Pope changes conclave rules

The move was a return to Vatican tradition and reversed Pope John Paul II's 1996 decision to let an absolute majority of cardinals decide on the next pope if they remained deadlocked after 33 rounds of balloting.

Some analysts had argued that with John Paul's rules, the majority bloc in a conclave could push through a candidate by simply holding tight until the balloting shifted from the two-thirds requirement to an absolute majority.

In the document, Benedict said John Paul had received a number of requests to return to the former system after he issued his 1996 document, Universi Dominici Gregis.

"It would seem that Pope Benedict wants to ensure that whoever is elected pope enjoys the greatest possible consensus," said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

The document - essentially an executive order called a "motu proprio" - came as something of a surprise, since the main public criticism of the Vatican's voting process to date has concerned the exclusion of cardinals over age 80 from the balloting.

There was no explanation about why the pope, who himself turned 80 in April, made the change now. It came out, however, just before Benedict goes on holiday and the Vatican essentially shuts down for the summer.

Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected pope on April 19, 2005 in one of the fastest conclaves in modern history.

In an unauthorised account of the secretive balloting published in 2005, an anonymous cardinal revealed that Benedict was elected after four ballots with 84 of the 115 votes - seven more than necessary.

The diary, published by the respected Italian foreign affairs magazine Limes, was significant because it showed that Benedict did not win with a huge margin. Pope John Paul II and Pope John Paul I are believed to have garnered at least 99 and 98 votes respectively, and that was when there were only about 111 voting cardinals.

John Paul instituted the simple majority in part to avoid a deadlock like the one in the 13th Century, when negotiations over choosing a new pope lasted three years.

Angry locals in Viterbo north of Rome, where the conclave was being held, removed the roof of the cardinals' meeting hall and threatened to slash food rations unless they picked a winner.

In 1623, eight cardinals died of malaria during a midsummer conclave in Rome that lasted 19 days.

But no conclave in the past century has lasted more than five days, and the 1978 election of John Paul II took eight ballots over three days.

The Rev Michael Fahey, a theology professor at Boston College and a specialist in papal elections, said conclave norms had shifted over the years, and that Benedict's switch merely corresponds to the reality today where a weeks- or months-long conclave just is not likely.

John Paul's norms "did create the possibility for tension and jockeying whereby you could have a group of cardinals holding out until the bitter end so that they might be able to get a simple majority, but the chances of that happening were remote," he said.

He called the switch a "minor adjustment" that carried no real significance.

"You could write an encyclopaedia in the way cardinals elected popes over the centuries," he added.

The Rev. Jesus Minambres, a professor of canon law at the Opus Dei-run Santa Croce University in Rome, said popes over the centuries had adjusted conclave norms - and that their successors had changed them at will.

He noted that John Paul II frequently surpassed the limit on the number of voting-age cardinals set by Pope Paul VI - 120.

Benedict has said he would respect the number, and with Tuesday's document, he is also going back to Paul VI's norms concerning the two-thirds majority.

Minambres' conclusion was that Benedict was acting "perhaps out of great respect for the laws of the past".