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In the second day of the conclave, thick white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, prompting cheers from thousands of people gathered in a rain-soaked and chilly St. Peter's Square.
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, succeeds Benedict XVI. He will be known as Pope Francis.The winner had to receive 77 votes, or two-thirds of the 115, to be named pope.
After the third ballot earlier today, the cardinals broke for lunch at the Vatican hotel and returned for another two rounds of voting this afternoon.
The names mentioned most often as "papabile" — a cardinal who has the stuff of a pope — were Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan, an intellect in the vein of Benedict but with a more outgoing personality, and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Canadian head of the Vatican's important bishops' office who is also scholarly but reserved like Benedict.Brazilian Cardinal Odilo Scherer was liked by the Vatican bureaucracy but not by all of his countrymen. And Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary has the backing of European cardinals who have twice elected him as head of the European bishops' conference.
On the more pastoral side was Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, the favorite of the Italian press, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the back-slapping, outgoing archbishop of New York who admitted himself that his Italian was pretty bad — a drawback for a job that is conducted almost exclusively in the language.
Unlike the confusion that reigned during the 2005 conclave, the smoke this time around has been clearly black — thanks to special smoke flares akin to those used in soccer matches or protests that were lit in the chapel ovens to make the burned ballots black.The Vatican on Wednesday divulged the secret recipe used: potassium perchlorate, anthracene, which is a derivative of coal tar, and sulfur for the black smoke; potassium chlorate, lactose and a pine resin for the white smoke.
The chemicals are contained in five units of a cartridge that is placed inside the stove of the Sistine Chapel. When activated, the five blocks ignite one after another for about a minute apiece, creating the steady stream of smoke that accompanies the natural smoke from the burned ballot papers.
Despite the great plumes of smoke that poured out of the chimney, neither the Sistine frescoes nor the cardinals inside the chapel suffered any smoke damage, Lombardi said.
The actual vote takes place in far more evocative surroundings: the Sistine Chapel frescoed by Michelangelo in the 16th century with scenes of "Creation" and "The Last Judgment."