no clear front-runners, in the dynamic between the institutional-maintenance and evangelical Catholicism. Giacomo Galeazzi of La Stampa said: "Apparently, a sort of tsunami of non-European candidates will fall upon the Roman Curia, and this could take the pontificate far away from Rome, making it more international." Italian Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio said: "It's time to look outside Italy and Europe, in particular considering Latin America."
The dossier of the Vatican's internal investigation into the so-called Vatileaks scandal was called "in effect ... the 118th cardinal inside the conclave". Although the investigating cardinals (none of whom are cardinal electors) were free to discuss the results of their investigation with the participants of the conclave, the dossier itself was to be given by Pope Benedict XVI to his successor.
Cardinal Velasio De Paolis said that the presence of Cardinal Roger Mahony, former Archbishop of Los Angeles, in the conclave would be "troubling", but he also noted that the said cardinal "has the right and duty to take part", and "the rules must be followed". Mahony's successor in Los Angeles, Archbishop José Horacio Gómez, had recently rebuked Mahony for his handling of sex abuse cases, though he too, supported Mahony's participation in the conclave.
Although the conclave cardinals may elect any baptized Catholic male, the last time a non-cardinal was elected pope was in the 1378 conclave. Observers of papal elections tend to consider, by a variety of criteria, some cardinals to be more likely to become pope than others – these are the papabili, the plural for papabile, an Italian word loosely translated as "pope-able". Since the set of papabili is a matter of speculation from the press, the election of a non-papabile is not uncommon; recent cases are John XXIII in 1958, and both John Paul I and John Paul II in 1978. This is reflected in the popular saying "He who enters the conclave as pope, leaves it as a cardinal."
Cardinals João Braz de Aviz, Angelo Bagnasco, Timothy Dolan, Péter Erdő, Seán Patrick O'Malley, Marc Ouellet, Gianfranco Ravasi, Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, Leonardo Sandri, Robert Sarah, Odilo Scherer, Christoph Schönborn, Angelo Scola, Luis Antonio Tagle, Peter Turkson, and Donald Wuerl were among the cardinals most often identified in press reports as those most likely to be elected. Scola, in particular, was considered such a front-runner that the Episcopal Conference of Italy had pre-drafted a press release concerning his election. However, Scola's ties to a corruption probe caused his perception by the fellow cardinals to decline drastically.
On 9 March, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois said there were around "half a dozen possible candidates". The next day, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin said: "There are three, four, maybe a dozen candidates." Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina was seen as a papabile, though less likely (according to the public opinion) to emerge as pope. One summary of the likely candidates included Bergoglio because he was "rumoured to be the (weak) second place finisher" in the previous conclave but observed that "his 'moment' seems to be over". In addition, Bergoglio was seen as an older choice; he was 76 at the time of the conclave, and older than the rest of the papabili.
As soon as Benedict XVI announced his resignation, cardinals started arriving in Rome, and by the day the interregnum formally began, most of them had already arrived. A formal invitation to the conclave was issued on 1 March. The last of the 115 participating cardinal electors to arrive was Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Phạm Minh Mẫn of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who arrived on 7 March.
Gianfranco Ravasi of the Roman Curia, one of seventeen cardinal electors with Twitter accounts, suspended his social media presence on his own initiative at the beginning of the interregnum, while others posted their reactions as they assembled. The College of Cardinals later imposed a pre-conclave media and social media blackout, following leaks to the Italian press, which precluded some American cardinals from holding further press conferences. Some cardinal electors researched one another online.
The first of several "general congregations" was held on the morning of 4 March to organise the event. The Sistine Chapel was closed to the public on 5 March in preparation for the conclave even before its date was set. To control communication with the outside world during the conclave, a Faraday cage blocking all outgoing and incoming communications was installed in the Sistine Chapel area. Contemporary media nevertheless gave journalists and other outsiders unprecedented access to this conclave. Approximately 5,600 journalists were accredited to cover the event.
The first congregation was held on the morning of 4 March and focused on introductory matters, picking three assistants to the camerlengo, the recent Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization, and a suggestion for a message of appreciation to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Thirteen cardinals gave speeches in the order they had requested to speak. The second congregation was held on the evening of 4 March and featured the preaching of the first of the two required meditations by Father Raniero Cantalamessa and nine more addresses.
The third congregation was held the morning of 5 March and featured 11 more addresses (all six continents had been represented at that time). The message of appreciation was sent, and the text of the guidelines for the conclave was read. Topics of discussion were: the activities of the Holy See in light of its relations with the world church's bishops, the course of the church's renewal after Vatican Council II, and the church's position in the world, especially regarding the New Evangelization. That evening, the Sistine Chapel closed and the furnaces were installed.
The fourth congregation was held on the morning of 6 March. The Liturgy of the Hours was prayed and three cardinals with birthdays were congratulated, then 18 more speeches (limited to five minutes) were given. All but two cardinal-electors were present and had taken the oath. The church in the world today and the needs of the New Evangelization, the status of the Holy See and of the Roman Curia's dicasteries (its departments: the congregations, the courts, and the pontifical councils, commissions, and academies), relations with bishops, and expectations of a future pope, were discussed. That evening, a prayer service was held at St. Peter's Basilica.
The fifth congregation was held the morning of 7 March. Three new cardinal assistants to the camerlengo were chosen. A telegram of condolence for the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was then read. Three separate speeches, each done by one of the three cardinal presidents of the three economic departments of the Holy See, were then given. Then, 13 more speeches were given, especially on ecumenism and the church's charitable efforts and attention to the poor, in addition to the topics from the previous meeting sessions.
The sixth congregation was scheduled for that evening. Some cardinals from the U.S. had stated in their interviews that the conclave might not begin until well into the following week, wanting the issues to be well-discussed. This also gave the non-Italian and non-curial cardinals the benefit of getting to know their Italian and curial counterparts, and especially their other colleagues worldwide, better, which may have lessened any disadvantage they may have had in voting.
On 7 March, reporters were shown images of preparation work, including the installation of the chimney. Cardinal Phạm Minh Mẫn was able to join the other 114 participating cardinal electors for the sixth general congregation the evening of 7 March. Seven more cardinals spoke; all 115 participating cardinal electors were present.
Text from the Wikipedia article “2013 conclave”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.