Vatican Game That Never Ends: Knowns And Unknowns With Covering Next Papal Election

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(OPINION) It might seem ghoulish to outsiders, but the media have a duty to closely monitor news personalities’ retirement plans, health woes, aging processes and impending deaths, whether that of a British queen, U.S. president, Supreme Court justice, tycoon or even Hollywood superstar.

Or a pontiff.

Currently, there is a season of speculation about Pope Francis’ future and whether his newly chosen cardinals to be installed on August 27 are his final bid to shape the conclave that will elect the next pope.

Careful. If you figure he’s making sure it will be a fellow liberal, don’t forget that the conservative Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI named the cardinals who elected Francis.

Speaking of successors, Associated Press correspondent Nicole Winfield follows the Rome bureau’s legendary Victor Simpson, who covered four popes across 41 years. On Sunday, she knowledgeably sifted some Francis scenarios.

Francis has just announced that when the cardinals gather in August, he’ll visit the Italian hometown of St. Celestine V, the pope who famously resigned in A.D. 1294.

Pope Francis. Creative Commons photo

Surprisingly, Benedict did the same in 2013. So, is this trip a signal, or only a trip? Francis has remarked that Benedict was “opening the door” for resignation by future popes, hinting he might consider the idea. But Vaticanologists figure Francis will not resign so long as another former pope is alive.

At age 95, Benedict is alert but frail. Francis, age 85, appears reasonably healthy but underwent colon surgery last year and recently appeared in public in a wheelchair for the first time due to chronic knee pain.

Then there’s this: The cardinals elected Francis partly in hopes he’d reform the perpetually troubled Roman Curia — as in the sprawling Vatican bureaucracy. Restructure is now set in a Francis edict that took effect on Sunday. But fully implementing the scheme may be thorny, and Francis may feel a responsibility to pursue his project.

Surveying the batch of incoming cardinal electors, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego stands out as the only American and as a mere bishop, not an archbishop — see this Terry Mattingly “On Religion” column about the drama. Francis again snubbed nearby Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the Mexico-born head of the nation’s largest archdiocese and the elected president of the U.S. bishops. Did membership in the Opus Dei organization count against him?

Because McElroy aligns enthusiastically with Francis’ progressive churchmanship, his elevation appears to be a pointed papal message to the American bishops. And his career once again raises the problem of bishops’ scandalous performance on clergy sexual abuse of underage victims. You can tap conservative views on all that here and here.

Alongside his California gamesmanship, Francis wants more papal electors from the periphery of world Catholicism. As with Gomez, he bypassed Milan’s archbishop in favor of a mere bishop in neighboring Como, named a mere bishop in Nigeria instead of the capital city’s archbishop, and left power centers like Monterey, Paris and Philadelphia without their customary cardinals. A newsworthy omission is the most important leader in Eastern Rite Catholicism, Ukraine’s Sviatoslav Shevchuk.

Meanwhile, the Italian missionary “apostolic prefect” who tends the tiny flock in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, will vote on the next pope, alongside cardinals from East Timor, Paraguay, Brazil’s northern Amazon turf and India’s Dalit underclass.

America’s most-quoted Vatican expert has long been a political scientist, and Jesuit Father Thomas Reese of Religion News Service — simply because he knows his stuff — has clashed with the Vatican during more conservative times and makes himself available to pesky reporters. He explores the arithmetic of the new cardinal ranks here and sees the danger of a “deadlocked conclave” here.

Another prime analyst is layman John L. Allen Jr., editor of the online Crux. He says handicapping the next papal field is difficult. There are no obvious candidates among the new cardinals, and many are “relative unknowns” whose remote locations rule out many chances to mingle with their international colleagues.

Journalist and canon lawyer Ed Condon of The Pillar offers the important observation that Francis “has effectively ended the function of the college (of cardinals) as a regular advisory body” that his predecessors summoned twice a year for counsel.

Francis cut this to once a year, relies more on a small circle of advisors, and due to COVID-19, the August “Consistory” will be the first in two years. The next papal election conclave, Condon says, will be “a meeting among relative strangers.”

Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.