Conclave day, March 13th, 2013 if I’m not mistaken (the Conclave itself
kicked-off on Tuesday, March 12th in the afternoon, right after the
morning mass held in St. Peter’s Basilica with all 115 cardinals in honor of
the Conclave itself).
There had already been on Tuesday two “black smokes” (next to the
Basilica a small chimney is set up. From there the cardinals’ ballots are
burned. Black smoke means no new pope.
White smoke instead means “Habemus Papam”, we have a pope!).
That day it was raining.
Obviously, there’s no one on the face of the planet that can tell the
folks over at the Vatican when they should vote and elect a new pope, so there
wasn’t any way to really know if by lunchtime they’d choose a new pope or
not. I had a gut feeling though that I’d
miss a great opportunity of that Wednesday afternoon they’d vote for the new
pope, and I wasn’t there, so by 2.30 pm I arrived at St. Peter’s square and
with my NBC pass I made my way to the top of the roof of the Gianicolo garage,
which is located right next to the square itself and which hosted several
international tv networks, such as NBC.
I naturally brought along my camera equipment and a really shitty cheap
umbrella which ended up falling to pieces!
To make a long story short, I was there for 6 hours under the rain. So-called “experts” said that nawwwww, the
voting would have taken place on the following Thursday and not on Wednesday
evening. Mother nature was calling in
the meantime, and I had to VERY urgently go to the washroom. It was around 6.50 pm, more or less. What to
do considering that at around 4.30 pm, when there should have been voting going
on by the cardinals, it instead didn’t happen, and I was going to run the risk
of missing out on that famous white smoke?
I couldn’t very well pee down below on the thousands of people that had
been gathered in the square for the event, so I scurried quickly down the
stairs to a washroom. Ahh, what relief, when all of a sudden as I was holding
my you-know-what in my hands, my cell phone rang: it was Dani who was asking me
where I was!! Bloody hell, the phone
nearly fell into the can! So I scurried
again back up at the speed of light and lucky that I did too: about 60 seconds,
more or less, after I got back up, there was the famous white smoke! Yes indeed, THE holiest piss of my life!
You can be an atheist, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or whatever, but trust
me, there’s NO place in the world you want to be when a new pope is elected
rather than at St. Peter’s square! And
trust me, the event is very, very
exciting. And for two reasons. No. 1 because after a few black smokes come
out, when that white smoke does finally shoot up into the sky, you know that
there’s finally a new pope. No. 2
because after that first piece of good news, the question is now the following:
so who exactly is the new pope (by the way, compared to the 2005 Conclave which
had elected Ratzinger as St. Peter’s successor, the Vatican folks had decided this
time to put special chemicals into the tiny furnace in order to make the white
smoke more distinguishable from the black one. On a few occasions in 2005 the
black smoke that came out looked grey instead of white, and so people weren’t
sure if a new pope was in fact elected or not)?
About one hour after the white smoke came out, one of the cardinals in
Latin read out the famous phrase that Rome and the world was anxiously waiting
for: “Habemus Papam”! Apparently, the
newly-elected pope is then changed from his red cardinal robe into his new white
papal one by assistants in the “room of tears”, appropriately named because he
breaks down in tears (as though to say: “Oh my God, I’m REALLY the new pope”!).
Let’s face it, it must quite the shock for
the average human being to know that you’re now the leader of some 1.2 billion
Catholics out there!
And then shortly after, there appeared to the entire world the new pope,
Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would take on the papal name of
“Francesco” in honor of that famous Franciscan saint over in Assisi (I was rather happy as Bergoglio is a
Jesuit, and my first 8 years of education in Canada were with the Jesuits at
St. Ignatius of Loyola in Winnipeg! Looks like we’re in good company along with
Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Voltaire, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and the president
of the European Central Bank, Italy’s Mario Draghi, just to name a few).
Seeing that Bergoglio apparently only has one lung, his voice that
evening wasn’t too loud. I really
couldn’t make out who he was until Dani again called me to ask me if I was
happy (I had packed my small Canadian flag that day hoping that the winner
would instead be Canada’s Ouellet). She
said his name and I said, “Who”?
Once again, the Vatican took the entire world by surprise by choosing someone
who up until that very same evening was virtually unknown! Ahh, the mysterious ways of the Vatican….
I made my way down to the square which was naturally packed and in a very,
very festive mood. In fact, with
Argentine tourists flocking to the square and waving their national flags, it
sort of looked like Argentina had just won a World Cup title!
Quite the 6-wait on March 13th, 2013!
