VATICAN CITY — Catholic cardinals entering a conclave on Wednesday to pick a new pope do not yet have a clear idea of who will emerge as Pope Francis’ successor, several said, and speeches by individual clerics in meetings this week may be decisive.
The 133 cardinals are holding near daily meetings to discuss issues facing the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church before the conclave, when they will be sequestered in a hotel and barred from contact with the outside world.
While there are a few cardinals seen as front-runners to succeed Pope Francis — two often mentioned are Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle — many of the clerics who will vote have not made up their minds.
“My list is changing, and I think it will continue to change over the next few days,” British Cardinal Vincent Nichols, participating in his first conclave, told Reuters. “It’s a process which for me is far from concluded, far from concluded.”
As the cardinals are meeting this week in what are called “general congregations,” individual clerics can offer speeches to give their vision for the future of the global faith.
During the 2013 conclave, it was in this period that Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave a speech that, by many accounts, deeply impressed his peers. Days later, he was elected as Francis.
Nichols, the highest-ranking Church official in England and Wales, said the speeches this time have again been pivotal in helping form opinions about who could be the next pope.
“There’ll be these moments when like a stone is dropped into a pond and the ripples will go out and I’ll sit there thinking, ‘Ah, yeah, that’s important,’” said the cardinal.
Asked about whether there are cardinal front-runners who are more likely to become pope, Nichols replied: “I came with a few ideas … (and) they have changed.”
Cardinal William Goh Seng Chye, the archbishop of Singapore, told Il Messaggero newspaper that he also did not know who the next pope might be. “It may seem strange, but we really do not know,” he said. “We have not yet begun to vote, so we don’t know. The game is still going on.”
The cardinals are meeting for two pre-conclave sessions on Monday and are expected to have at least one more on Tuesday.
The conclave itself begins Wednesday morning with the celebration of a special Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.
In the afternoon, the cardinals will formally process into the Sistine Chapel, the storied 15th century worship space adorned with frescoes by Michelangelo, where they will begin voting for the next pope.
They are expected to take one vote on Wednesday afternoon. Subsequent days will have two votes each morning and afternoon. It takes a two-thirds majority for someone to be elected.
According to conclave regulations, if no one has been chosen after the first three days, the cardinals should take a day-long “pause of prayer” before continuing.
The only signal given to the outside world about the deliberations will come from a chimney installed above the chapel. The cardinals will burn their ballots, adding a chemical product to create one of two colors of smoke: black for an inconclusive vote; white when there is a new pope.
Italian Cardinal Fernando Filoni, a former Vatican official participating in his second conclave, told Corriere della Sera newspaper he expected the first votes to be indecisive.
“The first two votes are for orientation, then we start to sum things up,” he said.
The cardinals being sequestered from the world and living and eating together at the Vatican’s Santa Marta guest house, is also important, said Filoni.
“When we vote, we don’t talk, but afterwards we eat together, live together, and compare notes,” he said.
TAGLE: ‘ASIAN FRANCIS’
Tagle is sometimes called the “Asian Francis” because of his infectious smile, easy laugh, and spontaneity with words.
Like the late Argentine pope, he hails from a country far from the Catholic Church’s traditional power base of Europe and came to Rome with an outsider’s view.
Some who have put Tagle on unofficial short lists for the next pope say he would be a shoo-in to succeed Francis if cardinal electors who enter the secret conclave on Wednesday are looking for as close a similarity as possible in order to assertively continue Francis’ progressive streak.
If Tagle were elected, it would also likely signal to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics that the cardinals want to go forward with Francis’ vision of generally opening up the Church to the modern world by not choosing a man who might roll back some of the late pope’s reforms.
It would also mean his fellow cardinals had shrugged off question marks over his management abilities.
“He would represent a continuity of what Pope Francis has been doing,” said Rev. Emmanuel Alfonso, a former student of Tagle’s who has known him for decades. “He’s really like Pope Francis in terms of his love for the poor, his approachability and so on.”
Tagle, the former archbishop of Manila, would be the first pope from what is now considered Asia, although in the early Church some popes hailed from what is now called the Middle East, technically part of Asia.
Tagle, who looks younger than his 67 years and likes to be called by his diminutive nickname “Chito,” has headed the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, effectively the Church’s missionary arm, for the past five years. That position gave him enormous influence over national churches in developing countries.
As archbishop of Manila, and before as bishop of the Philippine city of Imus, Tagle gained pastoral experience in running dioceses in Asia’s largest Catholic country. By bringing him to the Vatican in 2020, Francis gave him one more notch in experiences seen as helpful to papal candidates.
Many cardinals already know Tagle personally, and many may see an attraction in having a pope from Asia, viewed by Church leaders as an important region of growth for the faith. Young people feel comfortable with him.
When Tagle hosted Francis for a visit to the Philippines in 2014, the visit drew the largest crowds in the history of papal travel, including a Mass that attracted up to 7 million people.
WEAKNESS
Tagle, who speaks Italian, English, and Spanish as well as his native Tagalog, now has five years of experience with the Vatican’s arcane bureaucracy, although some cardinals may think even that is not enough to run the global Church.
One possible weakness in Tagle’s candidacy is that he was involved in a management scandal three years ago. In 2022, Francis removed him from a second job as titular head of a Vatican-based confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development and social services organizations working in more than 200 countries.
Francis fired the entire leadership of the group, called Caritas Internationalis, following allegations of bullying by top management.
Tagle’s role, akin to a chancellor of the organization, was mostly symbolic and ceremonial. He was not directly involved in day-to-day running and was generally admired by staffers.
Unlike Francis, Tagle enjoys a global reputation as a theologian, which could help him gain votes from moderate cardinals concerned by some of Francis’ off the cuff utterances, which led to what some called confusion about Church teachings.
In the 1990s, he served on the Vatican’s International Theological Commission under German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was known as a strict adherent to traditional doctrine and would later become Pope Benedict XVI.
Rev. Joseph Komonchak, Tagle’s professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said the cardinal was one of his best students in 45 years of teaching.
“Not the least of Chito’s virtues was the joy that he radiated on everyone who encountered him,” said Komonchak. “He had a fine sense of humor, which endeared him to his fellow students.”
Rev. Robert Reyes, a seminary classmate who has known Tagle for more than 50 years, said Tagle has an ability to connect with people and a simple style of living. When he first became a bishop in 2001, he didn’t own a car.
“He preferred to take rides, to hitch a ride with someone driving to a place that perhaps both of them were going to,” said Reyes.
While 67 is sunset age in many organizations, it is considered young in the Vatican, because few cardinals want a very long pontificate.
PAROLIN: QUIET DIPLOMAT
If the Catholic cardinals entering the conclave are looking for a steady administrator to run the Church and bring some calm after three consecutive papacies that were at times tempestuous, they may look no further than Pietro Parolin.
On nearly every media shortlist of papal contenders, Parolin has been the Vatican’s secretary of state for the last 12 years, effectively the number two position in the Church. He is also the Vatican’s top diplomat.
The two roles mean Parolin – a 70-year-old from a small town in Italy’s deeply Catholic northern Veneto region – is perhaps the candidate best known to the 133 cardinal electors.
Cardinals who have visited Rome from around the world on Church business have met him and he has visited most of their countries. Two cardinals from two African countries, for example, probably know Parolin just as well or even better than they know each other.
Parolin is seen as a quiet diplomat who is pragmatic more than conservative or progressive. He occasionally had to quietly put out fires caused by the late pope’s remarks.
Francis gave media interviews and sometimes spoke off the cuff in public.
“He (Parolin) knows how to take a punch for the number one and for the institution,” said one cleric currently based abroad who has worked with him and has known him for many years, who asked not to be identified because of the secretive nature of the conclave.
One such recent occasion was when the late pope suggested last year that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza might amount to genocide. Parolin agreed to meet with then-Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Raphael Schutz, who told him that Israel wanted the pope to say more about Israel’s right to defend itself.
When Francis said Ukraine should have the “courage of the white flag” to end the war there, the comment drew widespread criticism from allies of Kyiv but was hailed by Russia. Parolin quietly told diplomats that the pope meant negotiations, not surrender.
POPEMOBILE
One of Pope Francis’ popemobiles is being transformed into a mobile health clinic for children in the Gaza Strip, fulfilling one of his final wishes, the Vatican’s official media outlet said on Sunday.
The vehicle, used by the late pontiff during his 2014 visit to the Holy Land, is being outfitted with diagnostic and emergency medical equipment to help young patients in the Palestinian enclave, where health services have been devastated by the Israeli invasion.
Pope Francis, who died last month, entrusted the initiative to the Catholic aid organization Caritas Jerusalem in the months before his death, Vatican News said.
“This is a concrete, life-saving intervention at a time when the health system in Gaza has almost completely collapsed,” Peter Brune, Secretary General of Caritas Sweden, which is supporting the project, told Vatican News.
The mobile unit will be equipped with rapid infection tests, vaccines, diagnostic tools, and suture kits, and staffed by medical personnel. Caritas plans to deploy the clinic to communities without access to functioning healthcare facilities once humanitarian access to Gaza is feasible.
“It’s not just a vehicle,” Brune added. “It’s a message that the world has not forgotten about the children in Gaza.”
