Conclave notebook: a ringside seat for first day of smoke

William Cash• May 8, 2025

Under a darkening evening sky with seagulls and flashing drones swooping over the crowd crammed into St Peter’s Square, the black smoke finally came at 9 p.m. from the Sistine Chapel. The crowd roared but the dark soot-like colour came as no surprise. The starting gun had gone off for the race to win the Crown of Peter. 

The crowd were not overjoyed by the long wait. The Roman sky has become so dark that it was difficult to see the colour of the crucial plume emitting from the chapel’s chimney. The Italian media are speculating that Raniero Cantalamessa, the 90-year-old Preacher to the Papal Household, went on way too long in his “spiritual reflection”. For 45 minutes, so Corriere reported.

Either way, the slow clapping began around 8 p.m. That’s when other important choices are made in the Eternal City over dinner. By 9 p.m. it had begun to feel like that famous Test Match won in the Karachi darkness by batsmen Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe in 2000.

Part of the problem, I am hearing, is that with so many new cardinals, not familiar with the arcane rituals and procedures of the conclave, not all cardinals know what they are doing.

Earlier in the day, just after 5 p.m., the 133 cardinals – average age of 70 – had lined up in the Sistine Chapel, placed their right hand on the sacred book standing on a gilt table in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, read out their name and gave a personal oath in Latin before the voting got underway. Several – especially those from the Americas and from Africa – clearly struggled with their spoken Latin. 

Sequestered with the world’s media inside the John Paul II Hall, next to St Peter’s Basilica, it was difficult not to be moved by the theatrical spectacle of the most magnificent of roll calls – lasting around 45 minutes – which kicked off the conclave, not to mention the display of quite a selection of cardinal’s gold rings. 

The names went on…and on. No wonder Pope John Paul had limited the number of voting cardinals to 120. And then, at exactly 5.46 p.m., two Swiss guards stood to attention and the giant doors to the Sistine Chapel were shut with two loud bangs. The doors were now locked, the cardinals sequestered from the world. 

Then the crowds in St Peter’s began to wait, and wait for the Holy Sprit to speak in a bellow of smoke. Milling around in the crowds, one almost felt sorry for the papal souvenir shops in Vatican City who had put up rather desperate signs in Italian and English to the effect of “last chance to buy Papa Francis merch”. 

The moment the next pope walks on to the balcony, buttons will be pressed in Italian factories mass producing the new pope’s face on T-shirts, mugs and postcards. It’s worth recalling that until about 100 years ago nobody actually knew what the pope looked like, and few Catholics even knew his name, other than that he was an Italian; back then the Vatican seemed a very distant kingdom. Not a place that you ever expected to visit. The pope was more a holy office than a person.

This aloofness gave a sense of mystery to the Holy Father before the age of TV cameras, social media and jet hopping super-popes that began with John Paul II. One hopes that whoever is elected pope does a little less travelling by chartered papal jet and makes the focus of his pontificate saving souls and uniting the Church rather than politicising the papacy. Maybe we need a little bit of dullness right now.

The first day of the conclave began at 10 a.m. with the sacred Mass in St Peter’s called Per L’Elezione Del Romano Pontefice (“For the Election of the Roman Pontiff”). The Order of Service was a glossy booklet of 69 pages decorated with an image of the dove of peace, flanked by winged cherubic putti holding up the gospels in Latin. The extraordinary sight of all the cardinals, dressed in scarlet, “processing” – shuffling, or in some cases, staggering through the central aisle – was likened by Catholic Herald artist Adam Dant, there in attendance with me, to “watching horses on parade before a prize race”.

There was little choreography, based on age or seniority, with the Cardinals pottering along unaccompanied at their own pace. They gave no indication of the voting pacts and blocks going on in the background and surely exercised when the first votes were cast on the afternoon of 7 May. “You could have reached out and touched them,” added Dant, who also noted that the Italian next to him was doing his on-line check-in for a London flight on his phone (he obviously didn’t think the conclave wold take long, though others think it most certainly could).

Looking at so many of them shuffling in, some almost needing support, one can see why age could turn out to be a defining factor of this papal election. Back in 2013, the choice of Cardinal Bergoglio – later Pope Francis – took most Vatican journalists by surprise as he was considered “a bit old” at 76, just four years away from the voting cut-off age of 80. His age, indeed, was one of the factors that caught the conservative camp off-guard. 

With the last few day’s of campaigning in the Vatican turning into an at times unholy war of dirty tricks and smears on both sides, it may be that the cardinals will turn – as they did in 1978 by appointing the 58-year-old John Paul II – to a pope from a different generation. The subtext of all the recent attacks and cardinal watchdog leaks is that Luis Tagle and Pietro Parolin, in particular, cannot be trusted with the Crown of Peter as they are not “safe”, being too closely associated with a litany of financial and sexual cover ups.

If there is going to be a big surprise on the St Peter’s balcony – the window is already shrouded with deep crimson drapes – it may be to do with the conclave wanting a younger pope not besmirched by the sins of the father. A younger pope could be seen as a chance to take the Church into a new chapter, untainted by the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Church to its very foundations in the last 20 years from the end of the St John Paul II years, through the Benedict XVI and Francis I era.

Almost all the elderly cardinals – especially the generation of Parolin and Erdo – will almost certainly have had their long nights of the soul when it comes to having known something about a clerical sex abuse cover up, or financial scandal, during their time as an archbishop or bishop, and the last thing the Church needs now is for some investigative journalist to expose the next pope as having been mired in some past misdeed, or cover up, even if they were not to blame. 

Whilst Vaticanastas usually take the view that the conclave doesn’t like to vote for younger popes as they may be around for decades – and thereby do more damage to the Church if their pontificate goes astray – don’t dismiss the idea of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is only 60. He is also Italian which might help since there is a mood here that it is time for the Crown of Peter to return home.

I am a believer in omens and divine providence. Just as I was discussing this theory supporting Pizzaballa over cannelloni and fried squid in the trattoria Al Passetto di Borgo, the famed “canteen of the cardinals” (Pope Benedict was a regular), our waiter whispered in our ears that seated at the table behind were the two private secretaries of the Latin Patriarch himself.

Photo: Nuns react at St Peter’s Square as black smoke rises from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel signalling that cardinals failed to elect a new pope in the first ballot of their secret conclave at the Vatican, 7 May 2025. (Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images.)

William Cash is former Editor of the Catholic Herald and a journalist and writer who contributes to the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and others.