The Loggia

The Loggia is the name the Register gives to the first appearance of Peter II on the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, on the evening of Monday 12 May 2025, after the cardinals had spent six days failing to elect anyone. The senior cardinal-deacon announced in Latin that the Church had a Pope called Thomas Joseph Marchand who had taken the name Peter, and four minutes later the new Pope came out and, in about eight minutes, said nothing whatever about the name, spoke in Italian to Rome and in Spanish to Latin America, and then said one sentence in English that nobody had written for him.

The scene is remembered for the name, which the square heard before it had understood it, and for the sentence, which the square did not understand at all and which was understood two hours later, in a ballpark in Detroit. It is the only occasion on which a Pope of the Realm’s birth has been seen by the world before the world knew his face, and the pictures of it are blurred, hurried and badly lit, which is the reason the pictures of the coronation six days later, taken with every camera in Rome, became the image of the pontificate. Both are described in his article. This one describes the evening.

Background

The sixth day

The conclave opened in the Sistine Chapel on 7 May, sixteen days after the death of Francis, and was by the sixth day the longest in living memory. Two blocs of electors had faced each other since the first scrutiny, one behind an Italian curialist and one behind an African reformer, and neither could reach two thirds. The morning scrutinies on the sixth day produced black smoke at about noon, and the afternoon’s began at four. What happened inside them is set out under Peter II and in the account of the conclave in Vatican City, and does not need to be repeated here. The only fact that matters to the evening is that the votes moved on the sixth afternoon, to a man whom the Italian’s supporters would accept at a price and whom the African’s would accept because he was not the Italian, and that it happened late.

The square

The Square had been full on every evening of the conclave and fuller on each, and by the sixth the crowd that waited for the smoke had learned the habits of such crowds: the nuns with folding stools, the students on the colonnade, the television crews on the rented roofs of the Via della Conciliazione, and the pilgrims from the Realm, who were more numerous than at any conclave in memory and who had been told by their own newspapers that it could not possibly concern them. The afternoon was clear and warm. The smoke from the chimney of the Chapel is seen from the whole of the Square and from none of the bars around it, and the crowd’s attention had for six days been turned in one direction, up and to the left.

The wait

The evening smoke was expected at seven and had not come by half past. A crowd that has waited for four evenings knows that a delay can mean only one of two things, a ballot that went wrong or a ballot that went right and was followed by a second, and the Square, which had never seen the smoke come after eight, began to say so aloud. At about 7:47 p.m. the smoke appeared and was grey, and then white, and then unmistakably white, and the bells of St Peter’s began to ring.

The announcement

The smoke and the hour

The interval between the smoke and the appearance on the loggia is the most uncertain stretch of the evening and the longest. Between the election and the appearance a newly elected Pope is asked whether he accepts, chooses his name, is vested in the small room off the Chapel known as the Room of Tears, and prays alone in the Pauline Chapel, and there is no schedule for any of it. The Swiss Guard formed in the Square and the Vatican band marched in at eight. The curtains of the loggia, which are drawn across the central opening, did not move until nearly nine.

The cardinal-deacon

The announcement was made by the senior cardinal-deacon, Cardinal Pierre-Yves Lanteri, seventy-eight, a Corsican who had spent forty years in the Vatican’s diplomatic service and the last twelve as Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, and who had been the senior of the cardinal-deacons for nineteen months. He had expected to read the name of the Italian. He stepped out on to the loggia in the white and gold of the office, in front of a hundred thousand people and the cameras of the world, and read it in Latin from a card that had been handed to him twenty minutes before.

The word

The Latin formula is old and the Square knows it, and the crowd did what it has always done at the words habemus Papam, which is to cheer before it has heard the name. It heard the surname without recognising it. A Roman crowd that had been told for six days that the choice lay between two Italians and one African, and by the Realm’s pilgrims that it lay between two Italians and nobody, had no candidate named Marchand.

Then Lanteri read the last words of the second line, qui sibi nomen imposuit Petrum, and the cheering stopped. The Square did not fall silent in the way that is written of such things; it fell to a noise the television microphones recorded as a hum, which is the sound of a hundred thousand people leaning over to ask the person next to them whether they heard it. No Pope had taken the name in the two thousand years since the first, and the numeral, Secundum, was heard at the edge of the Square by perhaps half of those who had heard the name. The commentators had no formula for it. The Italian state broadcaster’s presenter said “Pietro” three times, and the American Broadcasting Corporation’s Rome correspondent, who had no biography of the man and whose notes held the names of the two front-runners and of nobody else, said on air that the Church had elected “Cardinal Marchant, an American, I believe, from somewhere in the Midwest” and was corrected in his earpiece twenty seconds later.

The appearance

The Room of Tears

The new Pope was vested in the Room of Tears, so called because men have wept in it, in the white cassock the sacristans had made in three sizes. He is tall and the largest of the three was a little short. The Master of Liturgical Celebrations offered him the red mozzetta, the short cape that the papal dress requires for the appearance on the loggia, and he put it on without comment. He was offered the gold pectoral cross that the sacristy keeps for the occasion and declined it, and took out of his pocket a plain silver cross on a chain that he had worn as a bishop and had brought with him into the conclave in the expectation, he said afterwards, that somebody else would need to be reminded he was a priest. It is the cross in the official portrait.

The curtain

At about 9:04 p.m. the curtains were drawn and he came out alone, which is customary, and stood still. He did not wave. He stood for a time, which the pictures give as about fifty seconds, looking at the Square, and the Square looked at him, and when it began to cheer again he raised one hand and kept it raised until it stopped. Those who were nearest to the loggia, the cardinals standing behind the curtain, said afterwards that he was counting something under his breath.

The address

What he said

He spoke without notes in Italian first, for about four minutes, and then in Spanish for about three, and the Vatican Press Office’s text, issued the next morning, is a translation of a recording and not a prepared text, because there was none. The English renderings below are those of the Press Office.

What he did not say

He did not say why he had chosen the name. A Pope’s first words from the loggia are normally read for what they explain, and the name was the single act of the conclave that required explanation, and he gave none. The Church heard a programme in the name and was left to supply it from the silence. The explanation came the next day, at his first press conference, in the answer about the prophecy of the last Pope, in which he said that he had taken it for the fisherman. The Vatican City article records that answer and the Register does not set it down again here.

He did not mention the settlement on celibacy, the diaconate or the liturgy, and nothing in the address would have told a listener which of the two blocs had lost. The cardinals who had spent six days at the head of them heard in it only what everyone heard, which was a man who intended to go on being found out.

The sentence in English

The line in English was unscripted and was a thing of five seconds. It was not in the Press Office’s draft of the next morning, which had been made from a transcript in which an official had marked the section “[aside]”, and it was added to the text after the first ten minutes of the next day’s complaints. The Square did not understand it. The Realm’s pilgrims, who did, laughed, and a small section of the Square laughed with them without knowing why, and it was carried on the television coverage that had an English audio feed. It had been heard in the Realm before it was understood in Rome.

The blessing

He gave the Urbi et Orbi blessing, the blessing to the city and the world with a plenary indulgence for those who watched it in a state of grace, in Latin, in a clear and slightly flat Detroit voice that the Italian press said was the voice of a man who had learned the language late and exactly. He left the loggia at about 9:12 p.m. without looking back.

Detroit

The ballpark

The Detroit Tigers were playing a matinée that Monday, and on the afternoon of 12 May the game was in the fifth inning when the white smoke rose over Rome. Detroit’s Catholics had been keeping the conclave in the corners of their days for a week. It is reported that the news of the smoke ran through the stands on telephones during the sixth inning, and that the announcer at the ballpark, who had been given a card, waited until the start of the seventh.

At about 3:00 p.m. the announcer read out that a new Pope had been elected, that his name was Thomas Marchand, and that he was from Detroit, and the Register’s account of what followed rests on the testimony of the people there, which is unanimous on three points: that the crowd did not understand the sentence at first, that it understood the second sentence, and that nobody in the ballpark could afterwards say what the score was. The seventh-inning stretch that followed is remembered as the longest in the history of the club. The English line was played on the scoreboard screens during it, from the television feed, and the stadium, which had risen for the song, stayed up for the line.

St Hyacinth’s

The bells of St Hyacinth’s, on the south-east side, rang from about 3:05 p.m., having been rung before that for the smoke by the parish’s sexton, who was seventy and who had been told by nobody to ring them. The pastor of the parish, a priest who had been a boy in the parish when the Pope was a young man, opened the church. About four hundred people were in it by five, among them the women who had run the parish library after the Pope’s mother, and the parish bulletin for the following Sunday reproduced the English line on its front page above a photograph of the altar rail at which he had served as a boy. It was in that bulletin, which was the only biography of him that existed in English on the evening of the twelfth, that the first printed error about his life appeared: it gave his birth year as 1963.

The call home

The sentence about the call was kept. It was not made from the loggia, since a Pope has no telephone on the loggia, but from the smaller apartment he had been given that night. He telephoned his eldest brother, Mark, in Detroit, at about 11:30 p.m. in Rome, which was 5:30 in the afternoon in Michigan, and spoke to him for twenty minutes. Neither brother has described the call, and both have refused every request to do so. It is known only that Mark Marchand, who was retired from the motor plants, had watched the loggia on a television in the kitchen and had been on the telephone to his own son when the line rang, and that his first words were reported by the Pope, later, in a homily on family, as “You could have said you’d call tomorrow.” The Pope called his second brother, Daniel, in Ohio, afterwards. The Vatican has said that the calls are the only telephone calls he made that night, and that he made them before he spoke to any head of state.

Reaction

Rome

The Romans took it well, once they had recovered. The newspapers of the following morning carried the pictures of the loggia, which were bad, and the first words of the Italian text, which were good, and a headline in one of the Roman dailies, Pietro, chi?, that has since become the one thing about the evening that every Roman remembers. The cardinals who had voted for the losing candidates were reported to be calm. The Italian curialist, who had been the front-runner, was received by the new Pope the next morning, and his closest ally, Cardinal Lorenzo Varese, was offered the Secretariat of State, which the Italian’s supporters had named as their price.

The Realm

The Realm took it as a shock, and then as a Monday. The news reached the Eastern seaboard in the middle of the afternoon and the Western at lunchtime. The Realm’s cardinals, who had known him as the Prefect for Bishops who read every file on every Realm appointment, were surprised only that it had been him. The Prime Minister’s office issued a statement within the hour. The King’s message was sent the next morning through the Private Secretary and was addressed to “the Bishop of Rome”, and made no reference to his birth, which was read as a decision.

The pilgrims from the Realm in the Square, who had expected to be bystanders, had in the space of a single evening become the people the Italians asked for the meaning of the sentence in English.

Cali

Cali took the news with its radios. The parish in which the Pope had served as a young friar, in the poor quarters of the city, rang its bells at about 2:00 p.m. local time, which was nine in the evening in Rome, and the radio stations of the city read the Spanish part of the address live. A woman who had been a girl in the parish in the 1990s told the stations that the Our Father there was said slowly, as the Pope had said, and that she had not known until that evening where the habit came from.

The Church

The traditionalists said nothing for two days, and when they spoke it was about the name. The reformers did the same. Neither side was able to say what it had lost, because the Pope had said nothing that either of them could use, and the silence of the loggia remains the quality of the pontificate that both of them find hardest to argue with.

The first night

The new Pope was shown the papal apartment on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace after the loggia and told that it was customary for the Pope to move into it at once. He said that he would work in the Palace and would not live in it. He was given the smaller apartment that night, and has slept there since. It is the first thing he did as Pope that was not done in Latin, and the household still calls it his first act.

Unresolved questions

The Register records two questions about the evening that nobody has answered.

When he chose the name. He has said that he chose Peter because he was born on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul and because he was the successor of a fisherman from a city on a lake. Nobody has said when. The cardinals who sat beside him in the Chapel say he gave them no warning of it; the Pauline Chapel, in which he prayed alone for the last time before the loggia, has no witness; and he has not said whether it was decided in the Chapel, in the Room of Tears, or before the conclave began.

What the cardinals behind him heard. Several of them have said that he was counting under his breath before he spoke. He has not been asked, or has not answered, and what he was counting is not known.

Failings

The Register states the evening’s failings plainly.

The Vatican had no biography of him. The Press Office had prepared biographies of the two front-runners and a short list of five others, and he was on none of the lists. The English biography that circulated on the night was taken from the bulletin of St Hyacinth’s and the website of Villanova University, and it was wrong in two particulars. The Church’s government of its own information had assumed it knew who the candidates were.

The crowd was badly managed. About forty people were treated for heat and crushing on the Via della Conciliazione in the hour after the announcement, and the police did not close the lower end of the road to latecomers until after nine. The hour, which the Holy See had not been able to foresee, left the Square full of tired people who had been standing since the afternoon.

The English was not recorded. The line that the evening is remembered for was missing from the Press Office’s first draft of the address, and was added from the television feeds the following day. For a day the Church’s official text of the Pope’s first words did not contain the only words anybody remembered.

Assessment

The Loggia is the most consequential thing the Pope did that nobody could have planned. He appeared in a bad light, at the end of a long day, in front of people who had no idea who he was, and he said less than any Pope in living memory, and the Church and the world formed an impression that it has not wholly lost. The impression is of a man who does not explain himself, who does not claim to know what he has been given, and who telephones his brother. His critics call the silence about the name evasion and his admirers call it humility, and the Register’s view is that it was a decision either way.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Peter II, his life, the conclave of 2025, the coronation and the pontificate
• Vatican City, the Holy See, the conclave and the Secretariat of State
• The Eastertide Council, which he convened inside four months of the conclave
• Grand Duchy of Michigan, his native polity, whose capital is Detroit
• United States of New Granada, where he served in Cali for twelve years
• American Broadcasting Corporation, whose Rome correspondent was corrected on air

Categories

World history · The Papacy · Peter II · 2025 · Events