VATICAN CITY
Washington Post
By Jason Horowitz
Saturday, February 23
Vatican City — The cardinals who file into the Sistine Chapel for next month’s conclave will check their newspapers, cellphones and iPads at the door. The frescoed chamber will already have been swept for bugs. If the last conclave is any guide, the prelates will cast secret ballots on a floor raised to make room for electronic jamming equipment.
As paramount as privacy is to the deliberations for selecting the next pope, sharing information will be critical to that pontiff’s success. When Benedict XVI’s successor is introduced on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica with the cry of “Habemus Papum,” his name and message will be liked on Facebook pages, blasted out on a Twitter account that already has nearly 2 million followers, downloaded onto a Vatican YouTube channel, linked in Catholic blogs and introduced across multiple platforms tended to by a small Vatican office off the Via della Conciliazione.
“The important thing for us is that people are sharing,” said Claudio Maria Celli, the president of the church’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, who oversees news.va, a hub for church news. On Saturday its home page, designed in the Vatican’s white and yellow colors, featured the pope’s Twitter feed, MP3 audio files of the speeches of popular Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi during the pope’s Lenten retreat and video of the massive crowd that showed up for one of the pope’s last public appearances. (Still, no gifs.) The site attracts about 15,000 visitors a day, nearly half of whom are new visitors. The average time on site, Celli said, is two minutes and twenty seconds. “They are not there by chance. They came to read.”
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