Red-faced Cleric Broke A Cardinal Rule During Election Of Last Pope, New Book Reveals

The world’s 1.4 billion Catholics are just now hearing a confession from one of the cardinals who helped elect a new pope last May.

Seems one of the 133 cardinals participating in the highly-secret conclave went into the meeting with a cellphone beneath his robes.

The unnamed cardinal had taken the same vow as his 132 scarlet-silk-capped colleagues – no cellphones allowed dude.

Everything was going fine as the clerics were preparing to take their first vote inside the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel.

But the electronic-jamming equipment in the building, designed to prevent outside communications, picked up the signal of an active mobile connection.

The cardinals stared at each other incredulously, then one of the older clerics discovered he had a phone in his pocket and handed it over, according to “The Election of Pope Leo XIV”, a new book by two long-time Vatican correspondents.

“The book does not name the cardinal or suggest he had any motive for keeping his phone, saying the moment left him ‘disoriented and distressed,’” according to an NBC News report of the shocking break in Vatican protocol.

The scene was “unimaginable, never before seen in the history of modern conclaves,” wrote the authors, Gerard O’Connell and Elisabetta Pique.

One such film, the 2024 hit “Conclave”, imagined a tangled web of intrigues during the fictional selection of a pontiff. Last year’s unprecedented discovery of a phone was in its own way more startling than anything portrayed in that movie, O’Connell told Reuters.

“Reality was better than fiction,” he said.

U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected pope, beating out two other rumored finalists to emerge as Pope Leo, the first pontiff from America.

Prevost, a dark horse, reportedly received 108 votes in the final tally, outdistancing Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, a long-time Vatican official, and Philippine Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who was also seen as a favorite.

The only thing stranger than a cellphone breach would be if either of both of the two rumored unsuccessful candidates decided to contest Prevost’s appointment.

Now that you put a final American spin on the election of the world’s 267th pope.