Forget the luxurious papabile websites and daily newsletters promising inside intel and the crude betting markets and the endlessness of talking heads with their thumb-tapped hot takes. And never mind leaping over the current hot mess of coverage to seek sturdy wisdom from papal-election observers of centuries past. The single best guide to what’s happening in Rome right now, for all the journalists, Catholic-curious types, and sincere pilgrims descending on the city for the start of the conclave was first published in 1957 by an Englishman named Henry Canova Morton. The book is called A Traveller in Rome. It begins with Morton arriving in the city in great excitement after long preparation and then totally falling apart. He despairs at the great gap between his pristine visions of the city from afar and his first experience of it. “Was this the place I had been dreaming about, for weeks?” he asks, expecting a room with a view of the dome of St. Peter’s, only to have, instead, a room with a view of a crowded, shabby side-street full of glum locals busy at un-charming daily tasks.

I’ve read Morton’s book many times and taught from it to students preparing for their first trips to the Eternal City. But in the rush to get ready to come to Rome for the conclave, I’m amazed at how fast I forgot its most important lesson. Your ideals of Rome are always defeated by Rome itself; it’s just a matter of how long it takes you to get over yourself and get on with life here. This works best by discovering the unexpected, even miraculous, in the mundane and minor. Morton did this not by changing his hotel but by being open to the goods that were right there before him—as long as he was willing to listen and look according to a reality beyond his own making. 

I mention all this because of how my own plans went terribly awry as I prepared to be in Rome for the conclave. I have been planning a trip here for the period between the death of Pope Francis and the election of his successor for several years now. I secured, years in advance, an understanding with my university that when the Holy Father died, I could take some time away from campus to be in Rome. I found a perfect place to stay: the stately Pontifical Canadian College, a few minutes’ walk from St. Peter’s Square. I identified, during past visits—over aperitivos near the Leonine Wall and on languorous walks around the Borghese Gardens—some thoughtful priests from the Vatican I could talk to when the time came, to get their sense of the action. But the Pontifical Canadian College filled up before I could get a room there. Instead, I found an Airbnb further out in the Pratti whose most impressive feature is a big-screen television meant more for a Boston sports bar than a Roman apartment. The priests I planned to talk to, it turns out, are all out of town this week. And while my own university is happy I’m here, months ago I had agreed to give a lecture on civil discourse in a small Alberta town in early May, which means that to be here, in Rome, I flew Toronto-Calgary-Toronto-Rome over three time zones and four days—with a flight delay. 

With all this in mind, the fatalist in me felt certain that, when I finally arrived from the airport to St. Peter’s Square the afternoon the conclave commenced, I would just catch the last wisps of white smoke. A first-ballot win. It’s already done. What was the point? Reader, as you already know, I was wrong. Day one, the first ballot, fumata nera. 

Beginning in late afternoon, just as the cardinal-electors were taking their solemn oaths inside the Sistine Chapel—live-streamed on big screens on either side of St. Peter’s Square, such hyper-visibility right up until the moment of sudden and complete secrecy—I waited in the square with everybody else. The sound around me was a low polyglot murmur, broken up by many crying babies. At one point, someone started cheering, and we all looked at the little chimney above the chapel and saw nothing. Then people jeered at whoever had tricked us. My ears tuned for English, I heard an Australian mutter, this was funny one time, but two times? Not so much. Someone yelled 7:28! You lose! Someone else groaned. A group of British-accented onlookers were micro-wagering on what time we’d see smoke, never mind what color it was. 

I did an interview with a television crew, and a group of people gathered around us, listening to my commentary, about which I was quietly ambivalent. Asked to make sense of things, it’s so tempting just to treat this as a political event; it’s also tempting just to focus on the workings of the Holy Spirit. It’s really hard, in real-time, camera rolling, to find the truer middle way between these two modes of response. After the interview, a young American man approached and asked if the interview was going to be on NBC or CBS. He wanted to tell family back home. I said it was for CTV. He cocked his head, confused. Canadian television, I explained. There was a noticeable sag. But then he shrugged and smiled. As did I. Whatever consolation this was for either of us, it was for both of us a moment shared while far from home and surrounded by thousands of strangers, none of us knowing what’s going to happen next, but waiting and, in the meantime—thank you H. V. Morton—open to the small, unexpected, good things of being here right now, before the big thing happens.