The papal succession conclave begins weeks after the Pope’s death and turns the election of a successor into a test of the Church’s procedures as well as its leadership. Its cardinal-electors are isolated from the outside world, bound by oaths, and required to vote until a candidate wins the prescribed majority. Yet decisions about the Pope’s final hours, the admission of a secretly appointed cardinal, and the disclosure of financial evidence show that procedure does not eliminate conflict: it determines how conflict can be argued, authorized, and brought before the assembled electors.

Background and preparation

The Pope died on 19 October, the day after the feast of St Luke the Evangelist. His funeral and the nearly daily congregations of the College of Cardinals occupied the remainder of October and the opening part of November. The private meetings addressed the Church’s future. Although progressive and traditionalist divisions surfaced, they passed without controversy, leaving the actual election to expose the disputes that preliminary discussion had not resolved.

On Sunday 7 November, the feast of St Herculanus the Martyr, Cardinal Lomeli stood at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel with Monsignor Raymond O’Malley, Secretary of the College of Cardinals, and Archbishop Wilhelm Mandorff, Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations. Workmen were still preparing the chapel: they laid a temporary wooden floor and beige carpet, assembled desks and chairs, and installed television lights. Against the vast scenes of Michelangelo’s ceiling and The Last Judgement, the practical bustle made the chapel a working election chamber as well as a sacred setting.

The electors were due to be locked inside the Vatican that evening, with balloting to begin the next day. The Casa Santa Marta doors were scheduled to close at six, and Lomeli urged the cardinals to arrive early. Once registered, they could have no communication with the outside world; mobile telephones and computers had to be surrendered, and entrants were to pass through a scanner. The election’s seclusion was thus not merely a custom but an enforced condition of participation.

Rules, authority, and admission

The conclave’s formal opening placed its authority in a sequence of public ritual and binding promises. At the Sistine Chapel altar, Lomeli intoned a prayer and administered the oath. The cardinal-electors swore as individuals and as a body to observe the Apostolic Constitution’s prescriptions and to carry out the Petrine Primacy faithfully if one of them were elected. The oath framed the ballot not as a private contest alone, but as an undertaking to serve the universal Church under rules accepted in advance.

After more than half an hour of oaths, Mandorff pronounced the formula “Extra omnes.” Television lights went out, and ceremony officials, choristers, security personnel, camera crews, the official photographer, a nun, and the Swiss Guard commandant left the chapel. At 4:46 p.m., Mandorff closed the double doors from inside. His departure marked the end of the outside world’s last view of the conclave and the beginning of its sealed deliberations.

The rules were tested when O’Malley reported that an additional cardinal had arrived, though his name had never appeared on the list. The man claimed he had been created in pectore, or secretly appointed. Lomeli initially suspected an impostor, but Mandorff believed the claim. Lomeli defended the late Pope’s appointment by invoking paragraph thirty-nine of the Apostolic Constitution: a cardinal-elector arriving re integra, before a new Pope had been elected, could join the election at whatever stage it had reached. In this dispute, fidelity to the dead Pope’s wishes and fidelity to the election’s legal rules converged; the latter supplied the grounds for admitting the unexpected participant.

Voting and the first ballot

The first ballot demonstrated how widely support could disperse before a viable majority emerged. Thirty-four cardinals received at least one vote, reportedly a record. Votes went to candidates’ friends and compatriots, and some electors voted for themselves. Lomeli’s name appeared more than once. He first felt touched by the confidence, then alarmed: in a crowded field, even a modest number of votes could make him a contender.

The count eventually clarified the leading group without producing a clear winner. Tedesco received 22 votes, Adeyemi 19, and Lomeli 5; Bellini finished behind Adeyemi, while Tremblay was only two votes behind Bellini. The remaining 38 votes went to others. Lomeli was dismayed by his own tally because he feared it had drawn support from Bellini and cost him the lead that might have strengthened his prospects. The result also overturned Sabbadin’s dinner prediction that Bellini would lead with as many as 25 votes while Tedesco received no more than 15.

No candidate approached the 79 votes required for election. Under the rules Lomeli consulted, electors had to continue balloting for a two-thirds majority, potentially through thirty ballots over twelve days. Only after that period could they use a different system in which a simple majority would suffice. The first count therefore established both the deadlock’s arithmetic and its possible duration: the assembly could not resolve its divisions merely by naming the strongest candidate in an initial round.

Disputed information and institutional scrutiny

The conclave’s handling of information began before the electors were sealed in. After the Pope’s unexpected death, a prepared timeline recorded his evening: dinner with Archbishop Woźniak at 7:30 p.m.; retirement to his apartment at 8:30, where he read and reflected on Chapter 8 of The Imitation of Christ; and bed at 9:30. Woźniak checked on him at 11:30 and found no vital signs. Dr Giulio Baldinotti began emergency treatment at 11:34, but resuscitation failed; the Pope was pronounced dead at 12:12 a.m. Lomeli proposed adding the Pope’s attendance at vespers to the official account while preparing a fuller schedule of the day to hold in reserve. The decision reflects the pressure to make an account accurate enough to withstand scrutiny while limiting the risk of discrepancies and rumours.

Woźniak later told Lomeli that he had found the Pope dead, summoned the doctor, and watched the doctor summon Cardinal Tremblay, the Camerlengo, as required by the rules. In the shock that followed, Woźniak did not immediately disclose that the Pope had seemed agitated at supper. He said Tremblay later asked what had been on the Pope’s mind, and that he had answered only that the Pope seemed troubled. Woźniak also reported seeing Tremblay speak privately with the Pope’s secretary, Monsignor Morales, and suspected that Tremblay had persuaded him not to discuss the meeting. The account made the circumstances around the death an issue of testimony and withheld knowledge, not merely a matter of an official timeline.

That tension between stewardship and disclosure reaches the Church’s finances. While searching the dead Pope’s apartment, Lomeli found documents concealed inside a wooden case hidden in a bedpost. They included bank statements, money transfers, apartment addresses, and handwritten annotations. An APSA list compared the size of official apartments occupied by Curia members with the Pope’s own 50-square-metre room at the Casa Santa Marta: Lomeli’s apartment measured 445 square metres, Bellini’s 410, Adeyemi’s 480, and Tremblay’s 510. An attached report estimated the APSA property estate at 347,532 square metres, potentially worth more than €2.7 billion, against a book value of €389.6 million. It also cited a paid occupancy rate of 56 percent and warned that much of the income appeared not to be properly declared.

Bellini recalled the late Pope’s effort to impose financial transparency: demanding properly kept books, account disclosure, outside tenders for even small building projects, and receipts; then bringing in accountants and management consultants to examine files from offices established on the first floor of the Casa Santa Marta. He described resistance inside the Curia, damaging leaks, and the Pope’s growing isolation amid disputes over reform and the Church’s public positions. In the conclave, this history gave financial scrutiny a larger significance: the election concerned not only who would hold office, but what obligations of oversight and institutional loyalty that office would carry.

Deliberation and consequence

When a crisis prompted a proposal to inform the electors, Lomeli first sought authorization rather than assuming the right to address them. He invoked paragraphs five and six of the Apostolic Constitution, which permitted certain matters to be discussed in special circumstances if a majority of the assembled cardinals agreed. He then put the question to a vote. Scores raised their hands in favour; Tedesco, Krasinski, Tutino, and roughly a dozen others opposed. The measure carried, and Lomeli made clear that anyone unwilling to hear the information could leave. No one did.

These episodes show the conclave working through procedure without making procedure politically neutral. Its rules impose isolation, define the voting threshold, and determine whether a late-arriving elector can participate. They also give Lomeli a way to seek consent before disclosing sensitive matters. The first ballot’s scattered totals reveal how far the electors remain from agreement, while the hidden appointment and financial records expose questions that cannot be settled by counting votes alone. The conclave’s decisive task is therefore both electoral and institutional: to choose a Pope under law while confronting what the Church’s rules can authorize, what its officials have kept from view, and what its members are prepared to hear.