Some questions about electing the Pope, past and present:
Why are Cardinals over the age of 80 prohibited from voting? Are they also prohibited from becoming Pope?
How long has the over-80 rule been in effect? 500 years ago, nobody lived to be 80 so it must be a recent rule.
Before the telegraph, how were the Cardinals notified? By mail? Was there a special dispatch sequence where notices were hand-carried in several directions. When one of them (for example) reached Barcelona with letters addressed to all the Spanish Cardinals, several local citizens were dispatched in multiple directions to notify other Cardinals in Spain. Were many Cardinals excluded from voting because they received the notice too late to make it to Rome for the vote? Was anyone allowed to vote by absentee balot?
When were Cardinals first appointed to the western hemisphere? If it was before the advent of trans-Atlantic communications, were they just excluded from the Papal election? Excluding the western hemisphere, how far to the east was the Catholic Church and the easternmost Cardinal?
The under 80 rule is in place because John Paul II decreed it and Benedict XVI didn’t change it. It’s an interesting question about how much latitude a Pope has in determining the election process for his successor(s). Could a Pope decide that every Bishop can vote for Pope or extend it out to include all Catholics?
Any Catholic male can be elected Pope. If not already ordained they wouldbe given holy orders so that they are a priest then a bishop. There have been cases of non-bishops being elected Pope and then consecrated as a bishop so they can take their place as Bishop of Rome.
Says who? LOTS of people reached 80 a century or more ago.
When you hear things like “The average life expectancy in the Middle Ages was 35,” that does NOT mean lots of people died at 35. It means many people died VERY young. If you survived all the childhood illnesses, you typically lived 70 or 80 years, just as people do, today.
Read Psalm 90 in the Bible: “Three score and ten are a man’s days, or four score, if he is strong.” Even in ancient times, most reasonably healthy adults lived to be 70 or 80.
No. Young adults also fell victim to plague, dysentery, smallpox, tuberculosis, scrofula, pneumonia, malaria, and many other maladies now easily prevented or cured.
If you were lucky enough to avoid fatal disease as a child and as an adult you could live to be 70 or 80. That doesn’t mean it was typical.
Sorta related question: when Pope Pius died in 1958? the stove used for burning the ballots hadn’t been used for so long, it took effort to find it. The status of the election is indicated by the color of the smoke emitted-when they burn the ballots. How hard is it to get white smoke vs. black smoke?
The first western-hemisphere-based cardinal was John McCloskey of New York, appointed in 1875. Since this was after the advent of telegraphs and steamships conclave attendance was not a problem.
East-wise, I’m not sure but I think for most of modern church history (say from 1000 to well into the 1900’s) there were no cardinals farther east than Poland. This was a bit of a journey to Rome in pre-industrial times but not extreme.
Burning all the ballots emits white smoke. This is done to indicate a pope has been selected. Burning all the ballots with a couple handfuls of straw emits black smoke.
The smoke was made white IIRC by wetting the straw.
A few elections ago (JPI? JPII? JXXIII?) there was a problem that the smoke was ambiguous for the first few votes, so people had to wait a while to tell if the vote was done or not. Hence the chemical addition.
Jared Diamond in Collapse mentions bishops were named for Greenland, but towards the end the last one or two never made it past Iceland. (due to ice, apparently). No cardinals.
Yes, people could live to 70, 80 and beyond but before modern medicine it was a crapshoot. If you were lucky, you made it to age 5. If you were really lucky, avoided disease and war, you survived past 50. The “senators” (seniors) of the Roman times were elders of government because they were 50 or 60, had a lifetime of experience, and survived.
I suppose the distinction is that with modern medicine, people survive well past their abilities; the current pope has a pacemaker, for example. Way back when, eldery who could not take care of themselves died of infections quickly. The guy who is 95 and still walks downtown every day - he would have been fine 200 years ago. Old granny who’s 85 and getting Alzheimers? Probably would have soon died of a lung infection or flu 200 years ago.
So that’s the reason for the rule. The cadinals were getting to the point where they would live beyond their ability to make good judgements. Benedcit saw this happening to JPII for a decade or more, and probably thought “better I leave and give the job to someone younger, now that I’m slowing down.”
As I recall, the white smoke that announced Benedict was barely visible as smoke, let alone visible as “white”. A “smoke bomb” will hopefully work better this time around.
Cardinals who arrived after the conclave had begun were allowed in.
But this was a relatively minor problem because most cardinals were permanently resident in Rome. Cardinals were supposed to be in attendance on the pope and most of them had positions in the Curia. It has only been in the last couple of centuries that popes have appointed significant numbers of them based elsewhere. Yes, there are the obvious exceptions, such as Wolsey, Richelieu and Mazarin, but they were not the norm and there was no real expectation that they would attend conclaves. (Although, having said that, Mazarin did travel to Rome for the 1644 conclave in the hope of exercising the French veto, but arrived too late.)
The tradition of smoke signals is basically less than a hundred years old, as the idea of black smoke/white smoke dates only from the 1914 conclave. Before then the smoke was significant, but what smoke of any colour indicated was a failed ballot. And one lesson since then is that it’s a pretty useless way of indicating a result - there is always confusion as to whether the smoke is actually white. So frankly there isn’t any good reason why they shouldn’t just add coloured smoke to indicate a successful ballot.
