I testify by the Lord Jesus Christ
Conclave“I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge” is the oath each cardinal-elector speaks when depositing a ballot in the conclave. Its significance lies in the tension between a public, rule-bound ritual and a private claim of conscience: the words formally accompany every vote, but their meaning changes as Lomeli’s judgment and confidence in his choices shift.
Prescribed Words and Procedure
The oath belongs to a carefully ordered act of voting. Lomeli reads the procedure in the Apostolic Constitution to the assembled cardinals: each elector folds and displays his ballot, carries it to the altar, speaks the prescribed words, places the paper on the plate and into the receptacle, bows, and returns to his seat. The formula identifies Christ as witness and judge, making the act of choosing a pope answerable not only to the conclave but to a divine judgment.
The ceremony is repeated ballot after ballot, while the decision itself remains the elector’s. The words do not name a candidate or guarantee that a choice is correct; they attest that the vote is for the person the elector believes should be elected before God. That distinction gives the formula its moral pressure: it frames voting as an act of judgment for which the speaker accepts responsibility.
Lomeli’s Votes for Bellini
During an early ballot, Lomeli writes Bellini’s name in capital letters, folds the paper, raises it, and follows the required procedure at the altar. The oath accompanies his vote as a formal declaration of sincere judgment. Later, after his confidence in Bellini has been badly shaken, he again writes Bellini’s name. He has prayed for a sign and received none; the familiar words now sound against his acute disappointment and his sense that, for the sixth time, he may have returned the wrong answer.
The repetition matters because the oath stays fixed while Lomeli’s certainty does not. It cannot resolve his doubts or spare him from choosing. Instead, the same declaration exposes the distance between the conviction the ritual requires him to profess and the uncertainty he experiences as he casts his ballot.
The Self-Vote and Its Moral Cost
On a later ballot, Lomeli writes his own name. He again raises the folded paper and speaks the oath, but only as he stands before the altar does the full extent of his perjury strike him. The formula has become a measure of the discrepancy between the solemn claim he makes aloud and his own recognition of the vote’s moral character.
At the moment he tips his ballot into the urn, a loud bang shakes the floor and glass crashes nearby. Lomeli initially experiences the event through the religious terms already pressing on him: he fears that he has brought down God’s judgment, even as he takes the interruption as proof of God’s existence. The scene does not establish that the blast is divine intervention; it shows how the oath’s language of witness and judgment shapes his response to a sudden crisis.
A Clearer Conscience
On the eighth ballot, Lomeli chooses Benítez, a man he had never met and had not known was a cardinal before the conclave. This time the name feels strangely right to him. He raises the ballot and speaks the oath once more, now able to do so with a clean heart. The words have not changed, but their relation to his decision has: after the strain of voting for himself and the repeated doubts surrounding Bellini, Lomeli experiences this choice as one he can affirm before God.
The oath thus gives the election a recurring verbal and ethical structure. It marks each ballot as a personal answer to a common rule, while its successive uses trace Lomeli’s movement from uncertainty, through compromised judgment, toward a choice he can make without the same inner conflict. Its force comes not from changing the procedure, but from making the voter’s conscience audible within it.
