But in order for the Holy Spirit to decide who would be the next pontiff, the 111 cardinals had to have numerous meetings disguised as luncheons and come to many agreements disguised as inconsequential, polite chats. No one in the Vatican would admit that immediately after the death of Pope Paul VI, an aggressive electoral campaign had been launched. Those humble promotional ventures were modestly disguised by a false lack of interest.

Some prelates remembered with a smile the evening Cardinal Pignedoli, surrounded by his peers in the College of Cardinals, declared himself unqualified for the role being proposed for him. He declared it was best to vote for Cardinal Gantin, a black prelate from Benin. In this manner, the necessary scrutiny could be carried out by elimination rather than by selection. Acts like this didn’t single out any particular cardinal because many prelates did the same thing, declaring their humility and submission only to remind the others that actually they were the best option. Not all of the cardinals were aware of these electoral manipulations, posturing, and declarations of religious fervor. Albino Luciani, for example, in his disregard for these matters, took advantage of his stay in Rome to arrange repairs for his Lancia 2000, a vehicle that had served only to make his trips miserable. He told Diego Lorenzi, his assistant, that he wanted the car ready by the twenty-ninth, the day the conclave was supposed to be over, in order to return to Venice early that morning.

Though it was possible to guess the will of the cardinals, no one could be sure of the choice of the Holy Spirit. And this time an unexpected outcome seemed more likely, a decision arrived at in collaboration by the prelates and the Holy Spirit. Once more, the mysterious ways of the Lord demonstrated how unpredictable events could be.

After the morning vote was over, Albino Luciani was kneeling in prayer in cell number sixty. The results had not been conclusive, but there had been some unexpected results, such as the thirty votes Luciani received on the second scrutiny. As he prayed, he felt great uneasiness in the pit of his stomach, so instead of asking Divine Providence for courage and clarity of thought when voting for the best cardinal to occupy that position, he implored God to please take care of it and relieve him of a great burden. He prayed that the cardinals would cease voting for him, and for the Holy Spirit to inspire the prelates to write the name of Cardinal Siri on their cards. At last count, Cardinal Siri was only five points away from him. The third on the list of reluctant candidates was Cardinal Pignedoli, who, despite having lost prestige, received fifteen votes. He was followed by the Brazilian Cardinal Lorscheider, with twelve. Nineteen of the remaining votes were distributed among the Italian cardinals Bertoli and Felici, with a few for the Polish Karol Wojtyla, the Argentine Pironio, Monsignor Cordeiro (archbishop from Pakistan), and the Austrian Franz Koenig.

An unintended competition arose between Siri and Luciani. Cardinal Siri wanted to win, while the cardinal from Venice, Albino Luciani, wanted to flee, and might have done so had the doors to the Sistine Chapel not been closed.

Before entering the conclave, Don Albino told those present, as well as his relatives and friends, that if elected, he would utter the well-known formula, “I decline, for which I ask for your forgiveness.” But this was a possibility that he, like most others, considered very remote. However, His Holiness Pope Paul VI, on a visit in Venice to the Adriatic Queen, had not only granted Luciani a stole, but had personally placed it on his shoulders. That public gesture in the presence of a large group was quite unusual for Paul VI, and was his way of acknowledging the Venetian cardinal’s loyalty and his defense—due more to obligation than to devotion—of the encyclical Humanae vitae, one of the most unfortunate in history. In July 1968, Paul VI had issued that totally radical pastoral letter banning any device or method of birth control, of course including abortion, sterilization, and even the interruption of pregnancy when there was evident danger to the mother’s life. In Humanae vitae everything was up to a supposed divine order, to an improbable marital responsibility, and if need be, to chastity. As the pope decreed, the divine plan could not be subject to social, political, or psychological conditions.

These recollections of the past would have been irrelevant, were it not that Paul VI was among those mainly responsible for Albino Luciani’s dread of being elected by his peers and by the Holy Spirit.

“Let them choose Siri,” Luciani begged the Creator. “I have so much to do in Venice!” Paul VI, consciously or not, had placed Albino Luciani in that difficult situation. He had made him cardinal, made a public display of his preference, and graced him in word and gesture. But that responsibility could not be solely ascribed to him. Had John XXIII not made him bishop, he’d never have come to this, and had his mother, Bartola, not given birth to him (in Canale d’Agordo on October 17, 1912), he wouldn’t find himself in this position, either. He had to dismiss all these thoughts. God alone would be the one to decide. Everything must be following some divine plan. Otherwise, his hometown priest, Filippo Carli, wouldn’t have encouraged him to enter the seminary in Feltre.

After the first vote, Cardinal Luciani understood he was being swept up in the current of the conclave, and that it was not possible to ignore such an unfortunate situation, though he had naively attempted to go unnoticed, which had succeeded before, in different circumstances. On this occasion, his natural reserve and shyness had provided no escape, and the process was completely incomprehensible to him. How could he have expected twenty-three votes in the first scrutiny, two fewer than Siri and five more than Pignedoli? As required by regulation, after each scrutiny all the ballots were gathered and burned in the furnace.

Paul VI had foreseen every detail of the conclave, nothing had escaped him. The preceding pope was the one to make the regulations, and this pope, for the first time, had ruled that cardinals over eighty years old could not participate in the conclave. In the apostolic constitution Romano pontifice eligendo, Paul VI had set this limitation for religious reasons. The responsibilities of being elected the Church’s shepherd would no longer be added to the physical woes of being eighty. There were no frivolous concerns. The governance of the Church of Christ could not be left to chance. Some ignorant people lamented the fact that some pontiffs devoted themselves to practical matters instead of spiritual ones. But the Church didn’t depend solely on Hail Marys, as one American cardinal pointed out.

After finishing his prayers, Cardinal Luciani got up and left his cell. Joseph Malula, the cardinal from Zaire, congratulated him warmly, but Luciano nodded in sadness, continuing on his way to the Sistine Chapel for the third vote.

“I feel I’m at the center of a great whirlwind,” he lamented. After the third scrutiny, Albino Luciani received sixty-eight votes, and Siri, fifteen. Albino was but eight votes away from being declared pontiff.

“No, please, no,” Luciani again prayed, under his breath. A few cardinals seated nearby heard their friend’s sigh. Prelate Willebrands tried to calm him with uplifting words.

“Coraggio, Cardinal Luciani. The Lord weighs us down, but He also gives us the strength to bear up.”

Felici came up to the nervous cardinal and handed him an envelope.

“A message for the new pope,” he said.

To Albino Luciani this was a surprising commentary, particularly from someone who had always voted for Siri.

The handwritten message mentioned the words Via Crucis, The Way of the Cross, symbol and reminder of Christ’s Passion. All the cardinals felt the same trepidation and unrest in the presence of Michelangelo’s imposing frescoes. The prelates knew that they were part of a transcendental ritual in the history of the Church and, given the circumstances, in the history of the world.

Everything had been according to tradition. The Holy Spirit had come to the participants in the conclave and had stopped over the figure of one of them, or at least that was what the majority thought.

It was God’s will.

Luciani received ninety-nine votes, Cardinal Siri eleven, and Lorscheider one (Luciani had voted for him). Destiny had been fulfilled. The cardinals erupted in fervent applause. They had scarcely taken one day to elect their pope among 111 cardinals, and that success was attributed, of course, to divine inspiration. By five minutes past six, the whole thing was over, a little before dinnertime.

The doors to the Sistine Chapel opened, and the masters of ceremony came in, following the Cardinal Camerlengo, Jean-Marie Villot, secretary of state of the Vatican with the preceding pontiff and keeper of Saint Peter’s keys until the conclave ended. All the prelates, according to the secular tradition, surrounded Albino Luciani.

“Do you accept your canonic election to become the Holy Roman Pontiff?” the French cardinal asked.

The eyes of all the cardinals were fixed on the timid man. Even Michelangelo’s figures seemed to adopt a more severe expression, lacking joy manifesting an almost unbearable sense of heaviness. Cardinals Ribeiro and Willebrand offered looks of encouragement to the Venetian priest, and Villot repeated his question.

“May the Lord forgive you for what you have done to me,” Luciani finally responded. “I accept.”

Everything continued according to the protocol established centuries before. The grave, imposing ritual proceeded with overwhelming precision.

“By what name do you wish to be known?”

Luciani hesitated again, and after a few seconds, smiling for the first time, he spoke the name he had chosen for himself in the historical records.

“Ioannes Paulus the First.”

In the Vatican it was presumed that the name chosen by a new pontiff partly indicated the religious and political direction he wished his papacy to follow. The most experienced understood that Albino Luciani had started in an unusual way and that his papacy would be an exceptional one.

“Nothing will be the same,” they said. His papacy was to begin with an innovation. In almost two thousand years of history, no other pope had used a combined name. Luciani was the only one who dared to go against tradition and in this way render homage both to the man who named him bishop and to the one who designated him cardinal.

“Congratulations, Your Holiness,” Cardinal Karol Wojtyla proclaimed.

There was a great bustle in the Sistine Chapel. Everything had been ready for days, but always some detail would come up that demanded attention—a fringe to be fixed, or an untimely visit to take care of. The cardinals distributed the chores among themselves, moving to and fro, with the urgency of those who know they are taking part in a historical decision.

Luciani was taken to the vestry to conclude the required rituals, and to finish his prayers according to tradition. Other prelates burned the ballots of the last scrutiny, adding to the fire the chemical products needed to whiten the fumata. But after a few white puffs, the faithful thousands waiting in Saint Peter’s Square observed that the smoke was turning black again, perhaps because of accumulated dirt in the chimney. Or perhaps because there was no new pope.

The brothers Gammarelli, tailors to the Vatican, bickered while trying to find a white vestment appropriate for the occasion. For decades now, the most famous tailor shop in Rome made sure to have on hand three cassocks—small, medium, and large—before each conclave. On this occasion, however, they had added a fourth—extra large—just in case. There had been rumors about the possible election of a heavy monsignor. The one chosen, however, had very narrow shoulders, and his name didn’t even appear on the list of the most prominent, as culled by newspaper and television analysts. After trying several garments on Albino Luciani and circling him again and again, the tailors were more or less satisfied. Luciani finally appeared wearing white vestments to present himself to the world as the new Holy Father of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Suenens approached Luciani to congratulate him.

“Holy Father, thanks for having accepted.”

Luciani smiled, “Perhaps it would have been better to refuse.”

Why didn’t he? his conscience wondered. He wanted to refuse but didn’t have the courage. In fact, his own true humility had been overwhelmed by the speed at which everything had evolved, and by the forceful will of the majority. But ultimately he accepted because he felt capable of executing the difficult task ahead of him. If he truly had not, he told himself, he would have declined.

The cardinals began intoning the Te Deum.

In the plaza, the groups of the faithful had begun to disperse. For them, it seemed that the cardinals hadn’t reached an agreement, or that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit had not yet come to them, since apparently there was no new pope. The fumata had been dark, no doubt about it, symbolizing the indecision of the conclave.

The Vatican radio commentators reported that the smoke was black and white, and so they couldn’t tell.

The commander of the Swiss Guard, who had to receive the new pontiff with a loyal salute in the name of all his men, did not even have the escort ready to accompany him through the corridors leading to the balcony on Saint Peter’s Square.

The brothers Gammarelli argued in the vestry, each blaming the other for their lack of readiness.

In the midst of this confusion, the enormous door to the balcony in Saint Peter’s Basilica opened, and the voice of Cardinal Felici thundered from the loudspeakers.

The faithful, already on their way home or to their hotels, came running to the plaza. Then there was complete silence.

Diego Lorenzi, Luciani’s secretary for the last couple of years, had accompanied him from Venice to Rome, and he was among the faithful thousands waiting in Saint Peter’s Square for the results of the scrutiny. He had seen that the smoke coming out of the chimney since six twenty-five was neither black nor white. For about an hour it had been kind of ashen, and nobody could decide whether that dirty smoke was the white fumata so eagerly awaited by all. Next to him, also waiting for the conclave’s resolution, were a couple with their two girls, arguing about the inconclusive smoke. The younger of the girls, overcome by the religious spirit dominating the plaza, asked him whether he’d said Mass in that immense church before them.

Lorenzi answered with an affectionate smile. No, he was in Rome only temporarily. He lived in Venice. He also talked with the girls’ parents, and all were in agreement that a conclave, even being outside of it, was a stimulating experience. It was all about the choosing of the Shepherd, and they felt certain that the voting of the cardinals received God’s benediction.

For Diego Lorenzi the thrilling experience was about to end. Early the next morning he would be driving the Lancia, with Don Albino Luciani, back to Venice—375 miles separating the two cities, a whole world apart. Just then, the voice of Cardinal Pericle Felici was heard loud and clear, and everybody turned to the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Hearing Luciani’s name, Lorenzi started to cry with joy. An irrepressible emotion took hold of his spirit, and he couldn’t understand how the cardinals had decided on Don Albino, always so shy and evasive. The girl and her parents looked at him with pleased appreciation. He was a priest, moved like them by the emotion of this historical moment. It all made sense.

Lorenzi bent down, tears welling, to speak to his new little friend.

“I am the new pope’s secretary,” he said finally.

So the new pontiff was to be Albino Luciani? And who was Albino Luciani? In fact, it didn’t matter much. The important thing was that the Church of Rome had a new pope.

Lorenzi and the thousands of faithful gathered at Saint Peter’s Square saw the figure of Albino Luciani as he appeared in the balcony, smiling and dressed in all white. That smile reached the hearts of many and filled their souls with heartwarming joy. His smile conveyed humility, benevolence, and peace. After Giovanni Battista Montini, the somber Pope Paul VI, this man appeared in the balcony with the smile of a young person willing to devote himself passionately to his mission. After the benediction urbi et orbi, the sun sent its last beams into the Roman dusk.