There won't be any white smoke to tell the world he has been elected, but another sort of secret conclave began in Rome on Monday - to chose the worldwide Jesuit leader who is known as the "the black pope".
At Jesuit headquarters a block from the Vatican, 225 delegates from around the world will choose a new superior general to run the largest and perhaps most influential, controversial and prestigious Catholic clerical order.
Their leader is traditionally known as "the black pope" because of the colour of the simple cassock he wears and because - like the pope who dresses in white - he has worldwide influence and usually keeps the position for life.
But this year's general congregation, as the meeting is known, is different. The current superior general, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, 79, received permission from Pope Benedict to retire for reasons of age.
A soft-spoken Dutchman with white hair and a goatee, Kolvenbach has been in the job since 1983 and has won widespread praise for steering the Jesuits through one of their most difficult periods in their 468-year history.
Kolvenbach's charismatic predecessor, a Basque named Pedro Arrupe, had several conflicts with Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul, who believed the order had become too independent, leftist and political, particularly in Latin America.
When Arrupe suffered a stroke in the early 1980s Pope John Paul appointed a personal delegate to run the order to make sure it would not drift further leftwards, a move some Jesuits at the time resented as "papal martial law".
Kolvenbach, by contrast, has been credited with re-establishing good relations with the Vatican over the past 25 years while dealing with issues such as declining vocations and the future of the order founded by St Ignatius Loyola in 1540.
