The Election of Pope Francis

On the evening of 13 March 2013, at six minutes past seven, white smoke poured from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel and the bells of St. Peter’s began to ring. The cardinals had a pope. When the senior cardinal-deacon stepped onto the loggia to pronounce the ancient formula, the name he gave was one few in the square had expected: Georgium Marium, Cardinal Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires — who had chosen to be called Francis. It was a name no pope had ever borne. He was the first Jesuit ever elected to the See of Peter, and the first pope drawn from the Americas. A new pontificate had begun, and with it a new chapter in the story this timeline has traced — one whose consequences for the traditional Mass no one in the rain-soaked piazza could yet foresee.

After an Unprecedented Resignation

The conclave of 2013 met under circumstances without modern precedent. On 11 February 2013, Pope Benedict XVI had stunned the Church by announcing, in Latin, that he would resign the papacy — the first pope to do so freely in nearly six centuries. His resignation took effect on 28 February, and for the first time in living memory the cardinals gathered to elect a successor while the man they were replacing still lived, in prayerful retirement within the Vatican walls. One hundred fifteen cardinal electors entered the Sistine Chapel on 12 March. The following afternoon, on the fifth ballot, they elected the seventy-six-year-old Argentine.

“From the Ends of the Earth”

Bergoglio’s first act before the world was disarmingly simple. Appearing on the balcony in a plain white cassock, without the red mozzetta his predecessors had worn, he greeted the enormous crowd not with a blessing but with an ordinary evening salutation — Buonasera. Then he spoke of how far the cardinals had reached to find a bishop for Rome.

Before imparting his own blessing, he bowed his head and asked the hundreds of thousands below to pray for him in silence — a gesture that became, in an instant, the emblem of the new pontificate. He asked, too, for prayers for his predecessor, whom he called the bishop emeritus of Rome.

Why “Francis”

Three days later, addressing the journalists who had descended on Rome by the thousand, the new pope explained the name he had chosen — a name laden with meaning and never before taken by a pope. As the votes mounted in his favor during the conclave, he recalled, the Brazilian cardinal Cláudio Hummes had embraced him and whispered words he would not forget.

❝

Don’t forget the poor.

— Cardinal Cláudio Hummes to Bergoglio during the conclave, as recounted by Pope Francis, 16 March 2013

That whisper, he said, turned his thoughts at once to St. Francis of Assisi — “the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation.” “How I would like a Church that is poor and that is for the poor,” he told the assembled press. The choice signaled, from the first hours, a pontificate whose accent would fall on simplicity, mercy, and the peripheries.

A Different Liturgical Sensibility

For those who had welcomed Benedict XVI’s liturgical vision, the election was watched with a particular and respectful attentiveness. Benedict had been, before all else, a liturgical pope — the theologian of the “reform of the reform,” the author of Summorum Pontificum, which in 2007 had freed the traditional Mass and called it a treasure of the whole Church. Francis was a man of a different formation and a different emphasis. A Jesuit and a pastor, his concerns ran toward mission, the poor, and the outward life of the Church more than toward the fine grain of the sacred liturgy, and his own celebrations were marked by a studied plainness.

It would be unjust to read the whole of his pontificate backward into its first evening; on 13 March 2013 the new pope had said nothing of the older rite, and much remained unwritten. But honesty requires noting the shift in sensibility that the election represented. The liturgical project that had defined the previous reign now passed to a successor who did not share its central preoccupation. What that would mean for the peace Benedict had tried to establish — a peace between the two forms of the Roman Rite — would unfold only over the years that followed.

And so the conclave of 2013 closed one era and opened another. The pope of the “reform of the reform” had stepped aside; a pope of mission and mercy had taken his place. The faithful of every sensibility owed him, from that first evening, their prayers, their obedience in what is owed, and their love — even those who would come to grieve the decisions of the years ahead. The story of the traditional Mass under Pope Francis was not yet written. But its first page had been turned, in the rain, beneath a chimney of white smoke.