Many men have been tempted to refuse election to the papacy, and some have done so. One day in 1294, after rivalries between candidates had kept the papal throne empty for more than two years, an 84-year-old hermit in the mountains of Abruzzi watched a small procession of cardinals winding up the path to his hermitage, where they kissed his hand and proclaimed him Pope. He protested that he was unequal to the task, but they dragged him off weeping and crowned him Celestine V (they finally permitted him to resign six months later).
The awesome burdens of the papacy have hardly grown lighter since the 13th century, and they were defined last week in solemn ceremony for the man who would leave the conclave as the 262nd Pontiff. At a Mass in St. Peter's before the cardinals retired into their sealed-off quarters, Monsignor Antonio Bacci, Secretary of Briefs to the Princes (an ancient office in the papal household), told them in finely chiseled Latin what sort of man they must choose:
"It is not enough that the Pontiff be gifted, that he know human and divine sciences and that he will have explored and experimented the subtle reasons of diplomacy and politics. That which is above all needed is a saintly Pope . . . The new vicar of Christ should be a bridge between heaven and the earth . . . a bridge between the social classes . . . a bridge among nations, even those who reject and persecute Christian religion . . ."
The Lonely Men. What considerations guided the cardinals as they assembled to make their choice will probably never be known, for no conclave in the history of the church has been bound by such rigid rules of secrecy. Author of the rules was the late Pope Pius XII himself; in his 1945 constitution, most recent of only 29 papal decrees in almost 1,000 years on conclave procedure, he ordered that the cardinals maintain absolute secrecy not only during the conclave, as heretofore, but afterwards as well. Pius XII banned from the conclave all "telegraph instruments, telephones, microphones, radios, cameras, and other such." He also tightened the balloting procedure. Ballots must now be burned at once, and not only are the ballots unsigned but cardinals are instructed to disguise their handwriting as much as possible.
For all the panoply and suspense of the conclave, it is a stark and lonely time for the cardinals themselves. They are imprisoned in an atmosphere of Renaissance marble contrasting with improvised wooden partitions, inhibited in their talks with each other and especially with their accompanying conclavists (with whom they are forbidden to discuss the balloting). Even their meals, in a temporary refectory set up amid Pintoricchio frescoes in the Borgia apartments, offer little comfort. Cracked one Vaticaner when he heard that the cardinals' cooks would be six sisters from the Order of Santa Marta: "That alone will be a great encouragement to conclude the conclave quickly."