De Civitate's Very Traditional Papal Betting Pool: 2025 Edition

Featuring a conclave preview and some handicapping!

No Pope yet!

The Beginning

Twenty years ago, I organized my first papal betting pool. I was 15. I wrote up a one-page sheet of papabili¹ bios, circulated it among classmates at high school,² collected their $1 bets, and distributed the pot—a lucrative $14—to the winner. I was doing this for the fun of it, hoping to get my diffident classmates excited about the first election of a new pope in our lifetimes, so I deliberately picked a candidate who wouldn’t win. It would be the height of gauche for the organizer of the pool to win the pool. So I picked a doomed candidate I happened to really like. He was too old, too closely connected to the John Paul II regime, and had too much of a reputation as “God’s Rottweiler” to win, even though I thought he’d make a great pope. I was happy to lose my $1 on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Of course, +Ratzinger was soon known by his new name, Papa Benny aka The Emperor. To this day, I remember the look of betrayal on James McGlinch’s face when he found out that I, the organizer, had taken his dollar and won it for myself. Did Heaney have inside information? Does he have Vatican connections? I’m sorry, James. It was, sincerely, an accident.

The Middle

Eight years later, Benedict resigned, so I organized my second papal betting pool. De Civitate had just recently launched, so now I could host it online to connect with all my readers!³ Again, I just wanted to have fun and teach myself and others about the 2013 papabili.⁴

To my great relief, I did not win.⁵ To my even greater relief, however, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was on my list of papabili. Some overlooked him, but De Civ kept its two dozen readers informed!

This was also the first conclave where someone objected that a papal betting pool might be immoral. If you participate out of greed or addiction rather than fun and bonhomie, it could be… but it is not immoral intrinsically. Catholics may bet with a clear conscience, if they do so in a healthy spirit. (That said, many find it merely unseemly. This is quite defensible, and I have no beef with those who refrain.)

The Now: Rules for Papal Betting Pool 2025

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I was pretty torn about running a betting pool this year, but, on Saturday, my sister convinced me to run it.⁶ So here it is: One bet costs $5. Winner takes the pot. Multiple winners split.⁷ If you all lose, pot goes to charity. I won’t bet.⁸

Sound like fun? Click here:

De Civitate's Very Traditional 2025 Papal Betting Pool:

https://www.jamesjheaney.com/popebets

Bets stay open until the minute the conclave starts on May 7!⁹

Oooo, and Substack allows buttons now!

How I Think It Will Go Down

Since I’m not betting, I am going to tell you everything on my mind. It isn’t much more than a collection of loose thoughts.

Who is Eligible?

Any baptized Catholic male can be elected pope. I could be elected pope. If I accepted election (a big if), I would be immediately ordained a priest and consecrated a bishop upon my election. I believe I would have to take a take a vow to never have sex with my wife again.¹⁰ Because my wife, as my spouse, has an entitlement to sex with me, my understanding¹¹ is that she, too, would have to consent to my election as pope before I could be consecrated as Pope Celestine VI.¹²

(As I’ve said for years, every Catholic man of age should have his regnal name picked out, just in case.)

As a practical matter, however, that isn’t going to happen. No currently-married person has been named pope since Pope Adrian II in 867, before the modern election system (and, besides that, he was already 75 years old). The last currently-married pope before that was likely Pope St. Peter, who was also the last Pope we can say with confidence was actually the one and only choice of the Holy Spirit.

Credit: @MadocCairns

Conclaves have occasionally elected holy men or monks, but not in over 600 years. The truth is that the current governing law of conclaves, Universi Domenici Gregis, barely contemplates the election of a pope outside the Sistine Chapel, much less outside the city of Rome. It is also difficult to imagine a specific monk with a high enough global profile to be supported by 90 out of 135 cardinals. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, the last time we went on a run of elevating non-cardinals, there were generally fewer than 20 cardinals present and voting—and they still sometimes only resorted to non-cardinals due to deadlock or external pressure.

This time, I think the odds of a sitting cardinal being elected are well above 99%, and the odds of the winner being a voting cardinal (that is, a cardinal under the age of 80 and not named Becciu) are north of 95%. My betting pool will accept any bet—feel free to put $5.00 on me, if you want!—but almost everyone focuses exclusively on sitting cardinals, and I think that is the right move.

Expect the Unexpected

On the other hand, all conclaves are unpredictable. Unlike American elections, where practically everyone makes up their mind before the candidates have even picked out a font and then the campaigns spend $2 billion trying to persuade six undecided Hispanic truckers from East Lansing who consume an average of 15.7 microseconds of news per month, the conclave is a small deliberative body with rules designed to drive deliberation and consensus. Most cardinals change their votes during a conclave, usually more than once! Even if we could poll them without getting excommunications all ‘round, a race like this is inherently unpollable, because the voters are so likely to change their minds.

On the other other hand, conclaves are not quite as unpredictable as people like to think. Remember that old Douglas Adams parable about Brockian Ultra-Cricket?

Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall around them. The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what's going on leads them to imagine that it's a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

There’s a lot of this in conclave reporting. People are like, “Oh my God! The conclave elected Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina, the first non-European pope in centuries! Nobody ever heard of this guy! Nobody saw it coming!” when plenty of people did, in fact, see it coming. He was on De Civ’s Top 18 papabili list, and I’m no genius. I got my list from reading other lists in circulation at the time. Pope Francis was in very few Top 5’s, but I think he was in everybody’s Top 20. I even know a young woman who correctly predicted he would be pope, but she refused to bet in my pool because she saw it as inappropriate, which was a real bummer for me because I had really wanted someone to win my betting pool!

Pope Benedict was in everybody’s Top 10, so that was no great surprise. Pope John Paul I (who reigned for most of September 1978) was in everybody’s Top 10, too, but few were paying attention because the Top 2 that year (+Pignedoli and +Siri) were seen as so strong. Pope John Paul II, though often presented as a complete nobody from nowhere, overlooked by all because he wasn’t Italian at a time when all popes were Italian, actually emerged for the same reason: right-wing Siri and left-wing Benelli couldn’t get to two-thirds, a compromise was needed, and +Wojtyła had been on a lot of Top 10 lists.

My point is this: the person elected pope is nearly always papabile, even when history, to make a more exciting story, turns around and pretends they weren’t.

Under ordinary circumstances, then, I would say there’s a 95% chance that the winner will be one of the 20 papabile listed today on CollegeOfCardinalsReport.com, an 80% chance it will be one of the Top 10 contenders,¹³ and a 50% chance it will be one of the Top 2 (Parolin or Tagle).

Under ordinary circumstances.

This brings us to the other other other hand: this conclave is more unpredictable than most. Pope Francis named a lot of the cardinals in this conclave, and many of them are from far-flung locations, with low media profiles and few contacts in the hierarchy. (This is, on balance, a good thing.) Francis also got annoyed at the college of cardinals in 2015, so he stopped scheduling meetings with them.¹⁴ There was one more meeting of the college in 2022, and that was that. Many of the cardinals have never met one another. Few know each other well. (This is, on balance, a bad thing.)

In the old days, you didn’t need that many meetings, because the European old boys’ club all knew one another anyway, but Francis deliberately broke that pattern without adding more getting-to-know-you sessions. As a result, we have a lot of cardinals showing up in Rome who are mostly unknown quantities to the world press, and who don’t know one another, either. This is an explosive mix of unknowns! Once they meet each other for the pre-conclave general congregations, they may form new cliques in unexpected configurations that throw the whole papabili list out the window.

(Of course, clueless voters have been known to act like those six Hispanic truckers from East Lansing: they might be more inclined to vote for the big, well-recognized names, because they don’t know any better.)

On the other other other other hand, Pope Francis didn’t just name a lot of cardinals from his oft-discussed “periphery.” Francis also used his power to create cardinals who agreed with him ideologically.

All popes do this, of course. However, the power has been much stronger since 1970 (just two conclaves ago), when Pope Paul VI legislated that only cardinals under age 80 can vote.¹⁵ Because cardinals are, usually, already old the day they are named, they hit 80 relatively quickly, which means there is a lot more churn in the voting membership than there used to be—meaning they have to be replaced more often, meaning the sitting pope has proportionately more influence in selecting the voters who will replace him. As I mentioned recently, Francis used this power aggressively, routinely bypassing traditional cardinalatial sees to snub right-wing bishops and elevate left-wing ones.

As The Pillar shows, he got a lot of bites at this apple:

This degree of influence over the college of cardinals has very reasonably led many to expect a relatively straightforward election: the conclave is mostly Francis Men, so they will probably elect another Francis Man.

On the other other other other other hand, look at the 2013 conclave. Nominally, it was 40% JP2 Men. However, Benedict adored JP2 more than life itself and selected JP2 Men himself, so, really, the 2013 conclave was 100% JP2 Men. Nevertheless, in 2013, amid curial corruption and other rising problems in the Church, and then especially in the face of Benedict’s abrupt resignation, Benedict’s papacy was seen as ending in failure, a kind of post-John Paul II “franchise fatigue.” So a room full of JP2 Men elected Pope Francis, who is about as close as you could get to the antithesis of JP2 in the 2013 college of cardinals.

You just never know with these things, and, when we break the college down into factions, it becomes a little more obvious how this conclave might decide to elect someone quite different from a Pope Francis Man.

The Factions

There are two basic views of faction within the Catholic Church generally, and in the college of cardinals specifically. These are summed up by two tweets that twoted this very week:

On this very common view, the Church is quite simply above politics. You can’t talk about right-wing and left-wing when it comes to a Church where orthodox positions map so badly onto conventional (American & European) politics. Each cardinal on the papabile list has a remarkable biography, enormous achievements and learning, and a special charisma for Christ that has helped him rise so far in the service of the servants of God. It is an embarrassment for a papabile to know “only” three languages fluently.

Such richness cannot be flattened into a single dimension! Calling a cardinal “conservative” or “progressive”, when all serve the one Jesus Christ, is a wild over-simplification no Catholic who actually knows anything about Catholic Church would ever do.

The other view:

In his source document, Mr. Carbo does not refer to them as “conservatives” and “liberals.” He calls them the “righteous” and the “modernists.” (In Catholicism, “modernism” is the technical term for a serious heresy.) He only repackaged them as “conservatives” and “liberals” for easier online consumption.

(Something to note: the purple cardinals Carbo lists as “centrists” are often not so much known centrists as actual complete unknowns who simply couldn’t be mapped.)

Come to think of it, my own view of this disagreement can also be summed up in a stupid meme:

Here’s the thing: all electorates have disagreements. Those disagreements always drive the voters into different camps. Those camps always have opposite views on the issues that the electorate considers most pressing. How could they not? People disagree! They compromise on things they don’t think are important, and they polarize on the things that they do. They eventually sort themselves into camps. Those camps can be placed on a spectrum, from “pro-the-thing-we-most-disagree-about” to “anti-that-thing.” Even if there are more than two camps (like in multi-party systems like Canada or the U.K.), all camps usually fit in somewhere along that spectrum. For example, in England, there are four parties, but they all fit on the same spectrum: far-left, center-left, center-right, far-right. Issues are always changing, so the parties are always churning and reconfiguring and shifting their place on the spectrum, but the spectrum is always there at the bottom.

The college of cardinals is not immune to basic laws of human political behavior. There are camps. We can label them. Cardinal Sarah and Cardinal Tagle are very different. Cardinal Burke and Cardinal McElroy are also very different. The salient differences between these two pairs, however, are mostly the same: Sarah and Burke are on one said, while Tagle and McElroy are on the opposite side.

You can certainly add to this analysis by adding extra layers and explaining deeper complexities. By all means, bring on the twenty-axis analysis! However, to a first approximation, of course the cardinals can be divided into right-wingers and left-wingers.

The one thing you must remember when you do this is that the Catholic left-right spectrum is very different from the American left-right spectrum, which in turn is very different from the British left-right spectrum or the Hungarian left-right spectrum. Every electorate can be put on a spectrum from left to right, but those spectra don’t match up, because different electorates care about different issues in different ways.¹⁶ Sure, there is some overlap between the American Right/Left and the Catholic Right/Left, especially since politics is displacing religion as the spiritual center of American life. Nevertheless, the Catholic Right at least nominally supports universal health care, the Catholic Left is at least nominally opposed to killing the unborn, and the biggest issues in the Church bear only occasional resemblance to the biggest issues in America.

To a first approximation, then, I think Carbo’s chart is pretty useful for helping us understand what’s going to happen in the conclave. Here’s another one of his:

Source

To help you calibrate what is meant by “conservative” and “progressive” on this spectrum: Carbo has said he would list Francis as being on the borderline between “centrist” and “progressive.” He identifies Cardinals Tagle, Erdő, Parolin, Pizzaballa, and Zuppi as liberal, conservative, liberal, conservative, and liberal, respectively. You can quibble with many particulars (I don’t see Pizzaballa as conservative), but the broad strokes are still pretty useful.

Three dynamics, then, seem likely to shape the conclave:

• First, despite a dozen years of Pope Francis’s influence, there seem to be more conservatives than liberals. Many of them are Benedict holdovers. They compose more than a third of the conclave—which means no candidate can be elected without their support, since a candidate needs two-thirds of the votes to win.

• Second, despite their numbers, conservatives do not compose a simple majority. Cardinals tend to rally behind any candidate who gets over 50%, so starting at 50% would be a huge advantage. (Anyone who has ever attended a deadlocked political convention will be familiar with this dynamic.) However, nobody has that advantage at this conclave.

• Third, there are a lot of people whose views we don’t know yet, and who may be particularly flexible. I expect that, since most of these were far-flung Francis picks specially sought out by Francis, most will lean more left than right. When all is said and done, they may be able to cobble together a simple majority, which they may be able to snowball into a two-thirds majority.

Fake headline. Credit @MadocCairns

Oh, one more thing I should mention: Cardinal Pell died, and I have heard it argued that that matters. +Pell was no longer a voting member of the college, but he was an ancient John Paul II stalwart, a rallying point and something of an organizing force among conservative cardinals.

In the conclave, as in any other electoral convention, organization makes a huge difference. Pope Francis’s profile went up enormously when the St. Gallen Mafia (which is the closest thing to an organizing force in the progressive wing) decided that he was the most progressive candidate who could win, and collectively threw their support behind him. A splintered and disorganized conservative wing could be mown down more easily than one might expect.

Because it is considered extremely gauche, even outright evil, for the cardinals organize themselves into blocs at all—or, for many cardinals, to even acknowledge the existence of blocs—there’s no obvious replacement for +Pell. It’s not like, say, the Tories’ 1922 Committee, where you just get a new chairman and soldier on. Organization certainly happens at the conclave, but protocol demands that it be spontaneous and informal, which may leave the conservative wing at a disadvantage.¹⁷

How Do the Cardinals View the Francis Papacy?

If Pope Francis’s election in 2013 happened in part because the cardinals viewed Pope Benedict’s papacy as a failure, we really need to ask: how do the cardinals view Pope Francis’s papacy?

Obviously, the man just died, and he was the Holy Father, so the cardinals are saying nothing but kind things in public, as is right and just. Pope Francis had certain clear strengths. He had a very public strain of humility, shown in his willingness to was the feet of prisoners and to live simply in the papal hotel rather than the opulent papal apartments. His plain-speaking approach to preaching won over many hearts. A great many people loved him dearly, and it is certainly notable how many of those people are not Catholics themselves. (His American approval ratings were great.) Francis was very attractive to many of the people the Church most needs to attract.

However, despite these strengths, I have heard rumors over the years (nothing I could link you to today) and gotten the general vibe that, at the upper echelons of the Church, Pope Francis is regarded as a holy man but not a successful pope. I would not be surprised to see a canonization effort in the next few years, but even Francis’s biggest fans acknowledge that a good man can be a bad administrator.

Francis’s style of evangelization was soft-spoken, open-minded, and humble, but his style of leadership was often harsh, vindictive, even tyrannical. He openly played favorites and punished those out-of-favor. He maintained “strategic ambiguity” on important doctrinal questions, which drove serious division in the Church. This has gotten to the point where the German Catholic Church appears to now be on the brink of schism while claiming (somewhat credibly!) to simply be following the “Synodal Way” that Pope Francis laid out for them. His reorganization of the Curia moved a lot of chairs around the deck, but does not seem to have measurably improved the problems of corruption and inefficiency that conquered Benedict and which Francis was elected, largely, to solve. The Becciu financial scandal was immensely embarrassing to his entire administration.

Francis deeply weakened the rule of (canon) law during his reign, disregarding it in ways that he (as Pope) is allowed to do but without revising it to make clear what everyone else is allowed to do. This caused many headaches for people further down the hierarchy… including the cardinals. It also gravely undermined Francis’s response to the Church’s most important crisis: passing a bunch of anti-abuse laws doesn’t do much for sex abuse victims when you don’t actually follow those laws.

Much of this is small-ball, behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn’t make international headlines, but it’s the kind of thing conclaves take very seriously (which is why conclaves are a good way to elect a pope).

I could be wrong, but my one slightly-brave prediction in this article is that the conclave will be looking for a way to break away from the Francis papacy, much as they were looking for a way to break away from the Benedict papacy a dozen years ago. I believe that is precisely why Cardinal Pietro Parolin emerged quickly as the most-talked-about candidate in the progressive camp: not only is he the Secretary of State (which always puts you on the conclave shortlist), but he has a reputation as an effective diplomat who shares Francis’s theology without sharing his acerbic qualities.

Still, I don’t think that’s likely to be enough. Enough of the administrative problems with Francis’s papacy are rooted in his theology (especially his camp’s antinomianism) that I think the conclave will elect someone who is at least somewhat to Francis’s right (75% confidence a “purple” or “red” cardinal wins), and possibly substantially to his right (40% confidence a “red” cardinal wins).

Reason to doubt me: I only read English. The English language is home to the American Catholic Right. They are both prolific and hostile to Francis—more hostile, perhaps, than any other Catholic subpopulation in the world. As a result, the Catholic news I read tends to be biased against Francis. I am aware of this, and I try to correct for it, but, nevertheless, I could be allowing that bias to color my view of cardinals from the rest of the world. If they think of Francis’s papacy as a big success, that would mean very different odds for the conclave results. However, based on my best judgment, I don’t think they do.

Those are my broad thoughts! You could go ahead and place a bet now…

…or wait until I go through each of the candidates!

Playing Polymarket: Handicapping the Pros

Finally, let’s take a look at the Polymarket for “Who will be the next Pope?” and I’ll tell you what I think of the current official odds for each candidate.

DISCLAIMER: These are all just hot takes. I haven’t thoroughly researched any of these guys. Many of them, I know only glancingly from having read, like, a complaint about them deep in an /r/catholicism comment thread seven years ago or whatever. As always in predictions, knowledge is precision, and precision is power. You can therefore probably beat my predictions just by reading more deeply. Still, my hot takes will hopefully at least help you get started.

There are 20 papabili,¹⁸ and I have suggested that someone in the Top 20 will win a conclave about 95% of the time, so our naive, baseline assumption would be that any given papabile would have roughly a 5% chance of winning, and any other cardinal (including non-voting cardinals) something like a 0.02% chance of winning the conclave.

However, as we will quickly see, the top candidates are going to have probabilities much higher than 5%. Since probability is a zero-sum game, many of our papabili must therefore end up much lower than 5% (but still much higher than 0.02%).

Cardinal Pietro Parolin (22%): A few days ago, +Parolin was at 37%, which was absurdly overpriced, and you could have made some money on that if I’d been faster to write this article. He’s starting to come back down to Earth, but I still think he’s a bit fat. Yes, he’s the Secretary of State, and the obvious natural successor to Francis, who sands off some of his rough edges. I admit this makes him the obvious leading candidate. Still, I’d put him at around 15%.

Cardinal Luis Tagle (21%): The most famous bishop from the Philippines has buzz and he was also papabile at the 2013 conclave, which helps. He’s now seen as a member of the left-wing camp. (In 2013, he had more of a centrist reputation.) That means (IMHO) that his only path to the papacy goes through +Parolin, so I say 7%.

Cardinal Peter Turkson (15%): Do the Polymarket bettors know something I don’t? As a bishop in Africa, +Turkson created a lot of controversy among conservatives when he seemed to leave the door open to condom use for married couples with AIDS. Then he caused a lot of controversy among progressives by vocally supporting anti-sodomy laws. He blended well into the Benedict regime, then pivoted to blend in with the Francis regime, calibrating his language accordingly. However, his major Vatican dicastery appointment ended with the Pope siccing his American favorite (+Cupich) on +Turkson in an investigation that ended with Turkson’s resignation. With that record, who would his supporters be? He was papabile in 2013, but he isn’t on any of the lists I’m looking at today.

Yet here he is in third place on Polymarket? I’d put Turkson at 0.1% and feel generous doing so, but Polymarket seems so confident in him that it’s honestly got me shook.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (12%): Polymarket seems pretty convinced that the Francis conclave is going to elect another Francis-style thinker, so they have Zuppi with strong odds. However, this is still a conclave with plenty of conservative voters like Müller, Filoni, Sarah, Burke, and Dolan. As I’ve argued, the progressive wing has only a narrow path to open victory, and will have to rally behind one candidate fairly quickly to have a shot. From the very little I know about him, Zuppi is pretty deep in the left-wing camp—a good deal deeper than Francis—and therefore much less likely than Parolin or Tagle. I think Polymarket is misreading the politics of this conclave. I’d price him at 0.5%.

Cardinal Péter Erdő (7%): I’m not sure exactly why +Erdő has emerged as the leading candidate of the conservative faction, but it does seem to me that he has emerged as the leading candidate of the conservative faction. A hit piece in The Guardian suggests that, “despite his conservative views, Erdő’s use of cautious and moderate language makes him notably less controversial than other leading traditionalists, such as Robert Sarah. He can thus position himself as a compromise candidate,” even though he is (as The Guardian argues) firmly on the conservative end of the Catholic spectrum. Combine with the fact that Erdő was also papabile in 2013, and has a reputation for a particularly brilliant mind, and, okay, maybe I’m starting to understand what bettors are seeing in him.

The press often reports on Erdő’s relationship to Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government as a big positive or negative factor, but I doubt the conclave is much concerned about this one way or another. Orbán is just another secular power in a Church that has been negotiating uncomfortable relationships with secular powers since a thousand years before any of today’s secular powers existed.

Giving some credence to the idea that Erdő is the leading conservative candidate, I’ll put him at 10%, a little higher than Polymarket has him. However, the buzz might just be MAGA Orbán fans hyping him up. If I were sure that he’s the leading conservative candidate, then I would put him even higher.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa (5%): The patriarch¹⁹ of Jerusalem’s views on substantive issues are all but unknown, but he has gained an enormous global profile in recent years as the Catholic cardinal caught in the middle of the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza. He has unequivocally condemned Hamas, and even famously offered himself as a hostage in exchange for other hostages, but he has been perhaps even more critical of Israel, while gaining an image as an immensely kind and pastoral leader. I don’t want him as pope, because I don’t want a(nother) Mystery Box pope with no established viewpoints. Besides, I don’t think he’s been fair to the Israelis. However, the college of cardinals—like most of the world outside the American Right—is far more hostile to Israel than I am, so this probably helps him.

If the cardinals go looking for a compromise, which they very often do, it’s easy to see why they would gravitate to a bishop with a good reputation for loving the poor and the vulnerable, who gives off moderate vibes, and has no pesky paper trail that anyone can hold against him. I know he’s a meme now, but I personally have considered +Pizzaballa the frontrunner since January. Not a strong frontrunner—it’s much more likely that someone else is picked—but still the man with the best chance out of the whole group. I put him at 20%.

Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline (4%): The polemicists at The Remnant call +Aveline “the French Zuppi.” Whether you like the +Zuppi approach or not, that seems at least directionally correct, and, in a crowded progressive “lane,” I give Aveline the same odds I give Zuppi: 0.5%.

Cardinal Robert Sarah (2.6%): This Black African cardinal is the overwhelming popular favorite among Catholic conservatives, at least in the English-speaking world where I can read the social media, which really scrambles the warp plots of everybody who assumes conservative == racist.

The read I have is that +Sarah’s popular support hurts him more than it helps him. Ditto his fairly public stances that seemed to undermine Pope Francis’s positions. Still, it’s certainly possible to imagine Sarah emerging as the early conservative vote-getter rather than, say, Erdő or Eijk. I’ll say 4%—less than Tagle’s 7%, because the conservative faction seems less unified than the progressive faction, leaving more room for surprises.

A Bunch of 1% Cardinals I Really Know Nothing About: I’m going to skip over +de Mendonca, +Reina, +Grech, +Ambongo Besungu, +Arborelius, and +Eijk, because I really don’t know them from Adam and have nothing further useful to say about them. Except… okay, lightning round: Eijk is underpriced, because I believe this market is consistently underpricing conservatives. Grech, not being on any papabile lists, is probably overpriced. Indeed, he strikes me at a casual glance as embodying both Francis’s theology and his heavy-handed administrative style. Reina is definitely overpriced, and, from the Polymarket comments, appears to be at 1% on the basis of dumb money from non-Catholics who vibe with him.

Cardinal Raymond Burke (0.8%): I sympathize strongly with Burke’s positions on many things, and he is a conservative icon, and I do think this market is underpricing conservatives… but, this time, the market is right: Burke has burned too many bridges with too many people to ever be pope. When you’ve lost my mother (who rolls her eyes every time he is mentioned), you’ve lost two-thirds of the conclave. 0.8% is actually probably too generous, an artifact of American conservatives putting dumb money into the market. I put him at 0.3%. Could happen, way more likely to happen than any given non-papabile winning, but definitely a long-tail event.

Cardinal Angelo Scola (0.6%): He is believed to be the runner-up in the 2013 conclave, an Italian conservative in the mold of Pope Benedict, often presumed to have been Benedict’s favored successor.²⁰ I think finishing second at a conclave is worth at least as much to your papabile status as being Secretary of State. After all, the winner of the 2013 conclave appears to have been the runner-up in 2005, and it’s natural for voters to gravitate to the “next in line.” Plus, he’s Italian. After almost fifty years of Curial dysfunction under non-Italian popes, maybe the cardinals are thinking maybe it’s time to try an Italian again? On the other hand, Scola is old now (83), and he was already considered too old and too unpopular among the Italian contingent by 2013. He’s not on the papabile lists anymore, despite being on them in both 2005 and 2013. Still, I guess Scola is my dark horse. I’m going to call him 1.5%.

No New Pope in 2025 (0.6%): This could happen, but only under circumstances where the world has been so traumatized by some terrible event that neither Polymarket nor I will be able to pay off the winners anyway. The theory in the betting pool seems to be that, in the past, conclaves could deadlock for months or years, so there’s always a small chance that this conclave will do the same. However, those past conclaves operated under very different rules, which were not well-designed to resolve deadlocks. The whole design of the modern conclave drives cardinals toward consensus within ten ballots, and rule changes after the thirty-second ballot make it virtually impossible for a conclave to deadlock for an entire year. It’s just too tiring under the modern rules. Someone will give up. The only ways to last a whole year would be world war, or a major terrorist attack on Rome annihilating the college, or the Second Coming of Christ, or similar.

I therefore price this at 0%. If you have infinity dollars, you should buy a whole lot of shares of the “NO” side of this contract and make tiny fractions of a penny in profit many, many times over. It’s one of the very rare times I look at a betting market and say, “Ah, free money.”

Cardinal Marc Ouellet (0.3%): Polymarket didn’t even spell his name right (“Mark”), but +Ouellet is underpriced. He is believed to have been the second runner-up in the 2013 conclave, pulling lots of conservative votes from the then-conservative American delegation despite a relatively moderate reputation. I think of him as the Cardinal Tremblay of the 2013 conclave, minus the simony—and I suspect the writers of that movie based Tremblay on Ouellet (minus the simony)!

Ouellet is out of this conclave (he recently turned 80), but he’s still papabile. A moderate with a previous track record of picking up key votes feels like the sweet spot to me. I put Ouellet at 5% to win.

Fake. Credit: @MadocCairns.

James’s Picks

Let’s put those in order, then, and see whether it still makes sense. Here’s who I currently think is most likely to be elected the next pope:

1. +Pizzaballa: 20%

2. +Parolin: 15%

3. +Erdő: 10%

4. +Tagle: 7%

5. +Ouellet: 5%

6. +Sarah: 4%

7. +Scola: 1.5%

8. +Zuppi: 0.5%

9. +Aveline: 0.5%

10. +Burke: 0.3%

11. +Turkson: 0.1%

12. One of the other papabile: 36%²¹

    1. Another progressive: 3%.

    2. Another conservative: 20%

    3. Another centrist/moderate/uncertain: 10%

13. One of the other non-papabile cardinals: 4%

14. A non-cardinal: 0.01%

15. No Pope in 2025: 0%²²

Yeah, that more or less adds up, I think. I could definitely improve these by doing a lot more research, but the conclave opens in six days, and I need to post this betting pool!

I am going out on a limb by giving the progressive faction so little chance to win. Heck, if you ask half the Church, I’m going out on a limb by defining a “progressive faction” into existence at all! This is my prediction that makes me most nervous.

I am definitely pointing toward a much more open field than most people (or at least most markets) seem to be considering. I don’t give anyone more than a 20% chance, and I think there’s a lot of people in the 1-5% range. A lot of things could happen. There’s no such thing as a sure bet in this conclave.

So you may as well throw your money in! Your guess is really as good as mine:

However, if Cardinal Turkson wins, I’ll eat crow.

1. papabili, n.: The cardinals believed most likely to be elected pope. Singular papabile.

2. In retrospect, this was probably against the rules, but gambling was rampant at my high school at that time and I believe I specifically invited teachers to participate. None did, but none turned me in, either.

3. lol. In 2013, “all my readers” was a subset of my Facebook friends, and not a large one.

4. It’s worth reviewing the list, because some of them are still papabili today.

5. According to my records, I bet $10 on Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, O.P., and I’m sitting here today asking myself, “Why?”

Well, I know exactly why. It’s because I spent an hour in a room with him and 20 other people in the fall of 2009 and he was the most charismatic person I ever met. He is still the person I think of when I think about “charisma as innate quality,” like intelligence, rather than as a learned skill, like astrophysics. Still, I feel fairly confident he wasn’t the person I wanted most. I suppose I was trying to avoid winning, while still picking someone I liked at the time!

+Schönborn turned 80 in January, so just missed participating in this conclave. He can still be elected.

6. I believe all she did was listen to me hem and haw for a while. Then she said, “Yeah, but you should run it.” That convinced me!

7. The split will be by winning bet, not by winning bettor. For example, if the pot is $100, and Bob placed one bet ($5) on the correct pope, while Alice placed four bets on the correct pope ($20), then Bob will have won $20 (1/5th of the pot), while Alice will have won $80 (4/5th of the pot).

8. My wife will bet, but I’m not telling her anything except to read this article. Ethics!

9. Or until the pot hits $500, not that that’s remotely likely to happen. I don’t want to deal with any significant amount of money here. I’m getting taxed on the pot as ordinary income and won’t get to keep any of it anyway.

10. Laypeople call this a “vow of celibacy.” This is inaccurate. Celibacy is the state of never having been married. I am incapable of taking a vow of celibacy, now or ever again, because I have been married.

Others may call a vow against sex a “vow of chastity.” This is, again, inaccurate for a married person. Chastity is the virtue of using your sexuality appropriately for your state in life. For a married person, sex with your spouse is an appropriate use of your sexuality, so having sex with your spouse is an inherently chaste act. (Unchastity is certainly possible within marriage, but only by abusing the marital act, not by performing it in joy. Some further discussion in my translation of “De Usu Conjugii”.)

When a married person takes a vow never to have sex again, then, it is properly called a “vow of continence,” from the Latin continentia, “a holding back” of what is rightfully allowed. Regrettably, non-Catholics tend to think a “vow of continence” this means vowing never to pee again or something, but, nevertheless, the vow I would (presumably) have to take upon consecration as a bishop would be a vow of continence, not a vow of celibacy nor chastity.

Of course, language changes over time, yadda yadda, I’m not really mad at people who use these words “wrong,” because it’s “right” in popular usage… but in Catholic discourse specifically, the differences between celibacy, continence, and chastity are important, and come up a lot, so precision is necessary, and I will correct you.

11. It doesn’t come up very often these days!

12. I have written a little before about Pope St. Celestine V’s story, but I did not explicitly draw out its moral lesson:

Pope Boniface VIII, who practically usurped the papal throne from Celestine, was a very able administrator, a brilliant pope, and one of the world’s all-time great patrons of the arts. Celestine was a total failure as a pope. He didn’t want to be pope, he did a terrible job as pope, and he abdicated as pope (which is the ultimate bad-pope move and unerringly earns the Church divine chastisement). All he wanted to do was pray in a cave, which would accomplish exactly nothing for anyone, certainly much less than Urban VIII’s art program.

But Celestine’s a canonized saint who is today certainly with the Lord. There’s been no official word on Boniface, but Dante placed him in the Eighth Circle of Hell and I think Dante had a point.

The role of a pope is to be a good pope, but the role of a man is to be a good man, and the latter is far more important than the former.

If I were ever elected pope, I would be constantly tempted to forget that, so I would take Celestine’s name as a reminder to keep my eyes on the prize. And to maybe spend a good chunk of my papal reign praying in a cave.

13. In alphabetical order to avoid commitment to a ranking: +Zuppi, +Tagle, +Sarah, +Pizzaballa, +Parolin, +Ouellet, +Erdő, +Bo, +Arborelius, +Ambongo Besungu. These are not my Top 10, but they seem to be something like the consensus Top 10.

14. Meetings of the college of cardinals are called “consistories.”

I must draw a distinction here: Francis held many “ordinary consistories” for the creation of cardinals and/or the canonizations of saints (and other routine matters), as do all popes. However, ordinary consistories are attended only by those specially invited and by those cardinals who live in Rome. Extraordinary consistories are the only meetings where the entire college meets.

Pope Benedict held two such consistories in eight years, on 23 November 2007 and 19 November 2010. Both immediately preceded ordinary consistories, and I am under the impression that most of the cardinals hung out for a few extra days to participate.

Pope John Paul II held six such consistories (then called “plenary assemblies”) in twenty-seven years: 5 November 1979, 23 November 1982, 21 November 1985, 4 April 1991, 13 June 1994, and 21 May 2001. Many of these lasted more than one day.

15. The United States should consider amending its Constitution to impose a similar rule for congressmen. And presidents. And governors. Actually, for all high political officials.

16. Misunderstanding this leads to the tired old joke that, by European standards, “the Democrats are a far-right party.” At least until fairly recently, American politics simply had very different salient issues, and Democrats were combatting an American libertarian-religious right wing that looked very different from the nationalist right wing common in Europe. Obviously, that has changed a lot in recent years—but the daylight between American Democrats and European liberals has shrunk accordingly!

I should take the time to expand on this, if only so I can prepare my defense for the PM I am sure to get over this footnote—you know who you are, and you can go ahead and send it anyway—but I have to get back to writing about the conclave! We’ve got a deadline!

17. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for the cardinals to be so completely and culturally hostile to factionalism. The Founding Fathers would probably give them a round of applause. I’m just explaining the practical consequences of that hostility.

18. There are various lists of widely varying reliability and perspective (New York Times (gift link), The Remnant, RFI), but I find the College of Cardinal Report to be the most sober and in-depth.

19. Pizzaballa is titled “patriarch” because of Jerusalem’s ancient status as a patriarchal see, but the Latin archdiocese of Jerusalem is just an ordinary archdiocese today, not a true patriarchal see with its own attached church and special prerogatives. In this case, the title “cardinal” supersedes his title of “patriarch,” and he is thus typically styled “Cardinal Pizzaballa.” The Pillar has more on the titular status of the Latin patriarchate.

This is in contrast to Patriarch Bechar al-Rahi, the then-Patriarch of Antioch who was papabile at the 2013 conclave. The Patriarch of Antioch is not the mere head of an archdiocese subject to Rome in the same way as all the others, but is actually the head of the Maronite Catholic Church, an independent Catholic Church in communion with Rome (especially on doctrine) but operating on its own, with its own canon law, its own liturgy, and its own self-selected hierarchy. In al-Rahi’s case, “patriarch” was a greater title than “cardinal,” so he was known as “Patriarch al-Rahi” even while in the conclave.

20. Who knows for sure? Benedict kept his mouth shut after his resignation, as befits an ex-pope.

21. I am treating “the pababili” as the twenty cardinals defined by The College of Cardinals Report as papabili.

22. Clarification: 0% chance that you win money on this. Obviously, there’s always a non-zero chance the world could end this month.