The cardinal was found on the phone during the papal conclave to elect Pope Leo XIV, the letter revealed
The secret meeting that appointed Pope Leo as head of the Catholic Church last May was disrupted when one of the 133 cardinals involved was found to be in possession of a mobile phone, a major security breach, a document released on Sunday revealed.
As clerics prepared to vote for the first time inside the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, which was wired to block outside communications, security officials raised word that there was a mobile phone in operation.
The cardinals looked at each other skeptically, and then one of the elderly priests realized he had a phone in his pocket and handed it over, according to “The Election of Pope Leo XIV,” a new book written by two longtime Vatican scribes.
The letter does not name the cardinal or suggest he had a reason to keep his phone, saying the moment left him “confused and depressed.”
SECURITY BREACHES ‘Better than fiction’
The incident was “unimaginable even on film and unprecedented in the history of modern conferences,” wrote the authors, Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Pique.
One such film, the 2024 hit “Conclave”, imagined the tangled web of conflict during the election of a fictional pope. The unprecedented phone discovery last year was more dramatic than anything depicted in that film, O’Connell told Reuters.
“Truth (was better) than fiction,” he said.
The clergy who participated in the conference vowed not to communicate with the outside world and to hand over their phones and all other means of communication during the trial, which could last several days.
The Vatican press office did not respond to a request for comment on the new book, which provides behind-the-scenes details of one of the world’s most secretive elections.
ONLY TWO CANDIDATES LEAD THE POPE
Cardinals gathered for a two-day conference from May 7-8 amid a tense global scene to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died in April after 12 years leading the Church of 1.4 billion members.
Many speculations at the time focused on whether the cardinals would choose a new pope from Asia or Africa, given that this conference was the most geographically diverse in history, as priests from 70 countries participated.
But no candidate from those regions received significant support, according to the book, which reveals for the first time details of the cardinal’s votes based on interviews with participating clergy.
Although it is strictly forbidden for the cardinals to disclose the details of the secret ballot in the parish without permission from the future pope, it is common for journalists to gradually mock the information of the clergy in the following years.
The two candidates came out ahead as insults, the book said.
One was Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, a longtime Vatican official identified by many outlets as the front-runner.
One was US Cardinal Robert Prevost, a man who was largely unknown outside Church circles but who would become Pope Leo, the first US pope.
In the first vote at the conference, held in the evening of May 7, Prevost already received between 20-30 votes, an unusually large number, according to the letter.
Philippine Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who was also seen as the favorite going into the election, received less than 10 votes in the conference.
In the fourth afternoon vote on May 8, Prevost won by 108 votes. Tagle was sitting next to Prevost as the final vote was counted and gave the future pope a cough drop to clear his throat, the publication said.
