Smuggled Phones, Double Votes, and a Battle for the Church: Inside the Conclave That Elected Pope Leo XIV
A new book reveals the minute-by-minute drama of the conclave — from a cardinal's contraband cell phone to a botched vote count — and how the reformers defeated the conservative bloc to make Leo pope.
Dear friends —
Today’s piece is a subscriber-only deep dive into the first real insider account of Pope Leo XIV’s stunning election — and yes, it’s just as wild as the rumors suggested.
The English edition of Elisabetta Piqué and Gerard O’Connell’s The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis comes out on March 25.
But I didn’t think you should have to wait that long to read about conclave cardinals smuggling phones, casting double ballots, or recoiling at the prospect of actually being elected pope.
Today’s essay brings you the most astonishing details from the book, including the moment conservative favorite Cardinal Péter Erdő realized he might win — and reportedly looked like he’d seen a ghost.
We also trace how the momentum quietly shifted behind a little-known cardinal from Chicago — and how the Spirit, through human drama and the late Pope Francis, gave us Leo.
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As 133 cardinals filed into the Sistine Chapel on May 8, 2025, fitted with jamming equipment and sealed off from the outside world, security officials picked up the signal of an active mobile phone.
The cardinals stared at one another in disbelief. Then one of the older clerics — “disoriented and distressed,” according to the authors — discovered the device in his pocket and sheepishly surrendered it.
So began the conclave that would elect the first American pope in the Church’s two-thousand-year history — and it only got stranger from there.
That scene is just one of the jaw-dropping revelations in The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis, a new book by Gerard O’Connell, the Vatican correspondent for America magazine, and Elisabetta Piqué, a correspondent for Argentina’s La Nación.
Drawing on interviews with numerous cardinals who were inside the room, O’Connell and Piqué deliver a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the most dramatic papal election in modern memory — and the picture they paint is equal parts thriller and ecclesiastical slapstick.
Consider the fourth ballot. After three rounds of voting, support had swung decisively toward Cardinal Robert Prevost, the low-key Augustinian friar from Chicago.
The cardinals cast their ballots. The scrutineers began counting. And then — 134 votes.
For 133 cardinals. Spanish Cardinal Carlos Osoro, it turned out, had accidentally stuck two ballot slips together in his hand. The entire round had to be scrapped and re-run.
Remarkably, the exact same thing happened during the 2013 conclave that elected Francis. One begins to wonder if the Holy Spirit has a sense of humor about office supplies.
And that’s before we get to the alarm clocks. With no phones to serve as morning alarms, several cardinals nearly overslept in their rooms at the Casa Santa Marta.
The Vatican, apparently anticipating this very scenario, had distributed complimentary alarm clocks to each elector.
Some cardinals also complained about the lack of a bathroom inside the Sistine Chapel, which meant they had to be escorted — like schoolchildren on a field trip — to an external restroom by a junior cardinal deacon. As one cardinal told the authors: “It’s like going back to kindergarten.”
But beneath the comedy, the book reveals something deadly serious: a battle for the soul of the Catholic Church.
The Conservative Bloc and the Road to Leo
The first ballot showed the field wide open — more than thirty candidates received votes.
