According to Custom

"On Wednesday, March 1, 1939, at 9:30 in the morning in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Vatican Palace, the Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinal Gennaro Granito Pignatelli di Belmonte . . . will celebrate a solemn mass of the Holy Ghost. The Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals will attend it wearing their woolen robes with plain rochets and capes of violet silk with ermine fur. . . .

"On the same day at 1:30 in the afternoon the Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals . . . will enter in a procession in the order of seniority into the conclave, where all the rest will be performed according to custom."

Thus last week read an official Latin intimatio, delivered to the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church who had arrived in Rome for this week's papal election. This document concerning the conclave was without doubt the most noncommittal which the Lord Cardinals received during the weekend. So intense and so unprecedented was the pre-election pestering of the Princes that several of them, including Milan's Cardinal Schuster, went into retreats.

Non-Italians last week were looking increasingly papabili (eligible for the papacy). To the top of the list moved the name of Cardinal Villeneuve of Quebec, a French-speaking churchman removed from the controversies of European politics. The same consideration held for another non-Italian--French-born Cardinal Tisserant, for years a Vatican librarian and now secretary of the Vatican's Oriental Congregation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.