Vote Tallies For Last Conclave?

If press reports are accurate, one of the cardinals who attended last April’s conclave has broken his oath regarding the secrecy of the conclave.

According to him:

In the first round of voting, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, received 47 votes and Bergoglio, the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, received 10. Italian cardinals Carlo Maria Martini and Camillo Ruini had nine and six votes, respectively.

Ratzinger also led the second ballot with 65 votes, while Bergoglio received 35. In the third round of voting, Ratzinger got 72 votes and Bergoglio 40.

Ratzinger needed 77 votes in the final round to win the necessary two-thirds majority of the 115 voting cardinals. He got 84, Bergoglio got 26, and three other cardinals also registered one vote apiece in the last round: Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Italian Cardinal Giacomo Biffi and American Cardinal Bernard Law, according to the diary.

The Vatican has not confirmed or denied these numbers, but I did see one comment from a Vaticanista expressing dismay at the secret being broken, which could be taken as indirect confirmation (or not).

This still has to go into the rumor category until and unless more info emerges, but it’s an interesting rumor, particularly because those candidates who do well in voting in one conclave often do well in the voting in the next conclave if they are still young enough.

In the meantime,

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

8 thoughts on “Vote Tallies For Last Conclave?”

  1. If press reports are accurate, one of the cardinals who attended last April’s conclave has broken his oath regarding the secrecy of the conclave.
    I really hope no one has broken his oath.

  2. Italian journalism, especially where the Vatican is concerned, likes to invent sources. So, I don’t think a cardinal truly broke his secrecy vows here.

  6. I suppose they’d like to avoid scandal, but I’d like to see the scalliwag that broke his oath exposed and excommunicated. It makes you wonder what sort of premium this leading churchman places on things like the Seal?

  8. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was Cardinal Law himself
    That’s what I was thinking, though the question of who voted for him would be rather more interesting if he didn’t vote for himself. I doubt we will ever know, and in any event we shouldn’t.

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