THE Vatican is to place an “electromagnetic force field” around the conclave to choose the next pope to prevent “electronic intrusion”.

The conclave, which starts on Monday afternoon after a morning Mass at St Peter’s, will be held in the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo’s frescoes, where conclaves have been held for centuries.

However, for the first time, the 115 cardinal electors will be lodged not in the cramped corridors of the adjoining Apostolic Palace but in a new residence, St Martha’s House.

Under new rules laid down in 1996 by the late Pope, they are forbidden to carry electronic devices such as mobile telephones or computers or to use radios and televisions.

The Vatican is taking no chances. The cardinals will be frisked by guards supervised by the papal chamberlain, Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo of Spain. “We live in an age of spy satellites and sophisticated directional microphones,” one official said.

Andrea Tornielli, papal biographer and Vatican watcher, said: “The secret services of various countries are extremely interested in knowing how the voting will come out and how the final choice was arrived at. The Vatican started to take preventive measures some time ago.”

Built between 1992 and 1996 with the succession process in mind, St Martha’s contains 106 suites and 22 single rooms. Run by nuns and described as an air-conditioned “luxury hotel”, it is being swept for electronic spying devices.

The cardinals will be taken to the Sistine Chapel in a bus with tinted windows. Voting papers will this time be placed in bronze urns rather than the traditional chalice.

Cardinals are under oath not to reveal how they voted, and the voting papers and any private notes are burnt. However, after the election of John Paul II in October 1978 it emerged that the vote had initially been dominated by two Italians — Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, 72, Archbishop of Genoa, heading a conservative faction, and Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, 54, Archbishop of Florence and a liberal.

With open backing from Cardinal Franz König of Austria, who urged the conclave to take the radical step of appointing a non-Italian pope from communist Eastern Europe, Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, eventually won by a landslide — according to some accounts — of 97 votes in the final ballot.

Sources close to the College of Cardinals said that although there was no obvious front-runner for the coming election, a similar “conservative-liberal” battle was shaping up between Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 77, the late Pope’s arch-conservative ideological “enforcer”, who will chair the conclave, and Carlo Maria Martini, the former Archbishop of Milan, 78, who although retired and not in the best of health, may be backed by “progressives” simply to block Cardinal Ratzinger.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge