VATICAN: For now, no Pope. And for the thousands crowded into St Peter's Square at 7.00pm yesterday, when the black smoke denoted no news, the wait goes on for a new pontiff to emerge on that famous balcony and be presented urbi et orbi (to the city and the world). Patsy McGarry reports from St Peter's Square.
There was some anxiety among the media present that there could be days like this ahead, with nothing to report. Some reporters had begun to talk to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. There was also John Paul.
John Paul Sonnen (26), from Minneapolis in the US, was carrying a large, conspicuous Stars and Stripes, for which he was getting flak from fellow Americans. They had thought it, the only national flag evident in St Peter's Square yesterday, inappropriate, he said. He also had a badge of the papal flag on his lapel.
He was there to honour the new pope and the Catholic Church which he saw as "the last bulwark of morality in the world".
As a Catholic, he was fiercely proud that President George Bush had attended Pope John Paul's funeral.
"It was unprecedented for the US president of a Protestant nation" to be there, he said.
Gabriella Grille had a homemade placard around her neck canvassing support for the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who she believed should be the next pope as "he is a friend of Ratzinger". She didn't seem bothered that canvassing for the papacy was not allowed or that it was unlikely to achieve much with the cardinals cloistered away from the city and the world.
A delegation of lawyers from Krakow had arrived to lay a red and white wreath at the obelisk in honour of Pope John Paul II, but the area had been sealed off for the world's TV cameras. A special exemption was agreed spontaneously for the loyal Poles one of whom, Maciej Lipinski, said: "I hope the new pope will be as good as ours."
Earlier the procession of cardinals to the Sistine Chapel was broadcast on big screens in the Square. So too was the swearing in of each cardinal while an organ played Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Cardinal Connell placed his hand on the gospels and recited his oath at 5.10pm (Rome time).
The exeunt omnes (all go out) instruction given, the chapel was cleared of all but electors, and the great doors closed at 5.25pm, as an American woman in the square prayed aloud: "Holy Spirit, everyone knows what you want, now it's up to these guys to get on with it." Her prayer was accompanied by many "amens".
The Mass in St Peter's Basilica yesterday morning was attended by a great number of priests and nuns, with a large contingent of laity, among them one man holding aloft a solitary Czech flag. Before the Mass Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, tall, thin, bespectacled, walked conspicuously up and down the centre aisle smiling, resplendent in scarlet, being greeted by and photographed with people in the congregation.
His elector colleagues were putting on their outer vestments at the right-hand side of the basilica, which was sealed off by a screen. Through an opening, beneath a marble plaque to St Victor supported by struggling chubby cherubs, Westminster's Cardinal Murphy O'Connor could be seen chatting and laughing with three colleagues before suddenly becoming serious.
The cardinals' procession to the altar for Mass was illuminated by a shaft of bright sunlight from a window high up at the front of St Peter's.
In his homily Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger warned: "We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."
He said "being an adult means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today's fashions or the latest novelties".
The procession of cardinals down the aisle after Mass, led by an army of priests, was accompanied by loud and sustained applause from the congregation. As it became more enthusiastic, it seemed to say: "You have our best wishes and our goodwill, but now get on with it."