VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
USA Today [McLean VA]
May 2, 2025
By Michael Loria
At private dinners throughout Rome and at formal gatherings of hundreds of cardinals, talk among church leaders of who will next lead the church has certainly already begun.
The pope has died. Hundreds of cardinals are gathering in Rome. The secret ballot for a successor hasn’t begun. But among church leaders, talk about who will next lead the 2,000-year-old church is already underway, according to experts.
Pope Francis, the first head of the Catholic Church from the Americas and a champion of people on the margins, passed away at age 88 on Easter Monday, leaving vacant his seat at the head of the ancient institution with 1.4 billion followers worldwide. Around 250 cardinals were summoned to Italy for business, including the pope’s funeral and chief among their duties — electing the 267th head of the church.
Yet, the drama of papal selection has already begun. The days before the conclave May 7 at the Vatican are not idle, and an unspoken selection process is already underway amid whispers in corridors and cafes throughout Rome and other cities in Italy.
“This is very much the crucial period, in fact, simply because in any election you need momentum,” Robert Harris, the author of the novel behind the blockbuster film Conclave, told USA TODAY. “I don’t know how you can do that without being pretty well-known and the best period to become well-known is now.”
There’s a lot happening right now in terms of papal politics and posturing. The week ahead of the conclave is just as important as the conclave itself, many experts say.
Selection of the next pope will happen at the Sistine Chapel under the watchful eyes of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, where cardinals vote under an oath of secrecy. The mystery of what happens behind the locked doors has inspired books, podcasts and the Conclave film nominated for best picture at the most recent Academy Awards.
At private meals and over aperitifs throughout Rome and at formal gatherings of cardinals, church leaders are finding who they trust to take over. The process is not all that unlike the wheeling and dealing made famous in the writings of 15th-century diplomat and philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, another noted centerpiece of Italian history.
“A lot of very important groundwork is done at this point because the rules are more relaxed around talking,” said Harris, who came to writing thriller novels from a career as a political journalist. “One mustn’t think of this like an election where someone is going around saying, ‘Vote for me,’ that would be the kiss of death. But they have their supporters saying, ‘I think you should come and see Cardinal X or Y.’”
Papal posturing in Rome
Over 130 cardinals will vote in the conclave, which is limited to those under age 80. Francis appointed 108 of them. Most come from Europe but they also represent 20 African nations as well as Asian nations from Iraq and Iran to China and Indonesia.
Many might have never met before and the days leading up to the conclave are when they become acquainted.
The 117 non-voting cardinals will also make the most of the period. They may not be able to vote for the next pope, but they still hold a tremendous amount of sway and pre-conclave days are their only chance to voice what they think the church needs.
Much of the pre-conclave debate happens at formal gatherings of cardinals called general congregations. Church leaders rarely divulge specifics of the meetings, but the story of Francis’ own election goes back to a speech he gave at an assembly during the pre-conclave period in 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI stepped down.
Experts on goings-on at the Vatican say there are already signs of clear potential successors, seen in Cardinal Baltazar Enrique Porras Cardozo hinting the vote won’t take long, according to John L. Allen Jr., editor of Crux, a Catholic news outlet.
“I was struck that Porras, the cardinal from Venezuela, told reporters after he came out of the general congregation that he thinks this conclave is going to be over in two days,” Allen, the veteran Vatican whisperer, told USA TODAY over the phone from Rome. “That would suggest a consensus is beginning to form. He didn’t say around whom, but he at least gave the impression that’ there’s a kind of agreement starting to take shape.”
Cardinals have less than a week before they will be sequestered at the Sistine Chapel and voting begins.
Private lunches, dinners and drinks
Cardinals raise the question of who will make a good pope more directly at private lunches, dinners and over drinks throughout the Italian capital, according to Allen.
Talk of who could be the next pope goes on well beyond the walls of Vatican City, according to Allen, an American correspondent based in Rome for the past 30 years.
“These are also opportunities to grind the political sausage and in those situations the conversation is also very direct, ‘What do you think of so and so,’” said Allen. “That’s exactly what this period is for.”
Restaurants that cardinals prefer, Allen said, include L’Eau Vive, a simple but elegant French restaurant located across the River Tiber from the Vatican.
Cardinals like it for the atmosphere as much as the poulet. The restaurant is run by women who are consecrated members of the Les Travailleuses Missionnaires de l’Immaculée, a Catholic religious society.
Diners eat in view of a portrait of the group’s inspiration: St. Thérèse of Lisieux. And at 10 p.m. the staff takes a break in service to sing the Salve Regina, a Gregorian chant praising Mary that dates back to at least the 1200s.
Another destination for the small groups of cardinals is the Borgo neighborhood, a warren of medieval alleys filled with classic Italian eateries that lies in the shadow of Hadrian’s Mausoleum.
The rise of Cardinal Ratzinger – later Pope Benedict XVI – is traced back to a block of cardinals that formed over plates of pasta and bottles of wine at Al Passetto di Borgo, just beyond the Vatican.
Despite tempting Roman eateries however many cardinals prefer to dine “out of the spotlight,” Allen said. They gather at apartments of colleagues based in Rome or at the headquarters of religious orders.
According to Allen, cardinals so far are signaling they want a pope who can take up Francis’ mantle of leading by compassionate, positive example but will also appease conservative elements in the church by clarifying doctrinal matters Francis left murky, including the church’s stance on LGBTQ+ matters.
“They want someone who can inspire people and attract them to the faith, especially in the West and above all in Europe where the church is in trouble to be frank— they want a pope who can light a fire,” Allen said. But also someone “who can hold his own on the world stage with the Donald Trumps, Vladimir Putins and Xi Xin Pings because the world is going through an uncertain time where the old pillars of the world order seem to be falling apart.”
What it takes to be ‘Papabile’
Congregations of cardinals, where potentially all 252 cardinals assemble to discuss pressing church matters, are the most public part of the pre-conclave process.
General congregations traditionally serve the function of preparing for the pope’s funeral and the days of mourning for the deceased, according to Bry Jensen, a historian and host of a podcast specializing on papal history.
But after the pope is buried, cardinals at the general congregations often turn their attention to the pressing question of who will become the next pope.
They address the question indirectly through speeches on what the church needs and what makes a cardinal “papabile” or fit to be pope, according to the host of the Pontifacts podcast. The name of the show is a play on the traditional name of the pope, Pontifex.
“This is where we see the jockeying,” said Jensen, noting that influential cardinals over 80 will especially make use of the period. “And because we have a lot of very prominent cardinals over 80, this is where they get their chance.”
There are 117 non-voting cardinals, according to the Vatican.
Cardinals have held at least seven general congregations so far. Official news from the Vatican about the assemblies lands like a dull sermon.
A total of 183 cardinals attended the assembly on Tuesday, according to the Vatican’s official news outlet. Of those, 124 were voting cardinals and around 20 gave speeches.
The Vatican summarized them as addressing “themes related to the Church and the challenges it faces, offering reflections shaped by the perspectives of their continents and regions of origin, as well as the Church’s possible responses.”
Jensen said Vaticanologists watch for what cardinals outside the formal gatherings for a sense of what’s going on in private, noting Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a conservative from Germany, warned that the church could split if an orthodox successor isn’t chosen.
“It’s a question of do we want to stick with Francis or break towards traditionalism,” Jensen said. “The fact that Müller felt the need to come out and say that tells me the discussion is more Francis oriented.”
Pope Francis’ pre-conclave reveal
General congregations can also be a chance for a frontrunner to emerge like Francis did in 2013.
At an assembly then, Francis gave a compelling four-minute speech on the need for the church to take up its mission again of exercising compassion for people at the margins of society. Church leaders saw then that the man they could trust was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then the archbishop of Buenos Aires.
“That’s where the cardinal electors said, hmmm, this is probably going to be a good candidate,” according to Father Aris Sison, a spokesperson of the Diocese of Cubao in the Philippines. “We need a church that is going to focus outside itself.”
Francis’ speech later became seen as a blueprint for his approach to leading the church. In it, he notably used the term “peripheries,” referring to expanding the church outreach to downtrodden people.
The term became a hallmark of his papacy, eventually earning him the epithet the “pope of the peripheries.”
Jockeying under a watchful Eye
Amid widespread speculation over who will be the next pope, theologians say the faithful look at pre-conclave jockeying as a chance for the divine to intervene in human matters.
A new pope “doesn’t fall like manna from heaven,” according to Jennifer Newsome Martin, a theologian at Notre Dame. “There’s a very real process of arguing for positions. It’s a human process that respects the rationality and thinking of cardinals around what the church needs at this moment.”
The longtime Catholic university professor highlighted the church’s longevity as an example of jockeying being guided by a higher power.
“From a theological point of view and that of a practicing Catholic, the Catholic Church is obviously a flawed institution insofar as it’s filled with human beings,” she said. “But also the truth of the matter is that it’s endured for so many years, so there’s something in the apostolic process that makes it durable and not just the object of contingent forces.”
She added: “These are holy men who are praying and invested in the outcome, and it’s hard to untangle the human from divine acts.”
(This story has been updated to correct a misspelling/typo.)