It is a favorite pastime of scribblers on the beat, and it is the job of the cardinals to be thinking about the next guy pretty much all the time. They are never more than a heartbeat away from having to discharge the primary duty of their office.
At least, they are always thinking about the profile of the next guy. It is not something constantly at the fore of the mind, but is more like a background function or subroutine.
That is, until it isn’t.
Commentators, both amateur and professional, sometimes complain that such prognostication is indecorous. Such complaints usually come from the side sympathetic to the incumbent. In any case, questions of propriety during the happy reign of a Roman Pontiff are moot now.
Handicapping the papal horse race, however, is still mostly a fool’s errand.
The Romans have an expression about conclaves: Chi entra ner conclave papa, ne risorte cardinale.
That’s Roman dialect for, “The one who goes into the conclave a pope, comes out a cardinal.” It isn’t invariably true, but it points to a general truth those of us on the outside do well to remember: The concerns of the men in the room are not those of the folks who aren’t.
So, for what it’s worth, here is my view of the cardinal electors’ concerns going into the conclave, offered as a sort of rudimentary profile sketch.
First of all, the electors will be looking for someone who is an institutionalist in terms of character and temperament but not a curial lifer. They will want someone, in other words, with knowledge of how the Roman apparatus of ecclesiastical government is supposed to work, but isn’t a cog in the Roman machine. This is largely because the machinery is not in any sort of repair. They will look for someone close enough to know how to fix it but far enough removed from it to be willing as well as able to do the needful without fear or favor.
That is a tough needle to thread.
They are going to want someone with an appreciation of the Church’s place in the international community and role in the international order. Someone with diplomatic experience will have an edge, then.
The other side of that coin is that the cardinals electing the next pope would likely prefer someone with a non-zero number of years in care of souls. They will want someone with pastoral experience, that is. At least, they will prefer someone with some experience in real pastoral government to someone with none, and the higher the level of experience the better.
Also, the nature of the papal office in the 21st century is spectacular. The ability to carry an audience is a premium. They will want someone who has stage presence and—this is a bigger deal than folks realize—can speak at least a few of the major world languages well enough to engage both individual interlocutors and a large public.
That said, they will want someone willing to stay home and govern, which means they will probably look for someone resistant to the allure of the limelight.
After all that, an exchange from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man comes to mind, between the heroine of the story (Marian Paroo) and her rather nosy but wise and surprisingly worldly mother, over Marian’s spurning of “Prof.” Harold Hill, a travelling salesman come to River City, Iowa—the ladies’ home town—who expressed some interest in Marian:
Marian Paroo: Do you think that I’d allow a common masher—? Now, really, mama. I have my standards where men are concerned, and I have no intention…
Mrs. Paroo: I know all about your standards and if you don’t mind my sayin’ so there’s not a man alive who could hope to measure up to that blend of Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat, and Noah Webster you’ve concocted for yourself out of your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness, and your li’berry full of books!
Even if those qualities are more in tension with one another than flatly contradictory, they should be a very tall order to fill, indeed.
A final consideration, one rather beside the particulars of the profile, is that Francis’s successor is highly unlikely to have much of a honeymoon.
Francis was great for news copy, right from the get-go. He carefully fostered a narrative that the scribbling and chattering classes were frequently happy to adopt. Beyond the curiosity of novelty, there is not likely to be much new relationship energy.
Whoever he is, the new guy should get a hard look.
The most the cardinals can hope for is a general willingness to give the new guy a fair shake.
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Also a «sense» of the divine incarnate, the divine transcendent, the divine immanent, the numinous character of the divine, the mysterium tremendum of divine worship and the awesome office of Vicar of Christ.
Get that right and all the rest should be child’s play.
The only real option for a creditable Pope for my money is a man who comes straight out of a monastery – someone who has learned to live the contemplative life of a monk. Necessarily, this would then be a man who knows what the vow of stability is i.e. being attached to a certain place i.e. Rome and not a peripatetic nightmare who’s given to interviews in the rear of airplanes. A man who has developed the habit of prayer during all hours of the day. Hopefully, this monk,having been schooled in obedience, has a certain modicum of humility. This would be a man who’s not used to being idolized as a rock star but prefers to give God all the glory. And, coming from the monastic tradition, this would be a man who is a thinker – schooled in theology and thoughtful about Church teaching every time he opens his mouth.
There’s got to be a monk somewhere who can lead the Church and for whom Christ is the one and only center of the Church.
A monk might be good as Pope, but would he have the political skills to get elected?
And that’s the nub of it. Some of us are fed up with ‘clergy as power broker.’ We’ve certainly seen enough of clergy who are smitten with the lusts for money, sex and power – none of which are adequate substitutes for Jesus Christ.
Gregory the Great (540-604) had been a monk, but at the other end of the short spectrum Celestine V (c. 1210-1296) resigned the papacy after only five months (the precedent for Benedict XVI’s resignation).
What’s needed, possibly, is a monk for Pope, together with a street-savy Secretary of State who can clean out the fouled nest as well as maneuver wisely in a world politically in free-fall.
Better yet, this and a coherent team of cardinals–some in charge of dicasteries restored to the level of Congregations. And, yet, also capable of fostering an institutional/charismatic Church as both an “ecclesial assembly” (Benedict XVI’s “communio”) and as a “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) as the guardian of the doctrinal truth about God and (the moral truth) about Man (Veritatis Splendor)…
…
What the Second Vatican Council already meant when the assembled Successors of the Apostles affirmed: “Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love [!], fully reveals man to himself [!] and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
For something completely different from the last 12 years of “business as usual,” the profile sketch of a Pontiff might be somewhat enriched over and above the 5 secondary attributes mentioned, if by the grace of God the Church was granted a courageous good shepherd who preaches Christ, instead of himself and his personal politics.
May we all be conformed to the beauty of Christ.
As a better amplification of my earlier comment, today’s essay at TCT by Fr. Paul Scalia.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/
I just want to see a Pope who hasn’t given up on the United States of America.
He doesn’t have to be an American, but I would like to have someone who respects all the good that we do in the world and the sacrifices that we have made and continue to make to help other countries, and at the same time, recognizes the diversity in our nation–nationalities, religions, topographies, cultures, technology, wealth distribution and freedom in our economy, our democratic form of government, and our Constitution–all of which often leads to divisions of belief and practice in the U.S. that no doubt give the impression to the world that we are a tempestuous country.
JMO.
Amen, Mrs. Whitlock. I agree with you. The flip side is that Americans have long ago come to terms with the reality that the good we have done, from the spread of democratic ideals, to donating billions in international aid to the poor, fighting other nation’s wars against tyranny, conquering disease, landing on the moon, medical advances, on and on and ON, will never be recognized. The world hates us, our accomplishments, our unbridled confidence, and everything we stand for. But, newsflash, it’s also been long established that we DO NOT CARE if we are hated. In fact, we have not cared since 1776.In the annoyingly cheerful manner which only Americans can exude, we will bump along to the next “impossible” situation. And fix it. It would surely be nice if our sacrifices AND accomplishments were acknowledged by the next Pope. But the Pope who recently vacated the seat of Peter appointed 109 his like-minded successors, who likely share his left leaning views about everything, and will be unlikely to be more “American friendly” than the Pope we just buried.
Must the papacy be ruled by the needs of the machinery? Why, we have multitudes of machinery mechanics. The managerial class. Chanceries are filled with them. Multilingual? English is our international language, from the Maasai in the Serengeti to as far as the Nepalese in the Himalayas [besides the modest Brits have long held that God is an Englishman].
Chances are that chances are a company man will be subject to well entrenched company men. They’re a wicked bunch. Rumor has it they pressured dear, saintly John Paul II, as well as dear, saintly Benedict XVI to quit, finally succeeding to ‘get their man’. Be assured! They’re working hard for a repeat. If not, as some have divined, someone worse.
To blazes with the machinery and the expected, preordained exercise in skulduggery. Pray God raise a holy peasant whose love is for Christ alone and for the salvation of his sheep.
Is the pope Catholic? a rhetorical question, at one time.
Having had Vatican postage stamps depicting the hero of the «protestant revolt», Martin Luther, Pachamamas and similar placed on altars, scandalous pluralistic «Assisi» events, sentimental oecumenism, flirtations with novel heresies etc. a return to that rhetorical principle where popes are unashamedly, unambiguously Catholic beckons.
Concern for things of this world, once interpreted through a Catholic prism in contrast to any agency of temporal transience might return to that optic.
The schmoozing with «aggiornamento», being up-to-date, hip, cool and so forth beloved of our forefathers requires critical reavaluation.
The Holy Catholic Church is two thousand years old, wisdom is supposed to come with age. May the next pope, a successor to Saint Peter, manifest that.
A note on my previous comment, that it is not a repudiation of Altieri’s as usual accurate assessments of Vatican politics. Rather it’s a hope that another scenario may prevail.
In an interview on April 23 requested by the Italian media Fuori dal Coro, Archbishop Vigano examined the recent and future papacy. This is the interview requested by the editorial staff of “Fuori dal Coro”. Without any explanation and without any apology from the editorial staff it was not published:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-shares-interview-fuori-dal/
I simply pray for a good and holy pope who will restore the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form and eliminate the illegal restriction that PF placed upon it in direct contravention to Pius V’s Quo Primum. Nothing else matters to me. Not plastic straws in our oceans. Nothing else. Restoring the highest form of prayer in our Catholic faith is all that I ask.