On Wednesday, after leaving their phones at a spare Vatican guesthouse where they will reside until the next pope is chosen, they will enter the Sistine Chapel and begin to vote.
No one knows how long the conclave will last.
There is no formal time limit: until two-thirds of the 133 voting cardinals agree on a new pope, the cardinals must continue to vote. Past papal selections have lasted from just a few hours to nearly three years.
In the 13th century, the tradition of sequestering the cardinals during the conclave started after residents in Viterbo, near Rome, where it was being held, grew frustrated with a selection process that dragged on almost three years.
Locals locked the squabbling cardinals in the papal palace in Viterbo and had the roof removed, subjecting them to the elements. They also cut down their food rations until they made a selection. Pope Gregory X finally emerged as their choice after 33 months.
It’s no wonder that Gregory X scrambled to come up with fixed rules for the conclave, which comes from the Latin “with key.” They included reducing meals to one a day if a pope was not elected after three days, and to only bread and water after five more days.
But some papal elections continued to drag on. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European Catholic monarchies used their influence over loyal cardinals to shape the outcome, meaning that votes sometimes dragged on for months.
Conclaves have become considerably shorter in the past two centuries, after the end of the pope’s temporal power in 1870.
The last two popes, Francis and Benedict, were each elected within two days.
Cardinals provided varying estimates of how long this conclave would last. Some said the process may take longer than recent selections because the members of the large and diverse College of Cardinals, many of them appointed by Pope Francis in recent years, don’t know each other well.
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York said he thought the conclave would be longer than the one that elected Pope Francis, which took two days. He has packed 12 packets of peanut butter, and enough to eat three a day. “So you figure that out,” he said on the math.
“I think it’ll be longer than last time,” he said.
Others predict the cardinals will converge on a well-known name and wrap it up fast.
“Everyone says that, but I don’t know how they know,” Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Sweden said in a recent interview. Maybe, he said, “Everyone wants to get home as soon as possible.”
Josh Holder and Elizabeth Dias contributed reporting.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
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