Waiting for the Smoke That Heralds a New Pope

After the men who will select the next pope were locked inside the Sistine Chapel without cellphones on Wednesday, the only thing left to do was wait for them to send a signal to the outside world. By smoke.

The highly secret voting began inside what is possibly one of the world’s most secure vaults in the early evening, with the 133 cardinals tasked with deciding who will succeed Pope Francis writing candidates’ names on voting cards by hand, trying to disguise their handwriting.

Outside in St. Peter’s Square, thousands of the faithful, the curious and the vacationing gathered to await the news of whether the cardinals had managed to elect a papal successor. Word came at 9 p.m., in the form of black smoke billowing from a chimney installed last week on the roof of the chapel.

If the smoke had been white, it would have meant that the cardinals had chosen the first new pope in a dozen years in just one round of voting, a feat not seen for centuries.

But the black smoke, created when the cardinals’ ballots are incinerated in a cast-iron stove, means they’ll have to try again.

“We are cold, we’re hungry, we’re thirsty but yet we can’t move,” said the Rev. Peter Mangum, 61, a priest at the Church of Jesus the Good Shepherd in Monroe, La. He and three other priests had been in the square for about seven hours, and it was Father Magnum’s fourth time waiting for news of a new pope.