August 26, 1978 - Conclave Each of the one hundred and eleven red-robed Cardinals strode up to the altar in the Sistine Chapel and, holding only one piece of folded paper in his hand, said aloud: I call to witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge   that my vote is given to the one whom before God  I consider should be elected. Most of the Cardinal electors believed that “at least one more” Italian pope would be good – but did not plan to elect Cardinal Siri (“too intransigent”), nor Cardinal Benelli (“too curial”), nor Cardinal Pignedoli (“too aligned with the late Paul VI”).   Although a few Cardinals were prepared to vote for a non-Italian, even for an Eastern Eur...

Prologue  In July 1978, when Pope Paul VI was leaving the Vatican to go to the papal summer residence in the hills at Castel Gandolfo, he bade farewell to Archbishop Giuseppe Caprio – his closest collaborator – with the sad words: “We will go, but I do not know whether we will return to Rome - or how we will return.” The 80-year-old Paul knew his physical state. Giovanni Battista Montini had been an intellectually brilliant but very frail youth, and throughout his service to Pope Pius XII in the Vatican of the 1930’s ‘40’s and 50’s, his famously long work days sometimes resulted in periods of exhaustion. During his fifteen years as Pope, beginning in 1963, he suffered from cancer of the prostate and painful, crippling osteoarthritis. He had recently shared with a group of pilgrims: “The clock of time moves inexorably forward, and it points to a forthcoming end.” Paul also knew his own spiritual weariness and pain. He had succeeded the immensely popular John...