ROME
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 17, 2013
Rome —
Two days before the conclave opened to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI on March 12, Cardinal Philippe of Lyon, France, candidly confessed to reporters gathered outside his titular church in Rome that the voters didn’t have their act together.
“There are three, four, maybe a dozen candidates,” Barbarin said, leaving observers with the impression of a crowded field lacking a clear front-runner, and perhaps a long and difficult election ahead.
As things turned out, Barbarin needn’t have worried.
It took the cardinals just five ballots to settle on Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the next pope, despite the fact that most them said afterwards they hadn’t gone in thinking of him as the obvious choice to be their next boss. Bergoglio had been the runner-up eight years ago, but most cardinals said this time they wanted an “energetic” pope, and a 76-year-old with one lung didn’t seem the most obvious candidate.
Trying to make sense of the result for themselves, cardinals who spoke to NCR on background in the days after the conclave said that what turned this longshot into a consensus candidate was the intersection of three basic forces:
.. • A strong anti-establishment mood, which expressed itself as an informal veto against any Italian candidate and any candidate out of the Roman Curia;
• A desire to elect a pope who could put a face on the burgeoning Catholic footprint in the developing world, which in practice meant the hunt was on for a Latin American;
• A process of elimination inside the conclave that one cardinal described this way: “Not him, not him, and not him, therefore him.”
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