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.
