Conclave: Live updates as cardinals set to gather in Sistine Chapel to elect new pope
-1 minutes ago
Today is the first day of the
conclave to elect a new Pope
and while it is impossible to say who that will be or exactly when an announcement will be made, we do have a fairly clear timeline of how the first day will unfold.
First up the cardinals of the
Roman Catholic Church
will gather for mass in St Peter's Basilica. It will be an occasion filled with the pomp and ceremony you might expect with the mass celebrated by the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Battista Re. He, you no doubt will recall, led the funeral mass of
Pope Francis
just over a week ago.
After the mass the 133 elector-cardinals will go to the Sistine Chapel.
The doors will be locked at exactly 4.30pm (Rome time) which is 3:30pm Irish time and the election of the 267th Pope will begin in earnest.
[
When and how will the new pope be elected in the conclave of cardinals at the Vatican?
Opens in new window
]
There will be just the one ballot on Wednesday and if no one gets a two thirds majority, the ballot papers will be burned and – following the addition of certain chemicals – black smoke will billow from a special chimney that has been installed in the Sistine Chapel for the occasion.
The elector cardinals will then retire for the day.
They will return to the Sistine Chapel on Thursday morning ahead of two more ballots in the morning, a break for lunch and then two more ballots in the afternoon.
It will be a case of rinse and repeat on Friday – assuming there has not been white smoke before then.
If there is no pope elected by Friday evening, there will be a day off for reflection – or lobbying – after which a further seven ballots will take place.
If there's still no white smoke there will be another 24 hour pause before there's a further seven ballots.
If after four such pauses there is still no pope, the cardinals will vote for one of the two remaining most popular candidates and once one of them has a two-thirds majority we will have a pope.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
Italians to vote on easing citizenship requirements, reversing labour reform
Italians will start voting on Sunday in a two-day referendum on whether to ease citizenship laws and reverse a decade-old liberalisation of the labour market, but the vote may fail to generate sufficient turnout to be deemed valid. Opposition leftist and centrist parties, civil society groups and a leading trade union have latched on to the issues of labour rights and Italy 's demographic woes as a way of challenging prime minister Giorgia Meloni 's right-wing coalition government. They gathered more than 4.5 million signatures, according to the CGIL labour union – far more than needed to trigger the referendum, which will comprise five questions: four on the labour market and one on citizenship. However, opinion polls suggest they will struggle to persuade the required 50 per cent plus one of the electorate to turn out to make the outcome of the vote binding. Ms Meloni and senior government ministers have indicated they will not vote. READ MORE 'Meloni is afraid of participation and has understood that many Italians, even those who voted for her, will go to vote,' said Elly Schlein , leader of the main opposition Democratic Party (PD), who is spearheading the campaign along with Maurizio Landini, the CGIL labour union chief. A Demopolis institute poll last month estimated turnout would be in the range of 31-39 per cent among Italy's roughly 50 million electors – well short of the required threshold. 'Securing a quorum will be hard. The opposition's minimum aim is to show strength and bring to vote more people than the 12.3 million who backed the centre-right at the 2022 general election,' said Lorenzo Pregliasco, from YouTrend pollsters. The citizenship issue has garnered most public attention in a nation where concerns over the scale of immigration helped propel Ms Meloni's anti-migration coalition to power in late 2022. The question on the ballot paper asks Italians if they back reducing the period of residence required to apply for Italian citizenship by naturalisation to five years from 10. This could affect about 2.5 million foreign nationals, organisers say. [ 'Trump likes this German': Merz Oval Office test gets approval back home Opens in new window ] With Italy's birth rate in sharp decline, economists say the country needs to attract more foreigners to boost its anaemic economy, and migrant workers feel a lot is at stake. 'If you just look at the time frame, five years are a huge gain for us migrants, if compared to 10,' said Mohammed Kamara, a 27-year-old from Sierra Leone who works in a building construction company in Rome. Francesco Galietti, from political risk firm Policy Sonar, said keeping such rules tight was 'an identity issue' for Ms Meloni, but she was also being pushed by business to open up the borders of an ageing country to foreign workers. 'On the one hand there is the cultural identity rhetoric, but on the other there are potential problems paying pensions and an economy that relies on manufacturing, which needs workers,' he said. The questions regarding the labour market aim to make it harder to fire some workers and increase compensation for workers laid off by small businesses, among other things, reversing a law passed by a PD government a decade ago. The leaders of two of the governing coalition parties, Antonio Tajani of Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini of the League, have said they will not vote on Sunday, while Ms Meloni, who heads Brothers of Italy, will show up at the polling station but will not vote. 'She will thereby honour her institutional duty but avoid contributing to the quorum,' said pollster Pregliasco. – Reuters
Irish Times
02-06-2025
- Irish Times
Forget hope. Be a hopeful pessimist instead
Pope Francis was a nice fella, but was he wrong about hope? Diagnosing the problems of the modern world, he argued that what we need more than anything today is belief in a better future. Yet many of the worst actors globally are infused with overconfidence, or excessive optimism. Hope itself appears to have become an impediment to tackling urgent challenges. Action on climate change is weakened by a general hope technology will come to the rescue. European defence against Russia is undermined by a hazy belief Vladimir Putin will metamorphose into a peacemaker. Dealing with Ireland's housing crisis is crippled by a faith in the same old policies. I've lost track of the number of people who said in the wake of Donald Trump's election as US president 'ah, sure, he mightn't be so bad'. And then there's the irrational exuberance surrounding artificial intelligence , with governments now tending to see the glass as half full regarding this potentially cataclysmic technology. Not for nothing is the biography of OpenAI boss Sam Altman called The Optimist. Philosophers have long discussed the paradoxical nature of hope. READ MORE 'Only one thing is more stupid than absolute pessimism and that is absolute optimism,' said Albert Camus. His thinking on the matter was informed by a conundrum that also troubled Pope Francis: Why are people so indifferent to the suffering of others? Francis described indifference as 'the opposite of love', and believed it was a much more common evil in human affairs than hate. Camus, who was active in the French resistance against the Nazis, was also deeply troubled by political apathy and saw it as essentially anti-love. Modern man 'fornicated and read the papers', Camus wrote in a damning assessment of our unmotivated condition. Francis saw hope as the answer to indifference. 'It is often said that 'so long as there is life, there is hope', but the truth, if anything, is the opposite: it is hope that keeps life going, protects it, takes care of it, helps it to grow,' he wrote. Camus was more ambivalent about optimism, and argued pessimism could be a more powerful force against inertia, what he called 'man's strongest temptation'. He was particularly wary of ideological hope in 'some great idea' – be it religious or secular – that deflected us from reality. 'We find in his [Camus's] pessimism a clearsightedness that cuts through all the subterfuges and evasions available in his time to the beating core of his activism: that we must do what must be done, for reasons of justice and solidarity – because we owe it to our fellow human beings to prevent their suffering as best we can ... Camus proposes a fierce philosophy of action that is as bold as it is stark, stripped from any confidence of victory,' philosopher Mara Van der Lugt writes in a new book, Hopeful Pessimism. [ Don't dismiss Peig Sayers. Her stoic folk wisdom has plenty to offer today Opens in new window ] Camus's wariness of hope seems well founded when considering the utopian thinking of today's tech moguls. Elon Musk , the world's richest man, dreams of occupying Mars and re-engineering democracy. And to achieve this goal, we need less – not more – concern for the suffering of our fellow human beings. 'The fundamental weakness of western civilisation is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response,' the multi-billionaire whined on the Joe Rogan podcast earlier this year. For utopians like Musk, human solidarity interferes with grand visions. So what is the right approach to hope? One way of resolving the conundrum is by definitions. Hope can be defined as either positive thinking or constructive thinking. One is more passive than the other. Optimism can be defined as a belief in a positive outcome. It has a faith element, and potentially carries higher risks and rewards. Studies show optimists live longer but are also more likely to take risks. 'The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn and costly,' the psychologist Daniel Kahneman said. He had in mind particularly the optimism around public projects, and how spending estimates on infrastructure were always pitched towards the most hopeful end of the spectrum. Hello National Children's Hospital . Then there is utopianism, which can be defined as an ideological attachment to progress or some idealised future. [ Could there be good reason to believe in life after death? Opens in new window ] So defined, it's always good to have some hope. Treat optimism with caution and be very wary of utopianism. Van der Lugt resolves the matter in a different way, saying we should strive to become 'hopeful pessimists'. This aims to take the best of what optimism and pessimism both have to offer. It has the advantage of drawing us away from self-centred hope, and towards the responsibilities we have to our fellow human beings and the wider world. 'If anything, the pessimists have taught me this: with eyes full of that darkness there can still be this strange shattering openness, like a door cracked open, for the good to make its entry into life. Since all things are uncertain, so too is the future, and so there is always the possibility of change for better as there is for worse,' writes Van der Lugt. An exclusive focus on hope can lead us towards passivity and indifference. Better that we are hopeful pessimists who, as Van der Lugt puts it, 'strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change'.
Irish Times
01-06-2025
- Irish Times
Britain's Simon Yates seals Giro d'Italia in Rome for second Grand Tour title
Simon Yates arrived in Rome, was blessed by Pope Leo XIV and then completed a miraculous overall victory in the 2025 Giro d'Italia , seven years after his race lead had traumatically dissolved with victory in his grasp. The English rider's remarkable turnaround in Saturday's final mountain stage, in which Yates leapfrogged 21-year-old Giro debutant and race leader Isaac del Toro and podium rival Richard Carapaz to take a near four-minute overall lead, was one of the most stunning in Grand Tour racing. This was Yates's Rory McIlroy moment, a career catharsis that banished the pain and humiliation he had endured on the Colle delle Finestre in 2018. Seven summers after the monstrous climb cracked his career apart, the mountain that had broken him became the setting of his redemption. As Yates, of the Visma-Lease a bike team, savoured the closing moments of the 2025 Giro, the final stage was won by his team-mate Olav Kooij, who outsprinted the Australian Kaden Groves to take their team's third stage win of the race. READ MORE Yates is now the third British rider to win the Giro, after Chris Froome in 2018 and Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020. By coincidence, the successes of all three were founded in the mountains of Piedmont. Yates's reversal of fortune was thanks to his own aggressive racing and the canny tactics of his team, but also to the bizarre tactical feud between Del Toro, of UAE Team Emirates, and the EF Education Easy Post leader, Carapaz, that played perfectly into his game plan. It wasn't quite X marks the spot, but when Yates, rose out of the saddle on the Finestre's narrow bends, a few turns of the pedal from where Froome had dismembered his race leadership in 2018, he was evidently a man on a mission. That year, a dominant Yates had appeared destined to win the Giro, yet endured one of the worst humiliations in the race's history, suffering a complete collapse on the gravel hairpins of the Finestre, and finishing almost 40 minutes behind the flying Froome. That humiliation derailed Yates, although he recovered in time to take that year's Vuelta, his first Grand Tour success. Yet there was no real thought of settling scores with the mountain until the route of this year's corsa rosa, climaxing with a return to the Finestre, was announced. It was, Yates said, 'in the back of my mind,' to come back to the climb that left him broken, to 'close a chapter' and to show what his real capabilities were. Aided by the hard work of his team-mate Wout van Aert, his redemption was writ large as he reversed his overnight deficit into a winning margin of just under four minutes. In contrast to 2018, Yates rode discreetly throughout this year's Giro, progressing from 21st place after the opening stage, to a holding position in the top three as he entered the Giro's final week. When he did finally show himself on the Finestre, it was decisive. In the end, Carapaz and Del Toro, both of whom looked capable of chasing Yates on the steep gravel slopes, found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Whether through hubris or tactical misjudgement, they chose to let the British rider win the Giro, rather than join forces to try to stop him. Yet that view is also something of a disservice to Yates, because without him seizing the initiative with his relentless attacking, they would not have been forced to make that decision at all. Third overall before the stage to Sestriere, Yates was also risking it all, gambling that his stamina would take him to the finish line, and that he would not be caught. 'Are they still together?' he asked anxiously on his race radio of Carapaz and Del Toro, as he climbed further ahead, through the Finestre's final hairpins. And they were, tightly locked in a game of poker that had no winner. Del Toro will hope that, like Yates, he one day gets another chance to claim the maglia rosa of Giro leadership. Carapaz, meanwhile, winner of the race in 2019, adds yet another top-three placing to past podium finishes in the Tour de France and Vuelta a España. But tactical nuances are only a small part of the story and the deep, primal sobbing that poured out of the usually stoic Yates, as he collapsed into tears beyond the finish line, revealed just how personal this was for him. Even an hour later, as he fulfilled his media duties, his eyes were still brimming. Professional cycling's most romantic race had the most romantic conclusion. The rest was just la polemica. – Guardian
