The Vatican Faces a Defining Moment as Cardinals Prepare to Choose a New Pope

After an intense period of deliberation and consultations, 133 members of the Vatican’s college of cardinals will convene in the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to elect a pope to succeed Francis. It won’t be easy.

Workers have already swept the room for bugs and have installed the special stoves where the ballots will be burned at the end of each voting session of the conclave. If two-thirds of the cardinals agree on a candidate, the smoke will be white. If they don’t, the smoke will be black, and the process will repeat four times a day, every day, until one man emerges as the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. 

It’s a centuries-old process with modern-day consequences. Francis’ 12-year pontificate was pivotal, not just for the church, but for the globe. His advocacy for care of migrants and the poor, his tolerance for homosexuality, and his denunciation of climate change and conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine helped reset the world’s moral compass.

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Yet within the church, his reformist interpretation of church doctrine—”Who am I to judge?” he famously responded when asked to weigh in on gay priests—set off a polarizing struggle between modernists and traditionalists. So too has his big tent inclusivity that welcomed practitioners of all kinds, and invited many of them, even members of the LGBTQ community and lay women, to sit with bishops and contribute their thoughts on the direction of the church in meetings called synods. It is this vision of synodality—the church as a listening one instead of a top-down enforcer of doctrine—that is at the core of Francis’ progressivism, and the biggest threat to traditionalists who want to maintain the power and influence of bishops and cardinals. 

Every conclave, at its most fundamental, is a referendum on the previous pope’s legacy. Behind closed doors and sworn to secrecy, the cardinals will decide if the new pope is one to continue on Francis’ radically inclusive path, or someone who will roll back his policies in favor of a more inward-looking church focused on doctrine.

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That will have repercussions in a tense historical moment of religious and ethnic strife exacerbated by conflict, climate change, rising nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment are coming to the fore, says Alberto Melloni, a Vatican historian who is the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences in Bologna, Italy. There are relatively few global figures who can move opinion, drive conversation, and call for change like a pope. “It will be very different if we have a pope who is more worried about ideological topics of tradition than someone who makes the unity of the human family and care for the planet the first point in his agenda,” says Melloni. 

There are 252 cardinals, but only those under the age of 80 will take part in the conclave. Of the 133 cardinals that will vote, Francis appointed 108. That doesn’t mean that they will opt for someone cast in his mold.

Over the past several years, Francis sought to elevate bishops from underrepresented places such as Myanmar, Rwanda, and East Timor to the college of cardinals to better represent the scope of global Catholicism. Coming from wildly varying cultural backgrounds, they do not align on any consistent ideological spectrum. Many of them are more conservative on issues of homosexuality and women, even if they embrace Francis’ focus on other kinds of inclusivity. That makes for a very unpredictable vote, says Melloni. “It is not liberals vs. conservatives. It is not donkeys and elephants facing one another across the aisle. It is a collage of people divided into very small groups,” aligned by theological leanings, doctrinal philosophy, or missionary experience.

Given the stakes, the competing agendas, and the constantly shifting micro alliances and priorities, it is impossible to predict from the outset who will ultimately get support from two-thirds of a very divided electorate, faced with one of the most, if not the most, important decisions of their career. “The only thing we can say with any confidence is that we’ll have a male pope,” says Melloni, when pressed to hazard a guess for the outcome. 

When the great wooden doors of the Sistine Chapel close behind the electors on Wednesday afternoon, most of the politicking will have already been done, conducted in private over informal meetings and at dinners in the nearby guesthouse where the cardinals stay. Overt campaigning is frowned upon, but it is not uncommon for trusted ‘kingmaker’ cardinals to push for the candidates that share their values and vision for the church. 

Once the process starts, the cardinals cannot leave the conclave except in rare cases, and they are cut off from the rest of the word, with no access to phones, the internet or even newspapers (the word conclave comes from the Latin “with key,” as in, locked up.) 

Inside the chapel, the electors will share a brief prayer and take an oath to observe the sanctity of the process before handwriting the name of their chosen candidate on a piece of folded paper. One by one, the cardinals will deposit their votes in a special urn. Once voting is done, the votes are tallied, then burned. Special chemicals are added to change the color of the smoke.

The voting will continue for up to 13 days, at which point, if no candidate has received two-thirds of the vote, a runoff will take place between the top two. The longest conclave in the modern era lasted five days, but the past two, to elect Pope Francis in 2013 and Pope Benedict in 2005, lasted two days each. 

Francis may have been globally admired, but within the church hierarchy he was a polarizing figure. This could result in a drawn-out voting process as diverse groups within the electorate struggle to find common ground. 

“This time, there is a real debate between what you might call the continuity camp that wants to continue the Francis legacy, and what you might call the change camp, that wants to move in a different direction,” says John Allen, a longtime Vatican analyst and the editor of Crux, a catholic magazine. He notes that neither of those groups is likely to represent a two-thirds majority. “Almost inevitably, that means they’re going to have to go shopping for some kind of compromise candidate, somebody who satisfies at least some of what both of those camps are looking for.”

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As the first pope from Latin America, Pope Francis paved the way for a more open election, in which candidates from Africa and Asia, not just Europe, have been given serious consideration. The cardinals are more interested in what a pope stands for than what passport he holds, says Allen. “But if you found the right guy, somebody who ticked all the boxes in terms of what you’re looking for, and he happened to be African or to be Asian, that would be another argument in his favor.” 

The electors will prioritize leadership and doctrinal philosophy, he says, but they also have to think about the growth of the global church and its role in the world. “The Cardinals know that, quite frankly, an African Pope or an Asian Pope would be a sexy choice. Right out of the gate, that figure would have the attention of the entire world. Assuming he knows how to exploit that public interest adroitly, then that could parlay itself into effectiveness in terms of getting the Catholic message across.”

Once a candidate receives enough votes to become pope, he will pick a papal name, don a white cassock, and step onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s square. A senior cardinal will declare, “Habemus papam,” or “We have a pope,” at which point the new leader of the church will address the faithful for the first time. When Pope Francis stood on the balcony for the first time, he declined to wear the traditional ermine-fringed red cape, reflecting his desire for a simpler, more humble papacy. What the next pope wears will probably be one of the first indications of the kind of stamp he intends to put on his tenure. Either way, he will be wearing the weight of the world’s expectations.