The Roman Catholic Church elected German Cardinal John Ratzinger as its first new pope of the third millennium on Tuesday as bells pealed and thick white smoke billowed out of a Vatican chimney.
Ratzinger will be known as Pope Benedict XVI.
After his name was announced, the pope appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to a huge ovation from the crowd filling St Peter’s Square.
”Dear brothers and sisters, after the great Pope John Paul II, the cardinals have elected me a simple and humble labourer in the vineyard of the Lord,” he said.
Sister Lydia, a nun, jumped up and down on a chair clapping in uncontrolled excitement.
”I prayed for a new pope today at the tomb of the Holy Father [the late John Paul II] and now we have one,” she beamed.
Eight-year-old Pierfrancesco, also standing on a chair to get a good view, screamed to his mother on a cellphone: ”Mama, we have a pope, we have a pope!”
”We have a father again,” said Zambian nun Sister Prisca. ”Can you imagine? John Paul II told us to look to the future in hope, and now we have this new pope.”
About 100 000 people on the square earlier roared and applauded as white smoke — the traditional sign that a pope has been elected — emerged from a thin copper chimney atop the Sistine Chapel just before 6pm.
After initially hesitating when the plumes first appeared grey, the crowd surged toward the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, already hung with curtains in readiness for the new pope’s first public appearance.
As the bells pealed, many in the ecstatic crowd chanted ”habemus papam [we have a pope]”.
The election by a two-thirds majority came in a fourth round of voting that begun when the 115 cardinals sequestered themselves into the Sistine Chapel late on Monday for their conclave.
The 265th pontiff in the church’s 2 000-year history has the heavy burden of guiding its 1,1-billion followers into a new era fraught with moral dilemmas and dissension over a host of issues ranging from emptying pews to contraception and celibacy.
John Paul II, in rewriting the rules for the election, wrote in 1996 that his successor should not refuse that burden.
”I also ask the one who is elected not to refuse, for fear of its weight, the office to which he has been called but to submit humbly to the design of the divine will,” he wrote in the Apostolic Constitution.
He added: ”God, who imposes the burden, will sustain him with his hand, so that he will be able to bear it. In conferring the heavy task upon him, God will also help him to accomplish it and, in giving him the dignity, he will grant him the strength not to be overwhelmed by the weight of his office.”
Having given his assent, a new pope is asked to choose the name by which he wants to be known in history.
Some cardinals may have already given that question some thought.
John Paul II chose his name out of deference to his immediate predecessor, John Paul I, who reigned for just a month in 1978 and who had chosen that name in tribute to popes John XXXIII and Paul VI.
The new pontiff is then fitted into his robes — traditionally, three sizes are prepared.
A short while later, the traditional announcement is made, in Latin, from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, ending with the words ”habemus papam”.
The new pope has a difficult task filling the void left by John Paul II — the third-longest-reigning pontiff in the church’s history, who died on April 2 aged 84 — and dealing with the complex problems that piled up unresolved under the last pontificate.
He left behind a legacy as a champion of human dignity, democracy and world peace, but also as a strong advocate of conservative values that did not always chime with the Catholic rank-and-file and many clerics.
John Paul II’s unique stamp on the papacy earned him the sobriquet of the ”people’s pope” due to his ability to connect with people of every faith, both in person — he travelled to a record 129 nations — and through masterly use of the media.
His death sparked a huge outpouring of public grief as millions of pilgrims packed Rome and 200 state leaders and other dignitaries attended his funeral, watched by many tens of millions more around the world.
Many of the mourners called for his swift canonisation as a saint, an issue likely to be one of the first on the new pope’s desk. — AFP
