Cardinals have held Mass in advance of the secret papal election with no clear frontrunner after Benedict XVI’s historic resignation.
The 115 cardinal electors who pick the next leader of 1.2 billion Catholics attended the Mass “For the Election of the Roman Pontiff” in St Peter’s Basilica on Tuesday morning.
The scandal over decades of sexual abuse of children by paedophile priests – and the efforts made by senior prelates to cover up the crimes – has cast a long shadow over the Catholic Church.
The cardinals were due to begin their secret deliberations in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday afternoon.
They will vote four times daily until two-thirds can agree on a candidate but are expected to vote only once on Tuesday.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Vatican City on Tuesday, said a Vatican spokesman had confirmed the cardinals were unlikely to elect a pope by Tuesday night.
Benedict’s resignation and the scandals make the choice hard to predict, she said.
“I think there’s an agreement across the board that there’s a huge PR problem for the Vatican, whether because of the sexual scandals or the VatiLeaks scandal,” our correspondent said.
Vatileaks refers to confidential papal documents published last year by an Italian journalist, allegging high intrigue at the heart of the Catholic Church.
