It’s conclave time—and frugality is in, extravagance is out

The Via dei Penitenziari, tucked between the ancient gate of the Vatican City and St. Peter’s Square, is a busy stretch of pavement as the Catholic church prepares to elect the next pope. A smart young priest in a crisp black suit, and carrying a briefcase, weaves through the crowds as purposefully as a Milanese executive. “A Jesuit, doubtless,” murmurs my lunch companion, a veteran Vatican reporter. A couple of African nuns in blue tunics and home-knitted cardigans get caught in a human traffic jam as a corpulent padre with a heavy silver cross around his neck leads a gaggle of pilgrims. “Spaniards from the Order of the Holy Sepulchre,” to judge by the Jerusalem crosses on the breast of their matching black polo shirts. And the elderly guy in a rumpled black suit, plain priest’s shirt, and squashed old hat making his way to Jesuit HQ next door—could he be a cardinal?

Other Vatican correspondents in their lanyards look up from their gossiping conversations and exchange a knowing glance. Cardinals may be the princes of the church, but in the low-key age of Pope Francis, humility is the order of the day. Except for formal meetings and ceremonies, red-trimmed cassocks are out. Plain black priests’ suits are in. The papal electors walk among us, incognito.

It’s a stark contrast to half a century ago, when cardinals habitually wore their full scarlet vestments in public, dined regularly at noble palaces, and traveled in chauffeur-driven cars flanked by attendants, one Roman principessa (a member of the papal nobility) who is now in her seventies told me. But not every Catholic, and definitely not every Roman aristocrat, has been thrilled by the radical turn toward simplicity, frugality, and humility taken by the late Pope Francis.  

“The church is nothing without its heritage,” says the venerable princess, who numbers no fewer than three popes in her family tree and whose home boasts both a private papal throne room and a painting by Caravaggio. In pride of place in her drawing room is a silver-framed photograph of her late father in the formal robes, cloak, and sword of a papal knight, a hereditary post. “Modesty is becoming, of course; churchmen should be modest. But the people also need spectacle. Lose the spectacle, and you lose the mystery.”

“Pope Francis was known for his humility,” says Father Martin Browne, an Irish Benedictine monk who works in the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, as we grab a quick lunch of pan-fried horse flank steak, horse-meat jerky, and foraged greens in the Testaccio neighborhood, famous for its meat market and offal restaurants. During Francis’s pontificate “lots of cardinals put away their fancy rings and crosses.”

The style of the upcoming conclave promises to be frugal, true to the late pope’s philosophy—for the time being. Whether that will stick is a matter for debate.

“Did [Francis] really convert them or not?” muses Father Browne. “We will see how the cardinals adapt to new times.”

(How is a new pope elected?)

“They like places that do not change”

Before they are locked into the Vatican for the conclave, many cardinals stay in accommodations linked to their home region or religious order. Benedictines, for instance, can choose to reside at the headquarters of the order on the Aventine Hill, or Dominicans at the nearby Santa Sabina. The same goes for Jesuits, with their vast handsome headquarters on the Via dei Penitenziari and a nearby guesthouse that boasts a huge hidden garden atop the ramparts of the Vatican. English Catholics have accommodation at the Venerable English College by the Campo de’ Fiori, founded in 1579. The exuberant frescoes and woodwork of the college’s chapel and refectory are a glimpse of what English ecclesiastical architecture might have been if the Protestant Reformation had not happened. Filipino prelates can stay at their own Pontifical College on the Via Aurelia founded just 40 years ago. There the style is very different—think a 1960s Hilton with modernist crucifixes.   

In the run-up to the conclave, cardinals attend a lot of private dinners—mostly frugal monastic-style dining in various refectories attached to the colleges, monasteries, and headquarters of religious orders that fill central Rome. When going out, the clergy tend to favor a handful of traditional, family-run restaurants that are off the tourist track. One is Trattoria Fiammetta, founded in 1944, tucked down a side street near the Piazza Navona. Among the house specialties are Roman classics like saltimbocca alla Romana—thin-cut pork steak in cream sauce—and deep-fried zucchini flowers stuffed with mozzarella and anchovy.

Older clerics favor Al Passetto di Borgo, a couple hundred yards from St. Peter’s, which is so old-fashioned, plain, and lit by 1980s-style hard white light that tourists tend to avoid it in favor of hipper eateries nearby. The food, though, is reliable and inexpensive and firmly old-school Roman. This week American Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley has been in, according to owner Antonello Fulvimari, as well as former Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl. Both were in civilian clothes. Some of Fulvimari’s clerical customers have been coming since they were young novices in the late ’60s.

“They like places that do not change, and are always like home to them,” says Fulvimari. “Over dinner is where all the important decisions get made.”

As for the more exuberant delights of the city, the New King piano bar—handily close to the Vatican and to the American Pontifical College—is traditionally popular with young American priests whom this author has encountered gathering in civilian clothes to sing show tunes around the grand piano. The Manila Restaurant on the Esquilino Hill is famous for its post-dinner karaoke sessions, which homesick Filipino priests in mufti also enjoy. Indeed, Philippines-born Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a papal front-runner, is famous for his YouTube karaoke performances. During the conclave, however, no such frivolity is allowed. The church is still in mourning for Pope Francis, a time for serious reflection rather than for indulgence. The Italian press has a long and not very honorable obsession with the yellowest of salacious gossip, so it would not do to have anyone associated with the church photographed in a late-night bar. “The confinement of the cardinals and the security around the conclave is in part to protect them from people like you—the press,” observes Father Browne.

Meanwhile, down at ground level, well below the high-flying ideals and top-level scandals, a massive team of Vatican staffers are hard at work getting the conclave show on the road. A vast press center equipped with multiple studios, satellite feeds, industrial-grade Wi-Fi, and monitors has been laid out on the corner of St. Peter’s Square. A team of nuns are busy preparing the accommodations for the cardinals, as well as making catering arrangements for the meals they will eat together in the Casa Santa Marta refectory. And then there are the Pontifical Swiss Guards, members of the world’s smallest army.

Not many 19-year-olds spend their work shifts wearing armor for up to four hours a day, eyes front, holding a heavy halberd at port arms. Unless, of course, you are a member of the Vatican’s 135-strong Swiss Guard. But despite appearances—namely, their red, orange, and blue Renaissance uniforms, ruffs, and steel helmets—the pope’s personal bodyguards are very much not just ceremonial soldiers. Recruited for the past 500 years from practicing Swiss Catholics, these guys have all completed Swiss Army training and spend a month at the Special Forces training center at Ticino, Switzerland, learning close-combat techniques. When they’re not dressed like they just stepped down from a fresco by Raphael, the Swiss Guards wear SWAT team-style dark-blue overalls and baseball caps in which they run around the Vatican cellars practicing taking down terrorists. When the pope is out and about, whether on walkabout in St. Peter’s Square or on foreign trips, they switch to black suits, under which they wear a handgun, mace spray, and handcuffs.

For their two years’ service the young guards lead a semi-monastic life—eating, exercising, training, and working mostly within the 100-acre confines of the Vatican City. Look up from the Piazza Leonina, just by the portico of St. Peter’s, and you can see their dorms complete with uniforms carefully hung up. Sometimes, though, the guys have a few free hours to grab a beer and a burger at their favored hangout, Morrison’s pub on the Piazza Risorgimento, just a few steps from the looming Vatican walls.  

On a recent Friday night, a group of four young guards sipped pints of Belgian beer and crossed themselves formally before tucking into bacon cheeseburgers. They are super-polite kids but shy of publicity. Busy times coming up with the conclave? Oh yes, they agreed, very busy. But they can’t talk about it. Like all the other Vatican support staff, from cooks to cleaners and curial officials, the guards have taken an oath of secrecy not to reveal any details of the conclave, however trivial seeming.

(Rome’s mysterious papal crypts)

“The cardinals do not like a pope to be too young”

 As recently as 1978 the newly elected Pope John Paul I entered St. Peter’s seated on the Sedia Gestatoria, a ceremonial throne carried aloft on the shoulders of noble-born papal knights. By 2013 Pope Francis, by contrast, insisted on traveling on the same bus as his fellow cardinals—and went on to regularly throw large receptions at the Vatican to which homeless people, transgender prostitutes, and drug addicts were invited. Rather than live in the papal palace, Francis inhabited a humble suite of two rooms in the papal guesthouse of the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.

In the days leading up to the formal start of the conclave, all cardinals—both voting cardinals who must be under 80 years old and their older colleagues—attend a series of near-daily meetings known as a General Congregation. Though formally a closed-door meeting, the Vatican press service reports the general outline of proceedings. Here, those who wish to articulate their positions about the future of the church can make speeches. Just don’t call it campaigning. As the world-weary old Roman saying goes, whoever goes into the conclave a pope will emerge as a cardinal.

“What is called politicking and horse trading is also actually getting to know who people are,” says the Vatican’s Father Browne. The cardinals “all know a few key figures in the papal curia, for instance [Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro] Parolin. But they don’t necessarily know who all the others are.”

Still, senior churchmen like to insist that the conclave is definitely not about politics. Swedish Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Stockholm warns that it is dangerous for people to “always have political glasses on when they look upon the church” and want “a pope who follows their own political agenda.” Rather, he told the Catholic News Service, “what people really need in a time like this [is] someone who can help them be freed from sin, from hatred, from violence, to bring about reconciliation.”

Yet the perils that the Catholic Church faces are high, and the new pope will find himself at the heart of every possible culture war. Add to that catastrophically falling congregations in much of Europe and the effort to rebuild trust after decades of sexual abuse scandals, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there are few more political jobs in the world than pope.

For the duration of the conclave itself the cardinals will move to the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse inside the Vatican, where they are sealed inside the confines of the world’s smallest state with strictly no communication with the outside world allowed. By tradition, the only indication of their deliberations will be black smoke signaling that there is no winner, white smoke to announce that the conclave has reached a two-thirds majority and elected a new pontiff.  Outside, on St. Peter’s Square, all eyes will be on the simple chimney erected on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, where a stove has been installed to burn the cardinals’ ballots after every secret vote.

The College of Cardinals has changed almost beyond recognition over the past half century. Only 52 of the 135 voting cardinals are Europeans, of whom just 17 are Italians, compared with 28 in the 2013 conclave. Asia now has 23 cardinals and Africa 18, reflecting Francis’s mission to grow the church in those regions. And many of the newest cardinals have been created in surprising places with few Christians, such as Sir John Ribat, Cardinal-Archbishop of New Guinea; the 45-year-old Mykola Bychok, Ukrainian Greek Catholic cardinal of Australia; and the 50-year-old Cardinal Giorgio Marengo of Mongolia. Bychok and Marengo posted cheerful selfies of themselves in St. Peter’s along with 51-year-old Cardinal Américo Manuel. Youth, however, is not necessarily an advantage in this particular race.  “The cardinals do not like a pope to be too young,” says one senior European diplomat who has worked pro bono on behalf of the Vatican for many years. “What if they have made a mistake?”

The College of Cardinals represents a broad spectrum of opinion, from the super-traditionalists of Opus Dei to liberals rooted in the quasi-socialist liberation theology of the 1960s. But the balance of power inside the church is moving away from Europe and toward the global South. “[Italian cardinal Pietro] Parolin is the establishment candidate of the curia, but there is a feeling that he may not have the charisma to appeal to the wider flock in the third world,” says the diplomat over coffee in the exclusive Nuovo Circolo degli Scacchi, one of Rome’s grandest private clubs. Meanwhile, “Tagle is a lovely and warm man, but questions about possible cover-ups of abuse in the press may hurt his chances.”

It’s also common for two strong candidates to cancel each other out and create a deadlock—allowing a dark horse candidate to come up from the rear. Francis was a third candidate, initially not favored, as was John Paul II. Both men went on to have some of the most influential papal reigns of the century.   

Once the pope is elected by a two-thirds majority and the decision is signaled by white smoke billowing from the roof, the new pontiff dons his new white robes and appears on the central balcony of St. Peter’s.

What’s in a robe? A lot of symbolism, it turns out, and a lot of politics. In the very first moments of his pontificate, for instance, Francis was at pains to prove that not all heroes wear capes. For his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s immediately after his 2013 election, he refused to don a red-velvet, fur-trimmed traditional cape (known as a mozzetta). Francis also passed over a pair of red leather sandals. Instead he wore a plain white mozzetta and his ordinary black shoes. On most working days, as those who worked with him attest, Francis wore the black suit and shirt of an ordinary parish priest.

Someday soon, after the conclave has made its decision, a new pope will go to the Room of Tears, a robing room by the Sistine Chapel, where he will put on his new white cassock as he weeps for his old lost life.

But right now there are only cardinals. One of those men moving into Casa Santa Marta in the morning will basically never be free to walk the streets of Rome, have a coffee in his favorite bar, or enjoy a private dinner in a restaurant again. Instead he will be locked into the Vatican—and into papal protocol—for the rest of his life. No wonder some cardinals were out in Rome before the conclave, perhaps wondering if those were their final moments of freedom.

(Pope Francis was a pope for the people.)