History Suggests Expecting the Unexpected From the Papal Conclave

On Monday, Pope Francis died at the age of 88. Attention has already turned to who will succeed him. But anyone who claims to know who the next pope will be is just speculating. Even the most savvy and knowledgeable expert can’t offer more—thanks to the secretive nature of the selection process.

For roughly 750 years, the College of Cardinals has chosen popes at closed conclaves where participants are locked in and completely cut off from the outside world. Every cardinal and anyone else involved in the sealed conclave—there are a small number of cooks, medical staff, and clerical support locked in with the electors—takes a vow of secrecy never to talk about what happened without a pope’s permission. The penalty for violating this pledge is the church’s most severe punishment: excommunication, or being permanently separated from the life of the church.

Even after a pope is chosen, we rarely get verifiable insight into the deliberations. Looking for patterns is also difficult because papal conclaves are so rare. While, for example, there have been 60 American presidential elections since 1788, there have only been 16 papal conclaves during that period. And perhaps the only lesson from these 16 choices is to expect the unexpected. 

For the first millennium of Christianity, the Catholic Church selected popes in one of two fashions. Either a cheering Roman crowd picked Catholics’ next spiritual leader, or a group of local clergy and powerful families got together and made a choice. 

The locked conclave did not become the method for papal selection until the 13^th century. The process changed because the cardinals infuriated the people of Viterbo, Italy by taking nearly three years to choose a successor to Pope Clement IV, who had died in their town. At that time, there were not many cardinals so they tended to travel with the pope and elected a successor wherever the prior pope had died. The fed up laypeople finally locked the cardinals up in an effort to hasten the process. The tactic worked. The cardinals quickly made a selection once they were behind lock and key.

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Their choice, Gregory X, thought he’d learn from a good example. In 1274, the church added the conclave into the official rules for papal selection: henceforth, cardinals would be locked up until they chose the next Catholic leader. 

Yet, deciding in secret didn’t originally mean the total secrecy that characterizes modern conclaves. In the Vatican archives, the church historian Frederic J. Baumgartner discovered vote tallies from the early modern conclaves. 

By 1800, however, church leaders decided that they should burn all ballots and notes from conclaves. Pope Pius VI had died as Napoleon’s prisoner and the cardinals were trying to protect the church’s independence. Some of the cardinals didn’t want their local government officials to know how they’d voted during an era of shifting national alliances. Over time, this practice led to a new tradition: the cardinals would burn the ballots with substances to make the smoke black to indicate no pope was elected and white to indicate success.

In the 16 more secretive conclaves since 1800, one pattern has emerged: more often than not, the choices typically don’t come from the bandied-about names of papabili (literally, “pope-able”). It’s in fact rare for that to happen: In 1963, Vatican watchers were pretty sure the conclave would select Milan’s Cardinal Giovanni Montini, and that’s precisely what happened: he became Paul VI. The saying “he who enters the conclave as pope leaves as a cardinal” was wrong in this case. 

But 1963 was an exception. That became clear when Paul VI died in 1978—the year of three popes. The conclave to replace him chose Cardinal Albino Luciani, who took the hybrid name John Paul I. In a shock, he died a month later (likely of a heart attack). That meant a second conclave, and this time the cardinals chose a name on nobody’s radar: Krakow’s Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who took the name John Paul II. At least in this case, one cardinal kept his vow of silence about how that came about. “I would like to tell you everything. It would thrill you,” said St. Louis’s Cardinal John Carberry. “But I can’t.”

The second 1978 gathering proved to be the last conclave of the 20th century. John Paul II remained pope until his death in 2005.

Given his 27-year tenure, observers expected the cardinals to replace John Paul II with an older successor. There was a sense that another very lengthy papacy was too much. Additionally, the final years of John Paul II’s papacy had been crushed by Parkinson’s disease. There was a real need for someone with administrative skills. The curia—the Vatican’s bureaucracy— was in terrible shape and it would take someone who knew how things worked to fix it.

That person ended up being the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had run the Vatican’s doctrinal office with a firm hand for almost all of John Paul II’s papacy. Nevertheless, Ratzinger’s name appeared on very few papabili lists and when it did, it was quite low, likely because he was considered a bit too old at 78. That meant his election as Benedict XVI was both surprising and unsuprising.

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Yet, he didn’t wrangle the curia into efficiency, and a great desire for change percolated among the cardinals. When Benedict XVI unexpectedly resigned in 2013, what followed was something like the second 1978 conclave, which produced a choice on almost no one’s list. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been the case had observers had more insight into the 2005 conclave, which we’ve gotten from whispers and hints in memoirs and interviews. Some cardinals have stepped very close to the line of breaking their vow of secrecy—or even broken it behind the cloak of anonymity. One kept a secret diary and shared it with an Italian journalist. That diary indicated that while Ratzinger always led the vote in the 2005 conclave, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires had roughly 40 votes, nowhere near the required two-thirds majority of the 115 electors, but a substantial number nonetheless. Perhaps he was too abrupt a break from John Paul II at that moment, so the cardinals made the safe choice with Ratzinger, whose papacy proved to be a coda to that of his predecessor.

But the 2013 conclave returned to Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis, demonstrating that there is such a thing as a second act in conclave politics.

Some have argued that Francis has loaded the college of cardinals with his men to ensure his agenda will continue after he is gone. Yet, in truth, Pope Francis simply did what every other pope (or monarch, world leader, or even CEO) would do: surrounded himself with like-minded people. Historically, that hasn’t guaranteed a like-minded successor, as demonstrated by the choice of the Polish John Paul II after 455 years of Italian popes, and the selection of the decentralizing Francis after 35 years of more monarchical papacies.

History doesn’t offer a specific pattern to help observers predict the conclave set to take place. It seems logical that the conclave may opt for the second consecutive pope from south of the Equator, where the church is flourishing, rather than north where it is faltering. But as past conclaves have illustrated, frequently the choice is unexpected. That’s the final lesson of studying the history of conclaves.

Christopher M. Bellitto is professor of history at Kean University in Union N.J. His books include 101 Questions and Answers on Popes and the Papacy (Paulist Press) and his latest, Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue (Georgetown University Press, 2023).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.