SCHIAVON, Italy: Conclave watching turned out to be a perfect aperitivo activity. Caffe Centrale, on the main drag of the Veneto hometown of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, a papal favorite, filled up with locals and journalists awaiting the first sign of smoke on Wednesday. A large TV screen displayed images from St. Peter’s Square and the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, where 133 cardinals were casting the first votes for pope, as locals in the Veneto town of Schiavon, near Vicenza, quaffed glasses of wine. “We’re waiting, and we’re rooting for him,” said Giacomo Bonora, raising a glass of the local favorite, a red wine spritz, and using the local nickname for Parolin, “Don Piero.” Bonora said that when Parolin returns to the town of 2,600, he asks to be called “Don Piero,” the way a parish priest would be addressed rather than “eminence,” a cardinal’s honorific. Piero is the Veneto dialect for Pietro. Parolin, 70, is a veteran diplomat who was Francis’ secretary of state, essentially the Holy See’s prime minister and No. 2 to the pope. Outside, a city worker stopped to show the parish sacristan a photo of Parolin when the town celebrated his elevation to secretary of state 12 years ago. Everyone is hopeful, but officials have been instructed not to speak to the media until a new pope is elected. Angelo Cisotto, the sacristan at the town’s St. Margherita parish church, was heading home to keep an eye on the smoke coming out of the chimney. If it is white, it is his job to go and ring the church bells. Cisotto, 84, remembers Parolin as a child, 14 years his junior, and always devout. “He used to dress up as an altar boy, and at home, in his garage, he had a little altar,” where he would play saying Mass, Cisotto recalled. “He is a very good, very humble and very kind person.” Back at Caffe Centrale, clients ordered plates of cold cuts as the closed meeting of cardinals dragged on long past the expected hour. TV reporters whose air times had passed headed out for the night. Finally, black smoke emerged. “Tomorrow, we’ll do it again,” Bonora said. As for Paroline’s papal chances, 86-year-old Sebastiano Minuzzo said: “This is a dream, but usually dreams don’t come true.” Locals recalled that Parolin came regularly to Schiavon before his mother died last summer. His father died when he was 10, and he entered the seminary in nearby Vicenza at 14. For a period, he was a parish priest in the foothills town of Schio before joining the Vatican‘s diplomatic corps. “He has such a mind, I can’t grasp it,” said Cisotto, the sacristan. While closely associated with Francis’ pontificate, Parolin is much more demure in personality and diplomatic in his approach to leading than the Argentine Jesuit he served – and he knows where the Catholic Church might need a course correction. Many see him as embodying Francis’ pastoral message while being more open to conservative points of view. While his career has been spent in Italy, his job as a Vatican diplomat has seen him travel the world, giving him a global perspective. If he were elected, he would return an Italian to the papacy after three successive outsiders: St. John Paul II (Poland), Pope Benedict XVI (Germany) and Francis (Argentina).
