The coming struggle to choose the next pope

THE DEATH of Pope Francis on April 21st came amid a tumult in international affairs, one in which the late pontiff had been expected to play an influential role. Two days after he suffered a fatal stroke, Francis’s simple coffin was transferred from his modest quarters in the Vatican to the ornate interior of St Peter’s Basilica. His funeral on April 26th was due to be attended by a constellation of world leaders, including President Donald Trump.

The pope’s departure removes from the international scene a leader with vast soft power and a distinctly ambiguous view of Mr Trump’s new administration. By no means all of the world’s 1.4bn baptised Roman Catholics follow the guidance of their spiritual leader in temporal matters. But even those who vehemently disagree with the opinions of a pope cannot ignore them.

His dissenters included Vice-President J.D. Vance, a late convert to Catholicism, who was the last distinguished visitor to speak to Francis before his death. The late pope had denounced the new administration’s plans for the mass deportation of America’s illegal immigrants as a “calamity”. The pope was, in any case, no great admirer of the United States, or of unbridled capitalism. As a Latin American he had seen at close hand some of the less creditable aspects of American foreign policy.

More, perhaps, than any of his predecessors, he stressed that Catholic social teaching condemned not just Marxism, but also unchecked economic liberalism. His ideas on climate change were at odds with those of Mr Trump and his movement. “We must commit ourselves to...the protection of nature,” he said last year. The reaction of conservative Americans ranged from dismay to outrage.

Where the late pontiff and Mr Trump did see eye to eye was on abortion and, to a more nuanced degree, on the need for an end to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. But their areas of accord seemed unlikely to avert a collision of values and wills. On the contrary, on December 20th Mr Trump named Brian Burch, a hardline critic of Francis, as his envoy to the Holy See. The pope appeared to respond with the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy, an outspoken champion of immigrants, as archbishop of Washington, DC. The stage had been set for a clash.

That will not happen now, unless the cardinals charged with electing Francis’s successor choose a man in the same mould. If they stick to the rulebook, the conclave—the assembly of cardinals that will elect the next pope—will open between May 6th and 10th. To an outsider it might seem inevitable that it will choose a progressive pontiff. All but 27 of the 135 cardinals who are entitled to vote were chosen by Francis (see chart). But papal elections, which Catholics believe are guided by the Almighty, produce surprises. Francis was chosen in 2013 by an electorate almost entirely composed of cardinals named by his two conservative predecessors.

There are several reasons why a liberal pontiff is not a foregone conclusion. Francis was plucked, in his own words after his election, from the “end of the Earth” and had a penchant for appointing as cardinals prelates from parts of the world a lot more peripheral than his native Argentina. The result is that many of the cardinal-electors do not know each other. They may therefore be more susceptible to the influence of a well-organised lobby. And there is no lobby in the higher reaches of the Catholic church better organised than the conservative American cardinals.

Not all of Francis’s choices for the college of cardinals are progressives. In Africa liberal Catholic bishops and archbishops are scarce. In many cases the late pope had little choice but to appoint traditionalists. Their conservatism may explain why Africa will be underrepresented. The continent’s Catholic population accounts for about a fifth of the global total. Yet Africans will cast only one-eighth of the votes.

Another consideration is the way in which popes are chosen. Before the conclave the cardinals will hold several days of informal discussion, to give them time to get to know one another and to decide how many of them are papabili (popeable). The meeting is also to try to reach agreement on the main issue facing the church so it can be used as a criterion for selecting the next pope. It is often said that, had the cardinals agreed in 2005 that Catholicism’s biggest challenge was the spread of Islam, they would have opted for Francis Arinze, a Nigerian cardinal. Instead, they decided it was the secularisation of Europe, and thus handed the job to a German, who became Benedict XVI.

Francis was elected to shake up the Vatican administration and to make it more responsive to the wider church. The intention was to bolster the authority and influence of assemblies of bishops meeting in the Vatican to discuss specific issues. The pontiff fulfilled the first of those missions in 2022 with the publication of a new Vatican constitution. But the second remains more of an aspiration than an achievement, largely because Francis was unwilling to yield when the assemblies, or synods, reached conclusions he did not share.

Reinforcing the powers of the synods could be seen as the main priority. But there are several other possibilities. One is the concern over the creeping secularisation of not just western Europe and North America, but also of Catholic eastern Europe and Latin America. That is due, in part at least, to another still-pressing issue: the continuing, debilitating effect of repeated scandals over the sexual abuse of young people by clergy. Another is the rise of China. That could argue for an Asian prelate. But it may be that, after Francis’s relatively unconventional papacy, there is a desire for a leader who can reconcile the contending wings of the church. Whatever issue is chosen, it could even be that a particular conservative would be better suited to addressing it than any progressive—however papabile he may be. ■