Round of Voting Fails to Name a Pope

VATICAN CITY — Black smoke billowed from a makeshift copper chimney atop the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday, signaling that the 115 cardinals of the Catholic Church eligible to vote for a new pope had again failed to muster majority support for a successor to

A first vote ended inconclusively on Tuesday, and the inky black smoke at midday Wednesday indicated an absence of consensus among the cardinals in two subsequent ballots, over what kind of pope they want to confront the pressing and sometimes conflicting demands for change in the church after years of scandal.

“It’s more or less what we expected,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said of the first three ballots. He said the continuing voting was a “normal process of discernment,” not a sign of divisions. In relatively recent times, he said, only one pope was chosen as quickly as the third ballot — Pius XII, whose papacy spanned World War II and lasted from 1939 to 1958.

Unusually, President Obama pitched in to the papal debate, promoting the idea of an American pope.

In an interview broadcast on Wednesday, Mr. Obama said an American pope would “preside just as effectively as a Polish pope or an Italian pope or a Guatemalan pope.”

The president dismissed the idea that an American pope would be perceived as too tied to the government of the United States. “I don’t know if you’ve checked lately, but the Conference of Catholic Bishops here in the United States don’t seem to be taking orders from me,” Mr. Obama told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in the interview.

 Mr. Obama said he hopes that whoever becomes pope will maintain what he called the “central message” of the gospel.
 “That is that we treat everybody as children of God and that we love them the way Jesus Christ taught us to love them,” Mr. Obama said. “I think that a pope that, you know, is that clarion voice on behalf of those issues will, you know, will have a tremendous and positive impact on the world.”

 Voting is set to continue on Wednesday afternoon and onward — with up to two rounds each morning and afternoon — until a candidate receives a two-thirds majority, or 77 votes.

At that point, white smoke will billow forth from the chapel, telling the world’s one billion-plus Catholics that they have a new leader, and the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica will peal.
On Wednesday, the first full day of the conclave, the prelates celebrated a morning Mass in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace before moving to the Sistine Chapel to deliberate and vote under its 16th-century frescoes by Michelangelo. Outside, pilgrims and sightseers sheltered under umbrellas in the piazza starting early in the rainy morning, hoping to see an unequivocal signal from the burning ballot papersl.

The crowd soon thickened, with many people staring toward the chimney with its simple cover or looking at it on huge television screens. Some closed their eyes and clasped their hands around rosaries in prayer.

At the last papal election, in 2005, the color was indeterminate in an early round, prompting confusion. But, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the smoke was unmistakably black.

Technology helped, too. By the time the first smoke emerged, at 7:41 p.m. on Tuesday, it was dark outside. But giant screens in St. Peter’s Square showed the smokestack clearly.

The Vatican has given details of how the black smoke is generated, saying that, since 2005, a secondary device alongside the traditional ballot-burning stove generates colored smoke from different chemical compounds. Both devices feed into stovepipes that join up as a single smokestack on the Sistine Chapel roof.

For black smoke, the Vatican Information Service said, the compound blends potassium perchlorate, anthracene and sulfur. White smoke heralding a new pope comes from a mixture of potassium chlorate, lactose and rosin, “a natural amber resin obtained from conifers.”

Before 2005, the black smoke was “obtained by using smoke black or pitch and the white smoke by using wet straw,” the Vatican said.

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