Briefing on the tenth and last General Congregation
of the College of Cardinals, 3/11/13,
and on events in the coming days
The tenth General Congregation of the College of Cardinals took place on Monday morning, 11 March, from 9:30am until 12:40pm. In attendance were 152 cardinals.
Three new members for the Particular Congregation were picked by lot to assist the Cardinal Camerlengo for the next three days in the lesser affairs of the proceedings.
The Cardinal assistants chosen were: from the Order of Bishops, Cardinal Antonios Naguib; from the Order of Priests, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, P.S.S.; and from the Order of Deacons, Cardinal Francesco Monterisi.
Numerous interventions then took place in the Hall, in total 28. This brings the number of interventions given during the course of all the Congregations to a total of 160.
The Cardinal Dean proposed a further afternoon Congregation to the cardinals, in case they wished to continue in order to guarantee the possibility to speak for all who want to do so without having to reduce the time for the interventions. The large majority preferred to conclude with the morning Congregation.
Regarding the topics of the interventions, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, as president of the Commission of Cardinals overseeing the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), spoke briefly about the Institute itself, its service, and the progress of inserting the Vatican institutions in the international system of control of economic and financial activities. Other topics included the expectations for the future Pope.
All the auxiliary personnel involved in carrying out the coming Conclave will take the oath of secrecy on Monday afternoon at 5:30 in the Pauline Chapel, presided over by the Cardinal Camerlengo.
About 90 people will be sworn in, including: the Secretary of the College of Cardinals; the Master of the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff and masters of pontifical ceremonies; the religious who supervise the pontifical sacristy; the religious charged with hearing confessions in the various languages; doctors and nurses; the personnel for preparing meals and cleaning; the staff of florists and technical service personnel; drivers responsible for transporting the Cardinal electors from the Domus Sanctae Marthae to the Apostolic Palace; security guards and surveillance (Gendarmerie and Swiss Guards).
The Mass pro eligendo Romano Pontifice will be celebrated in the Vatican Basilica tomorrow, Tuesday 12 March, at 10:00am. The booklet for the Mass is available on the Vatican website under the section of the Office for Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff and is also available in print for journalists.
The liturgy will be presided by Cardinal Dean Angelo Sodano and concelebrated by all the cardinals. In 2005 this took one hour and 40 minutes. Journalists, photographers, and camerapersons are advised to see the Office of Accreditation and Communications for appropriate access.
The entrance into Conclave is described in detail in the "Ordo Rituum Conclavis" (Book of Rites of the Conclave). It will begin on Tuesday afternoon at 4:30pm and will include:
- Opening prayer in the Pauline Chapel
- Procession through the Sala Regia to the Sistine Chapel.
Order of the procession: cross, choir, prelates, Secretary of the Conclave, Cardinal Prosper Grech, O.S.A., (who will lead the meditation), then the cardinals in the reverse order of their hierarchical precedence (i.e., deacons, priests, bishops). At the end will come Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re and the Master of Ceremonies.
[NB: Cardinal Re will preside at the Conclave since Cardinal Dean Sodano, 85, is no longer an elector, and Re is the most senior among the cardinal=bishops who are under 80. In 2005, Cardinal Dean Ratzinger, who had turned 78 three days before the Conclave, presided at the Conclave that elected him. As he was elected Pope, the usual function of the Cardinal Dean to formally ask the newly-elected Pope if he accepts his election, fell to Cardinal Sodano, then the Vice Dean. The current Vice Dean, Cardinal Etchegaray, is also over 80, so the function will fall to Cardinal Re.]
The procession and the entrance into the Sistine Chapel are accompanied by the singing of the Litany of Saints and the hymn "Veni Creator Spiritus".
In the Sistine Chapel, each cardinal will first take the solemn Conclave oath. The celebrant will lead the assembly in the general formula of the oath, and then the personal formula is pronounced by each individual cardinal in order of precedence, with his hand placed on the Gospels on the lectern at the centre of the Sistine Chapel.In 2005, the oath-taking took 57 minutes.
This is followed by the "Extra omnes" instruction in which everyone not directly concerned with the Conclave must leave, and the doors of the Sistine Chapel are closed.
Cardinal Grech, who is not an elector, will lead a meditation after the oath-taking. This will be followed by a possible first ballot, which will end in a fumata, the smoke signal to the outside world to show whether the cardinals have elected a Pope or not. In 2005, the first black fumata occurred at 8:04 pm. The session ends with the celebration of Vespers.
In the Sistine Chapel, each Cardinal elector will have a copy of the Apostolic Constitution "Universi Dominici Gregis", the "Ordo Rituum Conclavis" (Book of Rites of the Conclave), and a book of the Liturgy of the Hours.
The voting process is described in detail in the aforementioned Apostolic Constitution, which also includes the text of the oath taken by the cardinals at the time they deposit their ballot in the chalice for that purpose.
The procedures that follow once a valid election has occurred are described in the Ordo Rituum Conclavis. Upon accepting his election, the new Pope chooses his papal name, and the ballots are burned to produce white smoke. At the same time, the bells of St. Peter's Basilica will ring to confirm there is a new Pope.
The new Pope then goes to the Room of Tears to don the papal vestments. A brief ceremony follows: Gospel reading ("Tu es Petrus" or another passage referring to the Petrine ministry), prayer, the cardinals’ act of homage, and a Te Deum.
The Cardinal proto-deacon (French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran this year) goes to the Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica for the much=awaited ;Habemus papam' proclamation. Meanwhile, the new Pope goes to the Pauline Chapel for a short prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.
The Pope then goes to the Loggia for the first "Urbi et Orbi" blessing (an announcement of indulgence is made as at Christmas and Easter).
In 2005, the black fumata of the morning took place at 11:52am. [Weren't there two ballotings held on that second morning?] The white fumata after the first vote of the afternoon occurred at 5:50pm.
From the fumata and the ringing of the bells to the Proto-deacon’s announcement about 45 minutes passed, and less than 10 minutes later the new Pope appeared and gave his blessing.
Vatican Television will transmit live images of the chimney at the time a fumata is expected.
Father Lombardi noted that the Mass inaugurating the new Pontificate need not take place on a Sunday.
I am posting the following AP story as representative of MSM coverage, with all the preposterous built-in biases thereof...
Cardinals count down to conclave
VATICAN CITY, March 11, 2013 (AP) — Cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday to elect the next Pope amid
more upheaval and uncertainty than the Catholic Church has seen in decades [Excuse me! I need to go back and see what the MSM were saying in April 2005 about 'upheaval and uncertainty' in the Church. Did their hagiography of John Paul II cause them to ignore that he was not governing in the final years of his Pontificate and that those 26 years were never the rose-colored halcyon days they now seem to make of anything pre-Benedict??? The media and most of the chatterati, including the ones with great reputations, make it appear that Benedict XVI's only legacy is 'upheaval and uncertainty' when for almost eight years, he was the one stabilizing spiritual, doctrinal and pastoral element in the whole Church, even as almost all the hierarchy and faithful were thrown into more than a tizzy by everything that they read in the media. All commentators appear to have simply ignored the many significant and concrete achievements of the past eight years, just to provide a false, misleading and utterly dishonest pretext for the narrative they have chosen to make about the Church and this Conclave.]
There’s no front-runner, no indication how long voting will last and no sense that a single man has what it takes to fix the Church’s many problems.
[Pray tell when was there ever a sense of that in the history of the Church? Cardinals and the man they eventually elect to be Pope are human beings, not supermen. No one can presume he has all the answers and solve everything. Benedict XVI said it best in his inaugural homily when he said that he has no program of government but to listen to what needs to be done.
Even the Church has to work on priorities. His priority was to restore the essentials of the faith to Catholics and return God to the consciousness of the world. In the process, he also had to deal with problems - 'crises' or 'scandals' as the MSM prefer to call them - as they arose.*]
On the eve of the vote, cardinals offered wildly different assessments of what they’re looking for in a Pope and how close they are to a decision. It was evidence that Benedict XVI’s surprise resignation has continued
to destabilize the church leadership [Destabilize what leadership??? He was the leadership. Without the Pope, there is no leader, that is why the inter-regnum is called the 'sede vacante'!] and that
his final appeal for unity may go unheeded, at least in the early rounds of voting.
[What a meaningless comment! Of course there can be no 'unity' until a Pope is elected! That is why it is called an election by voting, not by unanimous acclamation.]
Still, the buzz in the papal stakes swirled around Cardinal Angelo Scola, an Italian seen as favored by cardinals hoping to shake up the powerful Vatican bureaucracy, and Brazilian Cardinal Odilo Scherer, a favorite of Vatican-based insiders intent on preserving the status quo. [This, of course, is the simplistic scheme that MSM has chosen to spin about the supposed front-runners. Scherer, as the supposed 'Curial candidate', has been demonized already in many ways, including a story that when celebrating Mass at his titular Church yesterday, he dropped the Host, picked it up and continued as if nothing untoward had happened, supposedly ignoring the rules for dealing with such an occurrence.]
Cardinals held their final closed-door debate Monday over
whether the Church needs more of a manager to clean up the Vatican’s bureaucratic mess or a pastor to inspire the 1.2 billion faithful in times of crisis. [A false set of 'alternatives'. The Church needs a universal Pastor. The Successor of Peter is not supposed to be, asI heard the media's favorite go-to resource person yesterday say, 'Harvard MBA' at the same time. For administration, he needs a good Secretary of State. Hmmm, when was the last one there was a Secretary of State who governed the Vatican with a Curia that was not criticized in much the same way as Benedict XVI's Curia, or worse?]
The fact that not everyone got a chance to speak was a clear indication that there’s still unfinished business going into the first round of voting.
[Cardinal Sodano offered them the option of another congregation on Monday so they could say more if they wished - they unanimously agreed not to hold another one. There were 128 interventions with 152 cardinals in attendance, including 37 non-electors. More interventions than electors - so one imagines each elector had a chance to speak up, unless they chose to have their colleagues speak for them, and more than once.]
“This is a great historical moment but we have got to do it properly, and I think that’s why there isn’t a real rush to get into things,” Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier from South Africa said as he left the session Monday.
None of that has prevented a storm of chatter over who’s ahead in the race.
Scola is affable and Italian, but not from the Italian-centric Vatican bureaucracy called the Curia. That gives him clout with those seeking to reform the nerve center of the Catholic Church that has been discredited by revelations of leaks and complaints from cardinals in the field that
Rome is inefficient and unresponsive to their needs. [That's a new one! Has MSM - AP itself - reported any such specific complaint in the past seveeral days? The Curial offices mostly give guidance to the local Churches on carrying out what the Pope decrees. The work of implementation falls to the dioceses themselves. By all means, let us hear how the Curia has been 'inefficient and unresponsive to their needs'. How typical of today's media - to throw out a major accusation like that and fail to even cite one instance of such failure? And what about the bishops themselves? Have they all complied by now, for instance, with the CDF request for each episcopal conference to submit a country-specific plan for dealing with the sex abuse issue? Last February, almost half of them had yet to comply!]
Scherer seems to be favored by Latin Americans and the Curia. The Brazilian has a solid handle on the Vatican’s finances, sitting on the governing commission of the Vatican bank, the Institute for Religious Works, as well as the Holy See’s main budget committee.
As a non-Italian, the archbishop of Sao Paolo would be expected to name an Italian
[Why should that necessarily be so? Paul VI had a French Secretary of State! Perhaps the most powerful Secretary of State in recent history was Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, an English-born Spaniard who served under St. Pius X in the early 20th century and who has been proposed for canonization.] as secretary of state — the Vatican No. 2 who runs day-to-day affairs at the Holy See —
another plus for Vatican-based cardinals who would want one of their own running the shop.
The pastoral camp seems to be focusing on two Americans, New York archbishop Timothy Dolan and Boston archbishop O’Malley. Neither has Vatican experience. Dolan has admitted his Italian isn’t strong — seen as a handicap for a job in which the lingua franca of day-to-day work is Italian.
Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet is well-known and well-respected by many cardinals, stemming from his job at the important Vatican office that vets bishop appointments;
less well known is that Ouellet has a lovely voice and is known to belt out French folk songs on occasion. [And what has that to do with being Pope? Isn't Cardinal Ouellet's experience as a missionary in Latin America a more pertinent fact to bring up?]
If not one of the leading names fail to reach the 77 votes required for victory in the first few rounds of balloting, any number of surprise names could come to the fore as alternatives.
Those include Cardinal Luis Tagle, archbishop of Manila. He is young — at age 55 the second-youngest cardinal voting — and was only named a cardinal last November. While his management skills haven’t been tested in Rome, Tagle — with a Chinese-born mother — is seen as the face of the church in Asia, where Catholicism is growing.
[It is? Where in Asia exactly????]
Whoever he is,
the next Pope will face a Church in crisis [Hear, hear! What a brilliant statement!]: Benedict XVI spent his eight-year pontificate trying to revive Catholicism amid the secular trends that have made it almost irrelevant in places like Europe, once a stronghold of Christianity.
[For perspective, shouldn't something be said about how the wave of secularism began building up into the tsunami that it is, shortly after Vatican-II, when elements within the Church itself self-secularized; and that whereas John Paul II's wide-ranging travels during 26 years called attention to the Gospel message around the world, and that he himself coined the phrase 'new evangelization' for the once-Christian countries of Europe, it was left to Benedict XVI to set up a structure that could carry this out systematically?]
Clerical sex abuse scandals have soured many faithful on their church
[Ah yes, all those of little faith to begin with!], and competition from rival evangelical churches in Latin America and Africa has drawn souls away.
[This competition began long before Benedict XVI's Pontificate, and not even John Paul II's vigorous global-trotting evangelization could stem it, but the Church in Brazil, for instance, the country most affected by this threat, seems to have found creative ways to counteract the appeal of the new sects.]
Closer to home, the next Pope has a major challenge awaiting him inside the Vatican walls, after the leaks of papal documents in 2012 exposed ugly turf battles
[uglier than usual turf battles because the persons involved are men of the Church] ,
allegations of corruption [a historic phrase for AP! - finally labelling the corruption charges as 'allegations'!] and even a plot purportedly orchestrated by
Benedict’s aides to out a prominent Italian Catholic editor as gay.
[Oops, Winfield takes back right away what she appears to have conceded in the preceding phrase - this charge is so minor and silly it did not deserve to be brought up at all, and to say 'by Benedict's aides' would seem to imply that the Pope was somehow in the silly scheme, when the right description according to the actual story of the Boffo snafu was 'Bertone's aides'!]
Cardinals on Monday heard a briefing from the Vatican No. 2 about another stain on the Vatican’s reputation, the Vatican bank. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who heads the commission of cardinals overseeing the
scandal-marred Institute for Religious Works, outlined the bank’s activities and the Holy See’s efforts to clean up its reputation in international financial circles.
[Shall we make clear that the one great scandal that marred IOR took place in the early 1980s with the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, and that under Benedict XVI, the IOR - despite minor self-inflicted wounds like the unceremonious defenestration of its former president last year - has passed muster with Moneyval for its transparency measures in the past two years, but MSM prefers to ignore all that]?
Massimo Franco, noted columnist for leading daily Corriere della Sera, said the significance of the revelations about the bank and the Holy See’s internal governance cannot be underestimated in this conclave,
having determined both Benedict’s decision to resign [
Yeah, right!] and the major task ahead for his successor.
Franco, whose new book “The Crisis of the Vatican Empire” describes the Vatican’s utter dysfunction, said
cardinals are still traumatized by Benedict’s resignation, leading to the uncertainty heading into the conclave. [What stupid statements! What Conclave other than the one that elected Pius XII ever began with any absolute certainty at all of the outcome! Even Paul VI who was supposed to be a shoo-in in the 1963 conclave needed six ballotings to be elected, two more than Cardinal Ratzinger whom self-proclaimed experts like the vacuous Franco had counted out of the running at all!]
“It’s quite unpredictable. There isn’t a majority neither established nor in the making,” he said.
Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Chile concurred, saying that while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had
tremendous front-runner status [historical revisionism, if one judges by the preponderance of pundit prognostications that had counted him out beforehand!] going into the 2005 conclave that elected him Pope after just four ballots, the same cannot be said for any of the candidates of 2013.
“This time around, there are many different candidates, so it’s normal that it’s going to take longer than the last time,” he told The Associated Press. “There are no groups, no compromises, no alliances, just each one with his conscience voting for the person he thinks is best, which is why I don’t think it will be over quickly.”
Dolan, a possible papal contender, seemed to think otherwise and was bounding with optimism by the end of the pre-conclave meetings and the drama about to unfold.
“I’m kind of happy they’re over because we came here to elect a Pope and we’ll start it tomorrow with the holy sacrifice of the Mass, then into the conclave and look for the white smoke!” Dolan enthused on his radio show on SiriusXM’s “The Catholic Channel.”
Errazuriz said the key isn’t so much where the next Pope comes from, but what he would bring to the papacy.
[But it's only been the armchair omniscients who have kept harping on this geographical 'thing'!]
Cardinals, he told AP, are looking for a Pope “who is close to God, has love for people, the poorest, the ability to preach the Gospel to the world and understand the young and bring them closer to God. These are the categories that count.”
[How about having added a phrase to say "the qualities that Benedict XVI and John Paul II had" or something similar, because the way the cardinals have been describing the qualities they are looking for, you'd think that these were qualities lacking or deficient in Benedict XVI!]
He argued that Latin America, counting 40 percent of the world’s Catholics, is underrepresented in the college of cardinals. “It doesn’t have 40 percent of the cardinals,” he said.
[Your Eminence, that will come in time, as more and more Latin American prelates earn status and merit.]
Tuesday begins with the cardinals checking into the Vatican’s Domus Sanctae Martae, a modern, industrial-feel hotel on the edge of the Vatican gardens. While the rooms are impersonal, they’re a step up from the cramped conditions cardinals faced before the hotel was first put to use in 2005
[it was constructed precisely for the primary purpose of housing cardinals during a conclave]; in conclaves past, lines in the Apostolic Palace used to form for using bathrooms.
Tuesday morning, the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, leads the celebration of the “Pro eligendo Pontificie” Mass — the Mass for the election of a pope — inside St. Peter’s Basilica, joined by the 115 cardinals who will vote.
They break for lunch at the hotel, and return for the 4:30 p.m. procession into the Sistine Chapel, chanting the Litany of Saints, the hypnotic Gregorian chant imploring the intercession of the saints to help guide the voting.
After another chant imploring the Holy Spirit to intervene, the cardinals take their oath of secrecy and listen to a meditation by elderly Maltese Cardinal Prosper Grech.
While the cardinals are widely expected to cast the first ballot Tuesday afternoon, technically they don’t have to. In conclaves past, the cardinals have always voted on the first day.
The first puffs of smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney should emerge sometime around 8 p.m. Black smoke from the burned ballot papers means no pope, the likely outcome after Round 1. White smoke means the 266th pope has been chosen.
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, also a leading papal contender, said he was going into the conclave still rattled by the fact that his mentor, Benedict, had resigned.
“It made me cry. He was my teacher. We worked together for over 40 years,” Schoenborn said during a Mass late Sunday. [For the first time in seven years, I feel something positive for Schoenborn. As far as I have seen so far, he seems to have been the only cardinal who referred to Benedict XVI in their Sunday homilies at their titular churches.]
Nevertheless, Schoenborn said the cardinals had banded together to face the future.
“It makes us brothers not contenders,” he said. “Such a surprising act has already begun a true renewal.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/03/2013 02:39]