Cardinals Check In to Official Digs

The 115 cardinals who will choose the next pope surrendered their cellphones Sunday, left behind their loyal attendants and stepped across the threshold of “Domus Sanctae Marthae.”

The gleaming new residence, known in English as House of St. Martha, looks from the outside like any mid-priced Italian hotel. Americans would dismiss it as Hilton-esque. But it was erected in recent years on the orders of Pope John Paul II to house the red-capped men who would choose his successor.

Now that time has come. And the limestone house with wooden shutters stood at the ready as the cardinals arrived, many rolling up in chauffeured Mercedes with Vatican plates. From now until the moment when they pick a pope these men are allowed to speak only with one another and carefully approved assistants.

Check-in was between 4 and 7 p.m., with dinner to follow.

“This evening we’ll just be around chatting with each other and settling in,” Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said, sounding excited if not humbled to be part of it all. He also had a bit of luck in a lottery, snagging a top-floor room, perhaps with a view of the spectacular dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Mahony had been staying in a dorm-like facility at a college for seminarians.

St. Martha’s decor is spare by Roman standards, where flocked wallpaper and painted ceilings are de rigueur. There are 106 suites, 22 singles, one apartment, a dining hall, a lounge with glassed bookcases, a TV and a chapel with a water-run 16th century organ. There’s no gym.

Judging from a video released by the Vatican, each room is equipped with a dark, carved-wooden bed, a desk, a lamp and an end table -- presumably with a Bible in the drawer. Wall sconces light the hallways.

An almost life-sized painting of John Paul II presides in the lobby. The dining hall was shown with tables of four and eight, each with white china, crystal and the Roman staples -- a bottle of red wine, a bowl of fruit and carafes for oil and vinegar.

The building was constructed on a site that used to be a hospice run by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and served as a hiding place for Jews and others fleeing the Nazi occupation of Rome in World War II. The order runs the residence, and a video showed one of the nuns arranging flowers in the dining hall, the closest a woman will come to this election.

It’s not the first time the residence has been used since it opened in the late 1990s. Prelates and their staff members stay there when they are in Vatican City for church business and conferences, giving the establishment a chance to ensure that the water runs and the beds don’t squeak.

There already have been some complaints. One priest who stayed there for a meeting said the walls were so thin he could hear a priest coughing in the next room.

But those initial visits were mere dress rehearsals. In a document written 1996, John Paul II detailed potential uses for St. Martha’s, but made clear that in the event of a conclave it would cater exclusively to the cardinal electors so they could be cloistered there to converse freely.

John Paul detailed the need for housekeeping and kitchen staff, two doctors on standby, even a team of priests to hear confessions in different languages. This week all those chosen for these tasks took an oath that they would never betray what they saw and heard in the days to come.

Like every other detail surrounding this election, the accommodations have been a subject of scrutiny. Previously, cardinals were housed in the apostolic palace, which includes apartments for the pope and the Vatican secretary of State, but no spare bedrooms. According to accounts of past conclaves, the cardinals slept on cots in dark, stuffy rooms. The windows were sealed with pewter, and there was no air conditioning.

During the last one, in August 1978, 120 men, the eventual John Paul II included, were forced to share six bathrooms.

Some wonder what affect the nicer digs will have on this most holy process.

Will these men, most of them well into their senior years and not exactly accustomed to roughing it, be able to think more clearly? Or will comfy beds and tasty food leave them less motivated to get a move on and deliver a new spiritual leader to the world’s 1 billion Catholics?

“I don’t think so,” Cardinal Edmund Casimir Szoka, the Vatican City governor, said in an interview before the gag order was imposed. “I think it’s good they have a place to live where they can get a good night’s sleep and a modicum of comfort.”

The cardinals are to begin each morning with a 7:30 service in St. Martha’s chapel and then go the short distance to the majestic Sistine Chapel by minibus or on foot -- if the rainy weather ever lets up. They’re to return for lunch and then get back to their task in the afternoon, under Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

Details of what goes on in St. Martha’s hallways and dining room -- the expressions on faces, the raised voices or spiritual coming together over morning coffee -- may never be known. It will all culminate, grandly and ceremoniously, with a plume of storied white smoke over Vatican City. Then, and only then, for these 115 men, will it be checkout time.