Cardinals have gathered in the Sistine Chapel.
The election of the Catholic Church’s next Pope is officially underway as a record-setting 133 voting cardinals from all over the world took an oath of secrecy and were locked in the Sistine Chapel on the evening of May 7.
Roughly three hours later, black smoke emanated from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, notifying the tens of thousands of faithful gathering in St. Peter’s Square that the first vote had been cast but had failed to reach the necessary consensus.
The next vote will be cast on the morning of May 8.
The first day’s events began in St. Peter’s Basilica at 10 a.m. local time, with the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff, led by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals.
Like Pope Francis’s funeral Mass, this Mass, while primarily undertaken in Italian, integrated several of the world’s languages, including Latin, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, and Mandarin Chinese.
Cardinal Battista Re said in his homily, which was translated in real time by the Vatican, that the upcoming vote was “an act of highest human and ecclesial responsibility,” and he emphasized that this latest successor to St. Peter the Apostle must exemplify the love Jesus Christ showed his disciples and foster communion among the world’s clergy, peoples, and cultures.
He also called those listening to pray that this successor will be someone who meets the needs of the world and church of today, and one “who knows how best to awaken the consciousness of all, and the moral spiritual energies in today’s society characterized by great technological progress, but which tends to forget God.”
Afterward, the cardinals had the opportunity to begin moving into the apartments in the Vatican’s Domus Sanctae Marthae, where they will stay for the duration of the conclave.
“The conclave is not a political tug-of-war, but rather a profoundly spiritual moment of continuity in the Church’s more than 2,000-year history,” Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, said in an email to The Epoch Times.
“The successor of St. Peter will have to be a man who can courageously unite the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics—who are facing challenges ranging from radical secularism and moral relativism to outright violent persecution—with clarity and compassion about the fundamental truths of our faith.”
By T.J. Muscaro
