Who chooses the pope—God or the cardinals?

In the interregnum between the death of Pope Francis and the conclave to elect his successor, a quotation from Pope Benedict XVI—then Cardinal Ratzinger—has been making the rounds on social media. It comes from a 1997 interview on Bavarian television, wherein Ratzinger was asked if the Holy Spirit is responsible for who is elected pope.

Beginning with a chuckle, he responded:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.

Ratzinger was, as usual, correct—but we need to attend carefully to what he says and how he says it.

The Holy Spirit isn’t responsible for the pope in the sense that he picks him out, takes control of the affair, and dictates the candidate for whom the cardinals must vote. In other words, the election of the pope is not a supernatural lightning bolt, wherein the ideal candidate is presented to the electors, who have no choice but to accept what’s been ordained.

Ratzinger is dead right: This cannot be how it works. If it were, the freedom of the cardinals in making their decision would be compromised; moreover, we wouldn’t expect to see, as we do, bad popes like Alexander VI periodically cropping up in the history of the Church. Dante famously placed Boniface VIII in the inferno of his Divine Comedy; whether he was right about that pontiff’s eternal fate or not, one thing is certain: we don’t exactly see an unbroken chain of great saints in the office across the past two thousand years.

However, in overzealously heading off that error, we can easily fall directly into the arms of the opposite error: believing, or at least insinuating, that the Holy Spirit essentially vacates the process, abandoning the Church to a pope that thwarts or frustrates God’s will for his Church. In short, we begin to think we might not only get a bad pope but the “wrong” pope, the cardinals parting ways with the path of the Holy Spirit.

In this dysfunctional and dangerous mindset, Ratzinger’s words not only become a kind of insurance policy against depression should the “worst-case scenario” walk out on the loggia; they’re warped in such a way as to immanentize and politicize this solemn assembly of the Church’s authority, exercised under the wings of the Holy Spirit.

Ratzinger, for his part, is careful not to go there. He acknowledges the sense in which the Holy Spirit isn’t responsible: the electors are free to make their choice, even if it’s a bad one. But at the same time, he also acknowledges the sense in which the Holy Spirit is responsible: the Spirit’s elastic, educative approach ultimately envelops the process and shields the barque of Peter from shipwreck. When we accentuate the first truth at the expense of the second—or, for that matter, the second at the expense of the first—we’re off the mark.

This apparent contradiction is, of course, one of the great paradoxes of the Faith: the convergence of divine providence and human freedom. God divinely governs all that we do, and everything that happens, whether good or ill, is an expression either of his active or permissive will. At the same time, human beings are truly free and have their own natural autonomy within the order of creation.

But, however we square these two truths, Catholics must square them, holding to both simultaneously. If we deny the first, we make God a passive witness to the world rather than its Lord; if we deny the second, we make man a helpless slave to fate rather than truly responsible for what he does. The same dynamics are at work in the pull between grace and freedom in the drama of salvation: if we undercut the first, we fall into Pelagianism, and if we overlook the second, we fall into Jansenism.

If God’s providential care extends over the whole of humanity in a general way—as Jesus tells us, even all the hairs on our head are counted (Matt. 10:30)—how much more so in the election of the Vicar of Christ to serve as the head of 1.4 billion Catholics? So much is at stake in the election of the pope—so many important decisions to be made, and so many souls to be won—that, far from one reality or the other vanishing, both can only be heightened, and the tension of the paradox intensified.

The cardinals are imbued with a powerful choice and responsibility, yes; but who they choose is ultimately in accord with deep movements of the Spirit of God as he guides his Church. This paradox explains why we see not only great mistakes but also grave horrors enacted by Churchmen in history, including popes and cardinals and bishops—corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst)—and also why God continues to draw ever-greater goods out of those very falls. God not only shields the Church from disaster; he can also write straight with crooked cardinals’ crooked lines—all within the designs of his will for the Church.

When the new pope emerges on the loggia, whatever his theological stripes, some of his cheerleaders may think to themselves that the Holy Spirit has dramatically intervened and secured the best man for the job. Some of his skeptics, on the other hand, might think that the Holy Spirit has just abandoned the premises and left the cardinals to pick the wrong person.

Neither would be right, and both would be thinking not as God does but as human beings do. Instead, the decision of the cardinal electors will resound with the same unified but distinctive force as that declaration of the first apostles: “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” (Acts 15:28).