VATICAN CITY
Washington Post
By Jason Horowitz and Anthony Faiola,
Updated: Wednesday, March 13, 7:32 AM
VATICAN CITY — The men who will elect the next leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics did not come to agreement during two rounds of balloting on a rainy Wednesday morning, but will return to the Sistine Chapel after a lunch break to try again.
Unlike the first vote on Tuesday evening, which is traditionally a sort of test case to measure support and float favorite candidates, Wednesday’s balloting was expected to provide an opportunity for alliances to begin to take shape.
Black smoke poured from the Vatican chimney at 11:40 a.m. local time (6:40 a.m. Eastern) signaling that neither of the two morning votes had produced a winner.
No one bloc of cardinals, either organized around passport or priorities, has enough votes to push a candidate through. To win, one of the candidates (reported front-runners have included Cardinals Angelo Scola of Italy, Marc Ouellet of Canada, and Odilo Pedro Scherer of Brazil) will need to consolidate support from a diverse cross-section of the 115 voting cardinals.
And if consensus remains elusive, the cardinals could look to the less familiar names in their college, which is what happened when John Paul II was chosen in 1978.
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