White smoke was still billowing Tom the makeshift Sistine Chapel chimney when Pericle Cardinal Felici stepped out on the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. After the first wisp of smoke had appeared, signifying election of a new Pope, crowds streaming toward the historic square had snarled every street in Rome west of the Tiber River. Now more than 100,000 people waited expectantly below the balcony. "I announce to you a great joy," Felici intoned in sonorous Latin. "We have a Pope!" The crowd roared, then hushed to hear the name.
Savoring the suspense, Felici drew out the announcement and the syllables of the name. "Ca-ro-lum ..." Some priests gasped. They thought he meant Carlo Confalonieri, 85-year-old dean of the College of Cardinals. "They've gone crazy!" cried one of the priests.
Thoroughly enjoying himself, Felici went on: "... Cardinalem Woj-ty-la."* The crowd froze. "Chi è?"— Who's he? —Italians asked one another. Possibly an African!? A group of Japanese tourists thought it might be one of their countrymen, though there are no Japanese Cardinals at the moment. An Italian TV announcer uncertainly said, "Polacco" (the Pole), and many viewers thought he had said "Poletti," the name of Rome's vicar general.
Felici finally concluded: "... who has taken the name of [pause] John Paul." This gesture of respect to John Paul I, the gentle Venetian who had died after a 33-day reign, reinforced the cheers that were beginning to roll across the stunned square. Now it seemed to hit everyone at once. "E il Polacco!"—It's the Pole—said one onlooker. "Un Papa straniero!"—a foreign Pope—shouted others. The realization was beginning to sink in that the supposedly hidebound College of Cardinals had done not merely the unexpected but the nearly unthinkable.
Karol Wojtyla. The first Pope from Eastern Europe. The first from Poland, a nation whose fervor for Roman Catholicism has been unsurpassed for a millennium. The first non-Italian elected since 1522 and thus, in a real sense, the first international Pope to lead a global church. And, in the wake of his frail predecessor, the youngest Pope chosen since 1846. The last under-60 Pope, Pius IX, reigned for 32 years. At age 58, Wojtyla is robust and muscular (he was described in the national daily The Australian as "a man built like a rugby front-row forward"), and it thus seemed possible that he could lead his faith into the 21st century. Plainly, the Cardinals had opted for a long pontificate. Just as plainly, they had chosen a man of extraordinary qualities and experience. A newspaper in Lima, Peru, greeted Wojtyla's election with the headline LABORER POET ACTOR PRIEST POPE. That and more: quarryman and factory work-in his youth, member of Poland's anti-Nazi underground, professor of philosophy and ethics, pastor with an unaffectedly common touch. On top of that he is more of an athlete and outdoorsman than any Pope in memory, one who loves to ski in Poland's Tatra Mountains, to kayak or canoe on the Mazurian Lakes, to climb mountains and hike.