In all the uncertainty that precedes any conclave to elect a pontiff, there is at least one thing we know for sure about the composition of the conclave that will name a successor to Pope Francis – it will be like no other before.
His desire to reach out to the peripheries applied not alone to those on the edges of society, but geographically too.
During his 12 years as pope, he appointed cardinals from 76 countries, 25 of which had never been represented in the College of Cardinals before. They include Sweden, Haiti, Myanmar, El Salvador, Luxembourg and South Sudan.
There are 252 members of the college, 135 of whom are under the age of 80 and so eligible to vote in a conclave. However, all cardinals can take part in discussions that precede the conclave. This would include Ireland’s only college member, Cardinal Seán Brady, former archbishop of Armagh, who is 85 and therefore cannot vote.
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Of the cardinal electors, 80 per cent were appointed by Pope Francis, which may indicate his successor just might be in the same mould.
One can be sure of almost nothing when it comes to a conclave. This adds to the belief of those who still hold that the Holy Spirit is at work in choosing the man most likely to be pope.
But even the most theologically literate of popes, Benedict XVI, had doubts about this.
In 1997, as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said in an interview with Bavarian television, when asked whether or not the Holy Spirit chooses the pope: “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.”
Hardly a confident endorsement.
The most important phase in the election of the next pope will occur this weekend when many of the 135 cardinal electors will meet each other for the first time. .
It is expected, as happened in 2013 before Francis was elected, that in the days or even weeks following his funeral next Saturday, all cardinals will gather in a series of special meetings – named general congregations – to discuss the future of the church and take stock of who might be best suited.
There were seven such meetings before the election of Francis and he spoke at only one of them. .
As Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, he said he wished for a church that was not consumed with “theological narcissism” or “spiritual worldliness” but instead goes to the “peripheries” to find wounded souls. He denounced what he called the “self-referential” tendency of the church to remain closed in on itself, unwilling to open its doors and go out to find those who most need God’s comfort.
“The evil that can afflict church institutions over time has its root in this self-referential nature, a sort of theological narcissism.”
He said the future pope should be a man who, contemplating Jesus, “helps the church go to the existential peripheries and helps it to be a fertile mother who lives from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelising”.
He spoke off the cuff and we know what he said then only because Havana’s then-archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, was so taken by what Bergoglio said that he asked for a copy of his speech. There was none.
So the future pope wrote a note of what he had said, as best as he could remember, for his Cuban counterpart. Clearly, Cardinal Ortega was not the only one impressed by his Argentinian colleague on that occasion.
Francis’s appointments to the College of Cardinals over the past 12 years have considerably lessened the number of Europeans among its number, but the continent, home to 20.4 per cent of the world’s Catholics, remains significantly over-represented.
Up to 40 per cent of the cardinals are European, down from 51 per cent in 2013. North America accounts for 10 per cent of the college, down from 12 per cent 12 years ago.
In all other regions, the representation is up: the Asia-Pacific region accounts for 18 per cent of voting-age cardinals, up from 10 per cent in 2013. The Latin America-Caribbean region is represented by 18 per cent of cardinals in the college, up from 17 per cent in 2013.
Today, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 12 per cent of cardinals, up from 8 per cent, while the Middle East-North Africa region has 3 per cent of the college, up from 2 per cent when Francis was named pope.
Ironically, and despite Francis’s efforts, his own Latin America-Caribbean region remains the most under-represented in the college. Home to 41 per cent of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, it has just 18 per cent of the church’s cardinals.
