James L. Franklin

In his first night as pontiff emeritus, the Vatican says, Benedict slept peacefully. Perhaps not everyone else has. The cardinals have set their first General Congregation for Monday, March 4, not as some mistakenly wrote, to begin the conclave, but to consider the housekeeping tasks of the sede vacante and possibly to set a date for the conclave to begin.

It was a solemn leave-taking in Benedict’s last meeting as pontiff with the College of Cardinals, subdued, almost anticlimactic after the emotional encounter in Piazza San Pietro Wednesday. That it was unprecedented, really, can be seen in his solemn promise of “unconditional reverence and obedience” to his successor. Our experience of papal loyalty has rather been to their apostolic predecessors.

The crowds were larger, the audience wider as Benedict XVI spoke at his final general audience Wednesday, Feb. 27. His candor was striking: “There have been times when the seas were rough and the wind against us, as in the whole history of the church it has ever been – and the Lord seemed to sleep.”

And amid the thanks, to his collaborators, the people of the church, a wider public, there was a sense of hopefulness, that he was not in it alone: “I said before that many people who love the Lord also love the Successor of Saint Peter and are fond of him, that the pope has truly brothers and sisters, sons and daughters all over the world, and that he feels safe in the embrace of their communion, because he no longer belongs to himself, but he belongs to all and all are truly his own.”

We who do not live in Rome must rely on well-situated observers and reporters. Among the journalists, those resident in the city and accredited to the Holy See are best placed. To begin with, they speak Italian, which is the lingua franca of church life in Rome. Latin would be nice and can be crucial (Benedict’s announcement at the consistory that he would resign was made in Latin, and I remember Cardinal Bernard Law deciding to make his intervention, jargon for a speech, at a bishops synod at the Vatican in Latin, presumably to show his independence of American culture and media).

A climate check on what the world is saying about the conclave.