The death of Pope Francis, the conclave and beyond: initial thoughts

Some early thoughts of how the conclave to choose the next Pope will act, who is in it, what they will look for in a new Bishop of Rome and what it will mean more broadly

After a sense that his demise was imminent in February, we heard the news on Easter Monday that Pope Francis, the 88-year-old Bishop of Rome, had died. In some ways it is the least surprising announcement there could be: extremely elderly man with long-standing health problems and stressful job dies. And to some degree we should put it in perspective, recognising that, whether you like or loathed the Pope, or maintained an attitude of serene indifference, he had lived a long life doing what he—we must assume—wanted to do, having heard the call of his vocation in Buenos Aires at the age of 17, and having risen to be the first Pope born outside Europe for 1,272 years, and the first ever to be a Jesuit.

Given all of that, I suspect many of the obituaries which are now flowing forth had been at least half-written for some time. I wrote a short assessment of Francis and his papacy for City A.M., which was very much not half-written (and getting from a first draft to final copy barely half the length was a struggle almost as intense as Jacob wrestling with the angel by the river in the Book of Genesis. I find him a hard man to assess or understand, though the passage of time will give us better perspective and a chance to reflect; I wasn’t able to explore it within the confines of the piece I wrote but I do wonder if there was a lot of his character which was shaped by his being Argentinian and of a specific generation. But I need to think about that a bit more.

Inevitably thoughts have turned to the papal succession, an issue given added piquancy by the recent release of Edward Berger’s Conclave, a film set in and around a papal election and based on the novel by Robert Harris. (Francis’s last act of service may be to drive up sales of the book, though boosting Harris’s royalties hardly counts as ministering to the poor). I had… views about the film, finding it perhaps 75-80 per cent a sumptuously shot, taut and well-acted thriller but 20-25 per cent patronising and intellectually lazy and woolly liberal secular wet dream.

It is a strange commentary on the world that when I typed “next pope” into Google earlier the first suggested set of search terms was “next pope odds”. Nevertheless I’m sure the bookmakers will do a roaring trade over the forthcoming days and weeks, and I look forward to some truly preposterous suddenly learned armchair experts on Catholicism, the papacy, papal elections and theological controversy (I am available, I should say: doctoral research on English monasticism and everything). For those of you who are curious and perhaps like a flutter, the leading contenders at time of writing according to oddschecker.com were:

• Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, Pro-Prefect for the Section of First Evangelization of the Dicastery of Evangelization, 6/4 jt fav

• Pietro Cardinal Parolin, Cardinal Secretary of State, 6/4 jt fav

• Matteo Cardinal Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna, 7/1

• Péter Cardinal Erdö, Archbishop of Esztergom–Budapest and Primate of Hungary, 10/1

• Fridolin Cardinal Ambongo Besungu, Archbishop of Kinshasa, 16/1

• Peter Cardinal Turkson, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 16/1

• Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, 16/1

• Raymond Cardinal Burke, Patron Emeritus of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, 16/1

Two things which strike me straight away. The first is that you will notice I have put the title “Cardinal” between the forename and the surname: that’s where it goes, that’s how they should be styled, it’s been that way for centuries, the explanations I’ve read are either fuzzy or flimsy but it doesn’t matter. We may as well be correct as incorrect. The correct style is [Forename] Cardinal [Surname]. I don’t make the rules.

The second issue is that with four of the top eight sharing odds of 16/1, that suggests to me the bookmakers are plucking probabilities out of the air for all but the first few names, either because they have no access to any useful information or as a reflection of the fact, accurately enough, that no-one knows what will happen and even educated guesses at this stage should put mote emphasis on the “guess” than the “educated”. (For all that, I think most of those odds are probably wrong, but what do I know?)

I don’t intend to peer deeply into the crystal ball at this stage and make a definitive prediction of who will be elected as the next occupant of the throne of St Peter, but, early in the process, there are a few observations I’d make to put them on the record and prevent bad habits from developing. I remind readers that I am not a Roman Catholic, though I seem to know more than is perhaps statistically likely, I don’t believe in any gods at all, but I am, as I once blurted out on Sky News, “Catholic-curious” and I have spent a lot of my life studying Holy Mother Church in one way or another. All of that is an alternative formulation for telling you to pay as much or as little attention to what follows as you choose.

Does any of this matter?

It was Joseph Stalin who may or may not have said at some unspecified point, when the subject of the Holy Father arose in a discussion, “The Pope! How many divisions has he?” What he meant was that the papacy is devoid of hard power; the Vatican City is the smallest sovereign state in the world, only 121 acres with a population of slighly under 900. The Pontifical Swiss Guard, the military force which protects the Pope, numbers 135 (nine officers, 41 non-commissioned officers and 85 halberdiers), and is unlikely to be deployed on active service any time soon.

On the other hand, there are roughly 1.4 billion Catholics in the world, one in every two Christians. The level of their adherence to the Church’s teachings will vary wildly, some will be scrupulously observant while others may lovingly embrace the identity of Roman Catholicism while systematically acting against a good proportion of the faith’s core tenets. There is evidence to suggest that the latter attitude is extremely common, especially on issues like abortion, contraception and homosexuality. Some will hang on the pontiff’s every word, while others will barely think of him from year to year.

It is undeniable, however, that the Pope commands very high levels of soft power. He may lack divisions, and he may be the head of a church many of whose members have no compunction in ignoring the rules—indeed, may feel themselves the more virtuous for doing so—but the Pope’s platform at least to broadcast his message is nearly unparalleled. He is guaranteed an audience, guaranteed media attention, he speaks with what some (not just Catholics) will regard as a degree of moral weight and there will be few world leaders who will decline to take his calls if attempts to establish contact. He has a significant part to play in making the weather for public discourse across the world, and it was headline news when in February Pope Francis stepped into the political debate about immigration and refugees by writing to the Catholic bishops of the United States and making some stinging, if stiffly worded, criticisms of Donald Trump’s approach to migration.

The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognise the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defencelessness.

Francis’s intervention may not have been decisive—at least not yet—but it brought the issue back to the top of the agenda and it did so on the Pope’s terms. We may not think, as some genuinely did when John F. Kennedy was running for President in 1960, that a Catholic politician will merely be a mouthpiece for the Church’s views and a malleable tool of the sinister influence of popery. The pontiff still has extraordinary reach and the ability to be heard. So, yes, it matters.

Who gets to vote?

The Pope is elected by the Sacred College of Cardinals, the ‘princes of the Church’ who are appointed to their eminence by papal authority. This right was first given to the cardinal bishops, the most senior members of the college, by Pope Nicholas II in his bull In nomine Domini of 13 April 1059, then extended to all cardinals in 1179 by the canons of the Third Lateran Council. In November 1970, Paul VI issued Ingravescentem aetatem, a document which stipulated that only those cardinals who had not yet reached the age of 80 on the opening day of a conclave could participate in a papal election.

There are currently 252 cardinals, but only 135 of them are eligible to vote on grounds of age. The substantial majority of them are either bishops or archbishops serving around the world or senior members of the Curia, the central administration of the Catholic Church—or have previously held such roles but have now retired, and therefore likely to be ineligible to vote—but some will be other clerics whom the Pope has decided to honour. There are no strict criteria for selection as a cardinal, save that they must be at least ordained priests if not higher clergy (though until 1917 it was possible for laymen to be created cardinals), and the selection rests entirely with the Pope.

I won’t rehearse exhaustively the finer points of the conclave at this point, but it is more straightforward that it might seem. Those cardinals eligible to take part in the election will travel to Rome and lodge in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the guesthouse next to St Peter’s Basilica in which Francis chose to live during his papacy. The Dean of the College of Cardinals, Giovanni Battista Cardinal Re, is 91 and therefore ineligible to vote; the Vice-Dean, Leonardo Cardinal Sandri, is 81 and so also ineligible. The duties of the Dean will therefore fall to the senior cardinal bishop, Pietro Cardinal Parolin (see above), who is not only Secretary of State but currently joint favourite to win the election (though we shall see how reliable an indication that proves to be).

The conclave usually begins 15 days after the death of the Pope, though this can be extended if necessary to 20 to allow cardinal electors to get to Rome. On the first day of the conclave, the cardinals will celebrate Mass in St Peter’s in the morning, and that afternoon they will gather in the Pauline Chapel of the Apostolic Palace and process formally to the Sistine Chapel, singing the Litany of the Saints. Once they have assembled, the senior cardinal (in this case Cardinal Parolin) will read aloud the oath to observe to procedures of the conclave as set down by the apostolic constitutions:

Et ego [given name] Cardinalis [surname] spondeo, voveo ac iuro. Sic me Deus adiuvet et haec Sancta Dei Evangelia, quae manu mea tango.

And I, [given name] Cardinal [surname], so promise, pledge and swear. So help me God and these Holy Gospels which I touch with my hand.

Each cardinal in order of precedence will swear the oath. Then the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, Archbishop Diego Ravelli, will give the order “Extra omnes!”, at which all except the cardinal electors and those participating in the conclave must leave and the doors of the Sistine Chapel are closed. One ecclesiastic may remain, who will then address the cardinals on the challenges facing the Church and the qualities desirable in a new pontiff, after which he will depart. Although formerly the electors would be locked in to the chapel (“conclave” is derived from the Latin cum clave, “with a key”), it is not quite so severe now, though access is still tightly controlled and the electors must have no contact with the outside world until the conclave ends. Cardinals who arrived after the conclave has begun amy be admitted, but any who leave are unable subsequently to return.

In a way, the task is very simple. This very small electorate of 135 men must choose someone they think suitable to be the next Pope, and the successful candidate must win a two-thirds majority, which in this case translates as 90. It is hardly a daunting logistical exercise, except that there are no formally declared candidates and it is considered extremely poor form to campaign openly for election. So in theory each cardinal elector’s choice is a blank canvas: they must choose an adult male Catholic but those are the only formal restrictions. By long practice, however, the Pope will be elected from among the membership of the College of Cardinals; the last Pope who was not already a cardinal was Urban VI (1378-89) although Archbishop Giovanni Montini of Milan received two votes at the conclave in 1958 before he became a cardinal (and later Pope Paul VI); the last Pope not already to be ordained a priest was Leo X (1513-21), a cardinal deacon.

It is impossible to predict how long the process will take, given the unpredictable number of candidates and the way the electors’ preferences can change. No conclave for more than 190 years has lasted even as long as a week, while before that none in 160 years had lasted less than three weeks. The longest election in the Church’s history was that of 1268-71, which lasted for 34 months before choosing Gregory X and was allegedly only brought to a conclusion when Charles of Anjou, the King of Sicily, ordered that the cardinals be given only bread and water and had the roof stripped from the Papal Palace. That election involved a mere 20 cardinal electors, of whom three died and one resigned during the course of the election, and there were at least 137 ballots. But the turning point for modern times, or the last pre-modern conclave, in some ways, was that of 1830-31. It lasted for 50 days and took 83 ballots to elect Pope Gregory XVI. Since then there have been anywhere between three (1939) and 14 (1922) ballots, but judging the most recent few conclaves around five ballots would be average.

It is worth setting out some statistics about the 135 cardinal electors. The most striking is that 108 of them were appointed cardinals by Pope Francis in the last 12 years, with only 22 owing their elevation to Benedict XVI and a mere five dating from St John Paul II. That is an extraordinary preponderance for a pontiff whose reign was longer than perhaps expected but did not come close to troubling the record books. Benedict XVI created 90 cardinals in eight years, St John Paul II 231 in 27 years, Paul VI 143 in 15 years and John XXIII 52 in five years. So the total of 163 created by Pope Francis in 12 years was a considerable increase in pace. It seems likely, therefore, that the late pontiff will already have exercised considerable influence over the forthcoming conclave by virtue of personally having chosen 80 per cent of the electorate.

This will be the first conclave at which European cardinals are not a majority, though they are still represented in disproportionate numbers compared to the worldwide Catholic population. The 135 cardinal electors break down by continent as follows:

Europe 53
Asia 23
North America 20
Africa 18
South America 17
Oceania 4

There are 71 different countries represented among the cardinal electors, but the noticeably strong contingents are Italy (17), the United States (10), Brazil (7), France (5) and Spain (5). There has never been an American or Brazilian Pope, and only two Spaniards, while Italy especially and France have historically dominated the position.

Another factor worth noting: we think of it as the Roman Catholic Church, but there are 23 autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches which acknowledge the Pope’s authority. These are the Coptic, Eritean, Ethiopian, Armenian, Albanian Greek, Belarusian Greek, Bulgarian Greek, Croatian and Serbian Greek, Greek Byzantine, Hungarian Greek, Italo-Albanian, Macedonian Greek, Melkite Greek, Romanian Greek, Russian Greek, Ruthenian Greek, Slovak Greek, Ukrainian Greek, Chaldean, Syriac and Syro-Malankara Catholic Churches and the Syro-Malabar and Antiochene Syrian Maronite Churches. None of these is large; the combined population of all 23 churches is only 18 million, from 6,000 Greek Byzantine Catholics to 4.5 million Syro-Malabar Catholics centred in Kerala.

I mention the autonomous churches for two reasons. The first is that the war in Ukraine has shone a brighter light on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic community, about a tenth of the country’s population. But the second and more relevant reason is that five of the 135 cardinal electors come from the autonomous churches, namely:

• Louis Raphaël I Sako, Patriarch of Baghdad (Chaldean)

• Baselios Cleemis, Major Archbishop of Thiruvananthapuram (Syro-Malankara)

• Berhaneyesus Demerew Souraphiel, Archbishop of Addis Abeba (Ethiopian)

• Mykola Bychok, Eparch of SS Peter and Paul of Melbourne (Ukrainian Greek)

• George Jacob Koovakad, Prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue (Syro-Malabar)

I don’t suggest for a moment that these are front-runners for the papacy, nor that they have especially great influence within the Sacred College. But remember how small the numbers are in this election: there are only 135 votes to be had. If any cardinal is so gauche and impious as to be planning a strategy, every single elector is important.

Who are they looking for?

The quality of being papabile (“popeable”) is a slippery and multi-faceted one, falling squarely into the stand-by of something you simply know when you see it. It is not unique, in a broader application, to the Catholic Church. Politicians, for example, sometimes have a quicksilver quality, perhaps including charm, intelligence, eloquence, empathy and likeability, which from an early stage can mark them out as “leadership material”. Tony Blair and David Cameron both had it, as before them had Anthony Eden and A.J. Balfour (though Balfour’s family connections were potent too). In the United States, perhaps it was most obvious in John F. Kennedy; Barack Obama had it once it was spotted, in his very short pre-presidential career, as did Franklin Roosevelt.

However, more cardinals are deemed to be papabile than ever become Pope. It is an axiom of Vatican observers that he who enters the conclave as a pope leaves as a cardinal. Cardinal Martini of Milan was the inevitable next Pope and liberal reaction to St John Paul II for years, except that a vacancy did not arise until Martini was old and unwell. As in politics and comedy, timing is everything. Nor is it a prerequisite for election: John Paul II was not widely considered to be papabile, yet, in a particular set of circumstances, rose to the papacy and was one of the most influential and longest reigning pontiffs in history.

The past is not the future and times change. Even the Catholic Church changes. We should, though, at least be conscious of the Church’s history. When St John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła in Wadowice in Poland, was elected pontiff in 1978, he was the first non-Italian to be chosen for 455 years, since the brief, 18-month reign of the Dutch Adrian VI. That represents an extraordinary grip on the ecclesiastical institutions by the Italians in the Curia, somewhat to be expected given the Pope’s position as Bishop of Rome. When John Paul II died, there were two principal schools of thought: the first was that the Italian stranglehold on the throne of St Peter had been broken, especially as John Paul II had been such a dynamic, influential and recognisable figure, given considerable credit for his contribution to the downfall of Communism; the second was that the itch of a non-Italian Pope had been scratched, and John Paul II’s papacy, at 26½ years, had been not only unexpectedly long but the third longest in history, which would mean that the Italians would feel it was time they had the papacy ‘back’.

The former point of view was born out by the papal conclave in 2005. It is always hard to know what occurs in the supposed secrecy of a conclave, but an account in Il Messaggero asserted that Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, recently retired as Archbishop of Milan and long the great hope of the liberal wing of the Church, won 40 votes on the first ballot, ahead of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on 38, while another Italian, Camillo Cardinal Ruini, also polled strongly. However, La Stampa was given the supposed diary of an anonymous cardinal elector, which recorded Martini receiving only nine votes in the first round and Ruini a mere six. Even if there was a credible Italian challenger at the beginning, it was short-lived, and the election quickly became a choice between Ratzinger and Jose Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, the recently retired Archbishop of Buenos Aires (and later Pope Francis).

Then most recent conclave, on the abdication of Benedict XVI on 2013, leans more towards the second point of view, though demonstrates the diminished weight of the Italian cardinalate. According to Gerard O’Connell’s account of proceedings, The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave That Changed History, the Archbishop of Milan, Angelo Cardinal Scola, led the first ballot with 30 votes to Bergoglio’s 26, and Canadian Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, close behind on 22. But, as in 2005, it seems, the Italian challenge faded; Bergoglio moved ahead on the second ballot and stayed ahead until he had the necessary margin on the fifth round, and was elected as Pope.

There are two understandable but misleading potential assumptions often made about the forthcoming conclave. The first is that, because Francis chose four out of five of the cardinal electors, they will in some way seek to replace him like-for-like, or at least in the same mould; the second is that Francis was a liberal and therefore the majority of cardinals will seek to elect a liberal. In fact, as I argued in my City A.M. piece, to portray the late pontiff simply as a liberal is inadequate. In doctrinal terms, Francis himself said “Soy conservador”, and one of the main points I made was that while his style as Pope was very different from his predecessors’, and he sought to be as inclusive as possible in tone, he made very few changes to the fundamental teachings of the Church, at least in matters of morality and sexuality. He was a man who could say of same-sex relationships “Who I am to judge?”, yet in private, and perhaps in anger, could also rail against the air of frociaggine or “faggotry” in many seminaries.

There is, certainly, a sense among many Catholics that it is time for an African cleric to lead the Church for the first time since Pope Gelasius, who died in AD 496. I mentioned Cardinal Ambongo Besungu and Cardinal Turkson among the bookies’ favourites earlier; Robert Cardinal Sarah, the former Archbishop of Conakry (1979-2001) and Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (2014-21), has been mooted as a candidate, having been born in French Guinea which became the Republic of Guinea; in 2005, Francis Cardinal Arinze, then Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and previously Archbishop of Onitsha in Nigeria, was regarded as papabile, but he is now 92 and is very unlikely to be a candidate.

A fifth of the world’s Catholics live in Africa, so the continent has certainly been overlooked in the past centuries. As a general observation, the Church in Africa tends to be markedly conservative, especially on issues like homosexuality, remarriage and ecumenicalism, and certainly Ambongo Besungu, Turkson, Sarah and Arinze could all fairly be characterised as traditionalist and conservative. I note that without judgement, but, just as if the cardinals chose a strongly progressive candidate, the election of a conservative African would force Catholicism to address some major and divisive issues which it has so far managed to skirt around.

An alternative, expressed in his status as the bookies’ joint favourite, is Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines, currently Pro-Prefect for the Section of First Evangelization of the Dicastery for Evangelization. He was previously Archbishop of Manila from 2011 to 2020 and is 67 years old. In a very generalised sense he is a little way towards the liberal end of the spectrum in the cardinalate, believing, as Pope Francis did, that the Church should be more welcoming, respectful and understanding towards unmarried mothers, homosexuals and other people who have moral arguments with the Church. At an event for young Catholics in London 10 years ago, he said:

The harsh words that were used in the past to refer to gays and divorced and separated people, the unwed mothers etc, in the past they were quite severe. Many people who belonged to those groups were branded and that led to their isolation from the wider society… But we are glad to see and hear shifts in that… for the Catholic Church, there is a pastoral approach which happens in counselling, in the sacrament of reconciliation where individual persons and individual cases are taken uniquely or individually so that a help, a pastoral response, could be given adequately to the person.

The population of the Philippines is enormous, just over 114 million people, of whom roughly 90 million are Roman Catholics; that makes it the third largest Catholic population in the world, after Brazil and Mexico, and easily the biggest Christian community in Asia. For Tagle to become Pope would feel like the Church reaching out not just to the Philippines but to Asia as a whole. There has never been an Asian pontiff, if one excludes those in the very early days of the Church who came from Judaea and Syria, so, in just the same way that choosing an African Pope would be symbolically significant, so too would a candidate from the Far East.

One last word on the age of potential candidates. Although cardinals lose their right to vote in conclaves when they reach 80, there is nothing formally to prevent them being chosen for the papacy beyond that age (though it would seem a curious decision). However—and this demonstrated why you should always challenge your own assumptions out of self-preservation if nothing else—I had initially dismissed some of the name suggested on grounds of excessive age: Cardinal Scola (83), Cardinal Turkson (76), Cardinal Sarah (79) and Cardinal Burke (76), for example.

I don’t necessarily recant all of those instincts. I think Scola is probably not a runner, and Sarah is on the edge; given the late Pope’s health problems in recent years, it would seem like a significant burden to ask a man about to enter his ninth decade to become leader of one of the world’s biggest religions and a church that is facing existential and long-standing challenges. That said, as I should have done at the outset, I looked at the precedents. In the past 150 years, only twice has the College of Cardinals chosen a candidate under 60 (Benedict XV was 59 and St John Paul II was 58), and three Popes (John XIII, Benedict XVI and Francis) have all been over 75 when first elected. Insofar as averages have any meaning, the average age of a new pontiff for the last 150 years has been 67.

Given the ‘youthification’ of so many other areas of life, including (with some notable exceptions like Presidents Trump and Biden) politics, we may find ourselves surprised at the advancing years of the next Pope. Given that Rishi Sunak, for example, has effectively called time on his active political career but has yet to turn 45, that Emmanuel Macron will leave the Élysée Palace after his two allotted terms as President of the French Republic some months before he reaches his 50th birthday or that Humza Yousaf, the former First Minister of Scotland, will leave the Scottish Parliament weeks after reaching the age of 41, the papacy remains at the other end of the scale.

All roads lead to Rome

Pope Francis’s funeral will take place this Saturday, 26 April. The conclave will begin somewhere between 6 and 12 May, and, on recent form, is unlikely to last more than two or three days. I have no clear sense of who might emerge as Bishop of Rome at the end of the process, though I will no doubt have more to say over the next days and weeks. Some instinct tells me it will not be Cardinal Parolin, no matter what the bookmakers think, and maybe, just maybe, Cardinal Zuppi has the right combination of sympathy and openness without committing to any doctrinal changes, diocesan and curial experience and, at 69, neither callow and foolish nor worn out and jaded. He is not an arch-conservative and shares the former Pope’s passionate concern for the poor and marginalised. A reversion to an Italian Pope? Not impossible.