That's reasonable! I tried to set up PayPal, because everybody has PayPal and it worked well in 2013, but this time it was going to take $0.40 of every bet in fees, which sucked. Thus, Venmo.
I will also accept $5 in unmarked small bills in an envelope delivered to my front door.
I’m inclined to the first way of perceiving the College of Cardinals but I can understand and respect your perspective on this too, James.
And I’m with your Mom on this, James. I can’t stand Cardinal Burke at all. And Cardinal Sarah has also lost me with the stunt he pulled with that book that he claimed BXVI co-authored but which BXVI denied and asked Cardinal Sarah to not list him as a co-author. That was absolutely disgraceful, and shame on Ignatius Press for not respecting BXVI’s wishes on that. The other publishers respected BXVI’s wishes.
I highly doubt he’ll get elected, but I really like what I’m seeing so far from Cardinal Bychok from Australia. Given what the Church in Ukraine has gone through with the Ukraine war, an Eastern Rite Catholic papacy would be great for them, although you could also say the same about a Pizzaballa papacy with respect to the Middle East.
I’m staying out of the palace intrigue, though. I’m praying and fasting and I will support and obey the Magisterium of whomever the Cardinal electors choose.
And I have a different perspective on the 3 papacies I’ve lived through in my lifetime so far.
Benedict XVI is my favorite pope of my lifetime so far, by a large amount, Francis comes after that, and Pope St. JPII is my least favorite.
JPII was a larger than life, charismatic guy, his magisterial documents were very hard to read, understand, and decipher, and the crowd that loved him so much was mostly charismatic Catholics and charismatic Catholicism has NEVER connected at all with me.
I did, however, appreciate his defense of life and his Theology of the Body.
Benedict XVI, however, connected with me very powerfully in a multitude of ways and I’ll always be a Pope Benedict XVI generation Catholic. I look to him as a spiritual grandfather. Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate are my favorite encyclicals.
Pope Francis is somewhere in the middle of those two for me. I appreciate how he challenged me to go to the people on the margins and bring the good news of the Gospel to them, I’ve been personally touched by his kindness (and I’ll tell you privately how when we see each other), and I’ll always remember fondly that incredible Urbi et Orbi where he prayed alone in St. Peter’s Square and blessed the world with the Eucharist. I ordered a photo of that moment and will frame that in my home, and I also ordered a copy of the icon of Salus Populi Romani that he loved so much. Also, I loved Laudato Si’, Evangelii gaudium, Dilexit nos, and Desidario desideravi, and, while I think it could have been better handled, I do think the SSPX took advantage of Summorum pontificum to spread their errors, especially rejecting Vatican II and the Ordinary Form of the Mass, and something had to be done to stop that. Also, Bishop Strickland was way out of line and I’m grateful Francis removed him.
On the other hand Pope Francis’ handling of the Fr. Rupnik case, sadly, reminds me a lot of how JPII handled Fr. Marcial Maciel, which is badly, and he should have brought the hammer down on Cardinal Marx and the absolutely nuts Synodal Way stuff going on there and he didn’t. I don’t understand why. Maybe the situation there was more complicated and required a different approach.
Anyway, pray, fast, and trust in Jesus to take care of the Church and steer the Church somehow in the right direction, whatever that direction is. That’s what I do. Life’s too short to get caught up in Vatican palace intrigue. I’ll let the good people at The Pillar handle that 😉
"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."
The rule changes could prevent a deadlock if the issue is there being a lot of different candidates and no coalescing, but it seems like it could make deadlock more likely if it's between two camps.
The current rules, as I understand it, is that starting with the 33rd ballot, the only people cardinals can vote for are the two people who got the most votes on the 32nd ballot, but one still needs to get 2/3. But what if there were already two favorites and you had two camps each voting for one? The requirement they vote for only one of those two means if they deadlock, there's no possibility for any kind of compromise candidate to come out and get the 2/3.
To put the matter into perspective, a while ago you suggested the possibility of replacing the electoral college with a college of governors, and that to prevent them from just voting for their own party's preferred candidate (all the Republican governors voting for a Republican president and all the Democratic governors voting for a Democratic president), some kind of supermajority would be required, like maybe 2/3.
So, if this idea was put into effect in 2024, it's hard to see 2/3 of governors choosing Trump or Harris (there would be 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats), because of how many would have to go directly against their own party, and to get a result they'd end up having to choose some other person for president to get the 2/3.
But suppose you got those governors together and told them they HAD to choose Trump or Harris by supermajority? It seems to me that would create deadlock due to the difficulty of getting enough people from either party to vote for the other party's choice. I don't know if the governors would be willing to just sit there for over a year on principle, especially if they were under the strict rules that cardinals have to follow, but it'd seem like it would make more deadlock because it removes a compromise option.
And then that applies to the cardinals: If they're deadlocked between two candidates like the governors would be, and they have no option to try to choose a compromise third option, these rules could very well make deadlock more likely. One advantage is that cardinals are presumably less partisan than governors would be, and it's not like they have to go to their voters afterwards and explain why they voted for the other candidate. But the basic problem is still possibly there.
Now, I still don't think it's particularly likely it would get to over 30 anyway. If anything technology is the big incentive to do it quickly; it's one thing to sit around with no contact with the outside world centuries ago, it's another to do it when everyone is so used to the ability to be checking their phones or computers all the time. But it does seem to me like this "top 2" rule could at least conceivably make a deadlock worse by making a compromise candidate impossible.
Yes, this is exactly why the current post-32nd ballot rules are stupid and why Benedict should have abolished JP2's erroneous reform altogether instead of only partly rolling it back. I'm with you on all of this. Designed to shorten a conclave, it could easily prolong it instead.
So I suppose it's not really the rule *changes* that make it inconceivable that an election would run long, which means I phrased that sentence quite wrong. Hopefully my previous writing which has condemned the current post-32nd ballot rules partly makes up for my error here.
What I really meant was simpler: the rules require the cardinals to pray together quite a lot and then vote twice a day, every day, on a schedule that is not terribly easy for a bunch of men in their 70s, with no contact with the outside world at all. The top-two-candidates rule could entrench the cardinals for longer than they would otherwise (if they had the right to resort to a compromise), but, eventually, the minority will give up in despair and vote for whoever has the majority. Their only other option would be to remain in conclave for years until dying sequestered. The cardinals lack the stamina for that.
Other old rules encouraged longer conclaves: the right of cardinals to schedule their own votes (rather than sitting for two rather tiring scrutinies per day, every day), the right of cardinals to arrive late (necessary in a pre-modern world), the right of secular powers to issue a veto (and attendant violations of secrecy), and of course old-school disruptions like riot and plague. But this is all gone now. All the cardinals are already in Rome, I think. So I just don't think they can keep it up for that long.
But you're right: the post-32nd ballot rules are a hindrance, not a help. (The gubernatorial conclave I dream of should not adopt anything like it!)
Ah, okay, so it was just somewhat poor phrasing. Yes, I agree that the other rules would seem to ensure the conclave wouldn't last terribly long, and even in the situation I envisioned, I think one side would give up well before the end of the year. I just thought that the post-32nd ballot shift could at least lengthen it if things go a certain way. I could see the conclave going on for a bit--while a while ago, the 1830-31 conclave lasted for more than a month, and I THINK the rules were the same--but lasting until the end of the year (seven months) would be difficult to accept.
Something Happened in around the 1830s/40s, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what -- because, you're right, there were not significant formal rule changes around that time (at least not that I know of).
Nevertheless, Wikipedia notes that the 1830-31 conclave (which lasted 50 days) fit the pattern of the time: "No conclave since 1667 had lasted fewer than three weeks." However, everything changed after that: "No conclave since has lasted as long as a week."
It does seem that improved transportation played a significant role in that, and it also seems as though the practical power of the monarchical veto was waning even though it had not been definitively abolished yet. Still, an interesting little puzzle.
Thanks for the coverage! It’s amazing how hard it is to find even handed coverage of big bureaucratic events like this, the MN legislature standoff (remember that?), and so on.
Because of the nature of a papal election in a conclave, where the cardinal electors are rquired to come to a 2/3rds consensus while sealed off from the outside world, it is nearly impossible to attempt an accurate prediction. As a probability exercise, the dynamics of that election result in a large margin of error, much larger than the few percentage points of, say, a Presidential election poll.
Yep. But if we elected presidents by conclave...! :)
But, yeah, absolutely, I think the huge uncertainty of a conclave is why it's fun to bet on it, especially compared to a presidential election. Conclaves are when you can just pick Cardinal Polycarp whom nobody's ever heard of and still have as much of a shot at winning as many others.
I'm tempted to bet for a cardinal not on your list but just highlighted by John Allen over at CruxNow: Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
But alas, I don't do Venmo, which wants too much personal info. (I used to have Paypal but their fees were too onerous). Too bad you don't use Zelle.
And alas, I don't live anywhere near the Twin Cities to drop off cash. . .
I do think the smart move, at this point in the pool, is to bet on somebody nobody else has bet on. At this point, so much money is already in the pot for, say, +Pizzaballa that, even if Pizzaballa wins, each winner will only profit a pittance.
Sorry about Venmo! PayPal worked well in 2013, but they wanted outrageous fees this time, and I don't know Zelle as well.
Out of curiosity, there is something in this post I don't think you gave (I might have missed it). You talk a lot about odds, but not preferences: Was there anyone you'd most want to be pope? Not expect, but want.
I suppose I shouldn't ask without offering one for me. For me, it is a tricky decision between Turkson and Sarah. I'll readily admit that part of my reasoning is what I'm sure some could call blatant DEI: I'd just like to see a black African pope. Given the growth of both Christianity and Catholicism in Africa, I'd like to see a pope from there as representation. It'd also probably be the first black pope (there were a few African popes from long ago, but they were probably not dark skinned).
There are others from Africa but those two seem the foremost. It is tricky for me to decide between the two. Sarah seems like he would rapidly reverse Francis's worst tendencies, but I worry he might be too heavy-handed by being such a major lurch in the other direction. Turkson seems like he would be a bit more moderate in regards to that. He at least seems like he'd probably preserve some of the things I like about Francis while avoiding the parts I didn't. So I think I'd go with Turkson.
I did avoid most normative stuff in this post, because I share the betting pool (and the betting pool document) with a wide circle of friends and coworkers, and I don't want to alienate anyone by saying that I think Francis was a bad pope and that I hope for a new pope who will reverse many of his acts.
If you just gave me supreme power over elections and let me pick the pope, I doubt it would be a cardinal at all. I'd obviously give it a great deal of thought, but, off the top of my head, I'd probably give it to someone I know personally and trust on that basis. My former pastor, Fr. Patrick Hipwell, comes to mind. He would be a bomb dropped on the Vatican, but I suspect in a good way. A couple of professors I had in Rome (Fr. Michael Tavuzzi -- who, alas, I scared off the Internet in 2009 -- would also be a bomb, in a different way, but again I suspect a good way).
If you limit me to bishops (reasonable!), the first two names that come to my mind are Bishop Charles Morerod of Fribourg, who once pranked me very effectively but also helped B16 negotiate with SSPX -- seems like a good mix, but needs more vetting, but we could use a Dominican pope -- and Archbishop Charles Chaput, formerly of Philadelphia, who consistently impresses me with his sober writing.
Of serious names, though? I'll follow Buckley's rule: the most Ratzingerian candidate who can win. From what I've been hearing, that's probably +Erdo or possibly +Eijk. +Sarah (from what I have been hearing since I posted this) is not even in the running in the conservative lane, which seems too bad, but maybe he *is* a bit Too Much for the throne, but I don't know. I'm one of those degenerates who doesn't think it's a bad thing if the Church becomes visibly smaller as long as it clarifies what it is and what it stands for in the process. Might even be good. It's probably happening anyway no matter who becomes pope. Saving remnant, etc. etc.. So Sarah still seems probably good to me, but unelectable.
Really, though, I know very little about any of the serious candidates and would therefore pay very close attention to the interventions at the general congregations, which I would rely on to help make up my mind. (Also: much prayer and fasting.) I'd also be doing a lot of research on the side about each papabile's involvement in the abuse scandals, direct or indirect, because I'll bet the cardinals themselves are politely sweeping their collective complicity under the rug instead of talking about it. I didn't learn much about the papabili's abuse scandal involvement for this article for precisely that reason: being bad on abuse probably doesn't preclude anyone from being elected pope, unless it was really embarrassing.
I instinctively distrust +Turkson. That's not fair of me. (It is instinctive, based on little more than having read his bio on College of Cardinals Report.) Nevertheless, I'd need a lot of reassurances to support him. A black Pope would be lovely, but I won't force it. I really want and NEED the Church to be color-blind in the long run.
I know this was an incredibly trivial part of the essay, but as a Brit, I feel like I should offer a slight counterpoint to the depiction of our politics on the left-right spectrum.
We haven't had a genuinely far-right party of any prominence since the decline of the BNP more than a decade or so ago, and far-right politics today seems mostly limited to street-thuggery. Farage is basically a Thatcherite libertarian with a keen nose for populist wedge issues and shameless knack for self-promotion, whilst Reform - led by libertarians but with a working-class voter base with much more left-wing views on the economy - has yet to cohere into much more than a grab-bag of variegated dissent.
It was the idea of the Lib Dems as far-left though that really made me go "hmmmm". Traditionally, they are the party of the vague, squidgy centre, sitting between the more hard-edged Tories on the right (who the Lib Dems chose over Labour as coalition partners in the hung parliament of 2010), and the more working-class Labour on the left, although they do stand apart from both in terms of their tendency to defend civil liberties. Stereotypically, their voters are genteel, NIMBYish, comfortably-off property owners in the west London suburbs and the nicer parts of the countryside, who wish to maintain a socioeconomic status quo that has worked out pretty well for them, but to feel nice about doing so - and certainly not like nasty Tories! They are broadly socially progressive, but in much the same way that the establishment of both parties has generally been broadly socially progressive for decades (Sunak, Badenoch and indeed current-iteration Starmer being somewhat to the right of the mid-late 2010s consensus on social values), with a greater tendency to favour migration and internationalism, but again, less out of ideology and more out of a desire for niceness, sensible-ness, and moderation.
I think the Corbyn movement could genuinely be counted as approaching far-left, and the Green party could potentially be the closest thing we have today, but again, they have a crunchy, de-growth, NIMBYish rural wing that maybe problematises this a little. Starmer's Labour party though does seem reasonable to put as being to the right of the Lib Dems, at least over the last couple of years, as it has largely maintained austerity (with noted exceptions for unionised public-sector workers, who are now their core constituency post de-industrialisation), whilst letting itself drift rightwards on cultural issues along with the general cultural vibe shift.
Basically though, all three main parties have failed to be honest about the fact that due to an aging population our health and pensions spending is slowly devouring the rest of the budget, and so absent any decisive commitment to either substantially raise taxes or substantially lower spending, they all in practice carry out the same austerity economics, generally whilst drifting with the winds of wider shifts in social attitudes, with only minor variations between them (hence to a large extent the surging popularity of Reform, despite their incoherence and the unpopularity of their leader's actual positions. E.g., there is little appetite for Putin sympathising on the British right, which generally still idolises the assertive liberal internationalism of Churchill/Thatcher).
(I realise as I write this that I have in fact completely failed to challenge the basic idea that our current left-right spectrum goes Lib Dems-Labour-Tories-Reform...I just think there are some nuances that would be helpful to point out too).
Purely from the perspective of policy analysis, I find it interesting that you mention the fiscal policy of the major UK parties because Labour pledged not to raise taxes but then imposed means-testing on the winter fuel payment, and James and I have a whole article about that:
(As for the next Pope, I just hope that whoever it is continues celebrating certain important Masses, like Holy Thursday, in places like prisons, because it seems to me that, especially given who Jesus' disciples were when they became his disciples, such as Matthew being a tax collector, Jesus of Nazareth would have been far more likely to wash the feet of prisoners rather than bishops.)
Congratulations on the new Pope (from a Rerum Novarum enjoyer) - I'm not a Catholic so I don't really have standing to comment on the internal needs of the Catholic Church, but I will say that I hope for another pastor who is able to reach and inspire people outside the Catholic Church like me, just as Francis did (intellectually as well as morally - I read Laudato Si' way back in 2016 when I was bored at work and skiving, and it opened my mind). Also, as a radical vegan environmentalist who has come to realise that any attempt to value all life that doesn't include unborn human beings is hypocritical and close-hearted, I found Pope Francis' approach particularly encouraging.
Re the effect of means testing on tax rates...oh, my sweet summer child, you know nothing of how distortive they can be! The winter fuel payment is now granted only to recipients of the means-tested pension credit, so (if I've understood this correctly) if you were to earn a single penny over the pension credit threshold (£227.10/week), you would then loose access to the entire £200-300 winter fuel payment in one go. So for a pensioner earning a penny below the threshold that would presumably mean a potential marginal effective tax rate on the next pound of income of 30,000% from the loss of the winter fuel payment alone (caveat: I'm bad at maths). And we also means test the income tax free allowance of £12,570, meaning (at least according to wikipedia) an effective marginal rate of 62% on income between 100k and 120k, compared with a marginal rate of 42% on incomes between 120k and 125k and 47% on incomes above 125k, even before any loss of means tested benefits is taken into account (Do I need to add that I found your article persuasive?)
Zooming out a bit: Ruling out any rise in the main broad-based taxes, ie income tax, VAT and national insurance (a pledge they have already fudged severely after increasing employers' national insurance - whilst saying that, actually, they only meant they wouldn't raise employees' national insurance, even though they never specified this at the time) despite a massive deficit has led the Labour government instead to pursue narrow tax rises/spending cuts that have hit small parts of the population very hard, hence the increasingly noisy dissent. The worst I think has been the cuts to the personal independence payment, which is for equipment and other support to help the disabled enter the workplace - which makes sense even in cold heartless accountancy terms, as well as simply in terms of giving effective help to those in need.
I admit, when I wrote the paragraph you originally mentioned, what I originally wrote was just:
> For example, in England, there are four parties, but they all fit on the same spectrum: far-left, center-left, center-right, far-right.
Then I stared at it for a while and said, "James Joseph Heaney, are you trying to tell me that New Labour under Tony Blair was a center-left party?"
That was when I added:
> 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.
Because, yes, whenever you look closely at the parties, it (almost) always turns out to be much weirder and more dynamic than the spectrum suggests. There are 20 axes to British politics -- and American politics, for that matter! -- but it usually just takes too dang long to explain them all.
Anyway, that's my belated reply to your OP. I won't wade into your and Daniel's discussion of means-testing, because re-reading that article still makes my brain tired (there was SO MUCH MATH on that one), but I will say that I am touched and pleased to learn that Pope Francis was able to reach out to your heart with Laudato Si' and invite you into the fetal rights movement. That is very, very good, and I'm glad to have heard of it.
I'm going to suggest that if you do want to further discuss means-testing and its distortionary effects, which I'd be happy to do, that the discussion be moved to the actual article so that the comments section of this one stays on the actual topic of this article.
*I* am bad because Prevost emerged as a serious candidate over the weekend and I thought about updating my article with updated odds (sell +Sarah, buy +Erdo, sell +Pizzaballa, buy +Prevost, buy +Mamberti) and I didn't. Got busy. I failed the readers! I'm sorry!
Will he be good? This is the hardest question. Popes aren't usually very predictable based on their past lives as bishops, especially not relatively obscure bishops like +Prevost. I certainly didn't expect Pope Francis to govern in anything like the way he did -- and I doubt the conservative conclave that elected him expected it, either. Unlike presidents, whom I think you can get a fairly good bead on during the campaign -- certainly in the first hundred days -- I don't expect to know whether Pope Leo will be a good pope for a couple of years.
So far, I have seen both good signs and bad signs from Pope Leo XIV. I will mention two:
* He has the whiff of the abuse scandal about him, as The Pillar reported Monday. Nothing egregious, only questionable. The cardinals knew about it, but questionable things can be answered and I guess they were satisfied with the answers, but quite frankly I don't trust the cardinals on the abuse stuff. I would certainly have preferred someone without even a whiff, and will look into it more. We know +Maradiaga was a huge supporter of +Prevost and +Maradiaga has more than a whiff. Bad.
* He was at Villanova in the 1970s, home of the oldest undergraduate pro-life student group in the country, founded in 1974 in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade. I have been told (and am attempting to confirm) that Pope Leo co-founded that group. Good! One often gets the sense from more progressive bishops that protection for the unborn is something grudgingly accepted because you can't be a pro-abortion cardinal, to the point where taking it seriously has become a fault line and (for me) something of a litmus test. (If you can be squishy on killing children, you can be squishy on abusing them -- and anything else, up to and including Jesus.) But if Pope Leo understands the importance of abortion within the wider web of Catholic Social Teaching, and was brave enough to articulate it to a *very* hostile world in 1974 (before the Evangelical pro-life turn), that's encouraging.
We mustn't read too much into this very small amount of information, though. (One is only a rumor!) We shall see.
Just letting you know that I was watching the announcement today at work and, by timing (or the Holy Spirit, one never knows), two coworkers stopped by just before Pope Leo was introduced. One coworker was asking how liberal or conservative he is and I first explained that I had never heard of him before. Then I thought of this article and talked about how you can't equate Catholic theological leanings with American political leanings!
I failed pretty miserably at translating the blessing, though.
I'm rooting for Ouellette, because I've met him, and his election would put me two degrees of separation from the Pope.
But I'm not betting because I don't have Venmo, and it's not worth getting set up on it for a friendly $5 bet.
That's reasonable! I tried to set up PayPal, because everybody has PayPal and it worked well in 2013, but this time it was going to take $0.40 of every bet in fees, which sucked. Thus, Venmo.
I will also accept $5 in unmarked small bills in an envelope delivered to my front door.
I’m inclined to the first way of perceiving the College of Cardinals but I can understand and respect your perspective on this too, James.
And I’m with your Mom on this, James. I can’t stand Cardinal Burke at all. And Cardinal Sarah has also lost me with the stunt he pulled with that book that he claimed BXVI co-authored but which BXVI denied and asked Cardinal Sarah to not list him as a co-author. That was absolutely disgraceful, and shame on Ignatius Press for not respecting BXVI’s wishes on that. The other publishers respected BXVI’s wishes.
I highly doubt he’ll get elected, but I really like what I’m seeing so far from Cardinal Bychok from Australia. Given what the Church in Ukraine has gone through with the Ukraine war, an Eastern Rite Catholic papacy would be great for them, although you could also say the same about a Pizzaballa papacy with respect to the Middle East.
I’m staying out of the palace intrigue, though. I’m praying and fasting and I will support and obey the Magisterium of whomever the Cardinal electors choose.
And I have a different perspective on the 3 papacies I’ve lived through in my lifetime so far.
Benedict XVI is my favorite pope of my lifetime so far, by a large amount, Francis comes after that, and Pope St. JPII is my least favorite.
JPII was a larger than life, charismatic guy, his magisterial documents were very hard to read, understand, and decipher, and the crowd that loved him so much was mostly charismatic Catholics and charismatic Catholicism has NEVER connected at all with me.
I did, however, appreciate his defense of life and his Theology of the Body.
Benedict XVI, however, connected with me very powerfully in a multitude of ways and I’ll always be a Pope Benedict XVI generation Catholic. I look to him as a spiritual grandfather. Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate are my favorite encyclicals.
Pope Francis is somewhere in the middle of those two for me. I appreciate how he challenged me to go to the people on the margins and bring the good news of the Gospel to them, I’ve been personally touched by his kindness (and I’ll tell you privately how when we see each other), and I’ll always remember fondly that incredible Urbi et Orbi where he prayed alone in St. Peter’s Square and blessed the world with the Eucharist. I ordered a photo of that moment and will frame that in my home, and I also ordered a copy of the icon of Salus Populi Romani that he loved so much. Also, I loved Laudato Si’, Evangelii gaudium, Dilexit nos, and Desidario desideravi, and, while I think it could have been better handled, I do think the SSPX took advantage of Summorum pontificum to spread their errors, especially rejecting Vatican II and the Ordinary Form of the Mass, and something had to be done to stop that. Also, Bishop Strickland was way out of line and I’m grateful Francis removed him.
On the other hand Pope Francis’ handling of the Fr. Rupnik case, sadly, reminds me a lot of how JPII handled Fr. Marcial Maciel, which is badly, and he should have brought the hammer down on Cardinal Marx and the absolutely nuts Synodal Way stuff going on there and he didn’t. I don’t understand why. Maybe the situation there was more complicated and required a different approach.
Anyway, pray, fast, and trust in Jesus to take care of the Church and steer the Church somehow in the right direction, whatever that direction is. That’s what I do. Life’s too short to get caught up in Vatican palace intrigue. I’ll let the good people at The Pillar handle that 😉
"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."
The rule changes could prevent a deadlock if the issue is there being a lot of different candidates and no coalescing, but it seems like it could make deadlock more likely if it's between two camps.
The current rules, as I understand it, is that starting with the 33rd ballot, the only people cardinals can vote for are the two people who got the most votes on the 32nd ballot, but one still needs to get 2/3. But what if there were already two favorites and you had two camps each voting for one? The requirement they vote for only one of those two means if they deadlock, there's no possibility for any kind of compromise candidate to come out and get the 2/3.
To put the matter into perspective, a while ago you suggested the possibility of replacing the electoral college with a college of governors, and that to prevent them from just voting for their own party's preferred candidate (all the Republican governors voting for a Republican president and all the Democratic governors voting for a Democratic president), some kind of supermajority would be required, like maybe 2/3.
So, if this idea was put into effect in 2024, it's hard to see 2/3 of governors choosing Trump or Harris (there would be 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats), because of how many would have to go directly against their own party, and to get a result they'd end up having to choose some other person for president to get the 2/3.
But suppose you got those governors together and told them they HAD to choose Trump or Harris by supermajority? It seems to me that would create deadlock due to the difficulty of getting enough people from either party to vote for the other party's choice. I don't know if the governors would be willing to just sit there for over a year on principle, especially if they were under the strict rules that cardinals have to follow, but it'd seem like it would make more deadlock because it removes a compromise option.
And then that applies to the cardinals: If they're deadlocked between two candidates like the governors would be, and they have no option to try to choose a compromise third option, these rules could very well make deadlock more likely. One advantage is that cardinals are presumably less partisan than governors would be, and it's not like they have to go to their voters afterwards and explain why they voted for the other candidate. But the basic problem is still possibly there.
Now, I still don't think it's particularly likely it would get to over 30 anyway. If anything technology is the big incentive to do it quickly; it's one thing to sit around with no contact with the outside world centuries ago, it's another to do it when everyone is so used to the ability to be checking their phones or computers all the time. But it does seem to me like this "top 2" rule could at least conceivably make a deadlock worse by making a compromise candidate impossible.
Yes, this is exactly why the current post-32nd ballot rules are stupid and why Benedict should have abolished JP2's erroneous reform altogether instead of only partly rolling it back. I'm with you on all of this. Designed to shorten a conclave, it could easily prolong it instead.
So I suppose it's not really the rule *changes* that make it inconceivable that an election would run long, which means I phrased that sentence quite wrong. Hopefully my previous writing which has condemned the current post-32nd ballot rules partly makes up for my error here.
What I really meant was simpler: the rules require the cardinals to pray together quite a lot and then vote twice a day, every day, on a schedule that is not terribly easy for a bunch of men in their 70s, with no contact with the outside world at all. The top-two-candidates rule could entrench the cardinals for longer than they would otherwise (if they had the right to resort to a compromise), but, eventually, the minority will give up in despair and vote for whoever has the majority. Their only other option would be to remain in conclave for years until dying sequestered. The cardinals lack the stamina for that.
Other old rules encouraged longer conclaves: the right of cardinals to schedule their own votes (rather than sitting for two rather tiring scrutinies per day, every day), the right of cardinals to arrive late (necessary in a pre-modern world), the right of secular powers to issue a veto (and attendant violations of secrecy), and of course old-school disruptions like riot and plague. But this is all gone now. All the cardinals are already in Rome, I think. So I just don't think they can keep it up for that long.
But you're right: the post-32nd ballot rules are a hindrance, not a help. (The gubernatorial conclave I dream of should not adopt anything like it!)
Ah, okay, so it was just somewhat poor phrasing. Yes, I agree that the other rules would seem to ensure the conclave wouldn't last terribly long, and even in the situation I envisioned, I think one side would give up well before the end of the year. I just thought that the post-32nd ballot shift could at least lengthen it if things go a certain way. I could see the conclave going on for a bit--while a while ago, the 1830-31 conclave lasted for more than a month, and I THINK the rules were the same--but lasting until the end of the year (seven months) would be difficult to accept.
Something Happened in around the 1830s/40s, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what -- because, you're right, there were not significant formal rule changes around that time (at least not that I know of).
Nevertheless, Wikipedia notes that the 1830-31 conclave (which lasted 50 days) fit the pattern of the time: "No conclave since 1667 had lasted fewer than three weeks." However, everything changed after that: "No conclave since has lasted as long as a week."
It does seem that improved transportation played a significant role in that, and it also seems as though the practical power of the monarchical veto was waning even though it had not been definitively abolished yet. Still, an interesting little puzzle.
Thanks for the coverage! It’s amazing how hard it is to find even handed coverage of big bureaucratic events like this, the MN legislature standoff (remember that?), and so on.
Because of the nature of a papal election in a conclave, where the cardinal electors are rquired to come to a 2/3rds consensus while sealed off from the outside world, it is nearly impossible to attempt an accurate prediction. As a probability exercise, the dynamics of that election result in a large margin of error, much larger than the few percentage points of, say, a Presidential election poll.
Yep. But if we elected presidents by conclave...! :)
But, yeah, absolutely, I think the huge uncertainty of a conclave is why it's fun to bet on it, especially compared to a presidential election. Conclaves are when you can just pick Cardinal Polycarp whom nobody's ever heard of and still have as much of a shot at winning as many others.
I'm tempted to bet for a cardinal not on your list but just highlighted by John Allen over at CruxNow: Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
But alas, I don't do Venmo, which wants too much personal info. (I used to have Paypal but their fees were too onerous). Too bad you don't use Zelle.
And alas, I don't live anywhere near the Twin Cities to drop off cash. . .
I do think the smart move, at this point in the pool, is to bet on somebody nobody else has bet on. At this point, so much money is already in the pot for, say, +Pizzaballa that, even if Pizzaballa wins, each winner will only profit a pittance.
Sorry about Venmo! PayPal worked well in 2013, but they wanted outrageous fees this time, and I don't know Zelle as well.
Out of curiosity, there is something in this post I don't think you gave (I might have missed it). You talk a lot about odds, but not preferences: Was there anyone you'd most want to be pope? Not expect, but want.
I suppose I shouldn't ask without offering one for me. For me, it is a tricky decision between Turkson and Sarah. I'll readily admit that part of my reasoning is what I'm sure some could call blatant DEI: I'd just like to see a black African pope. Given the growth of both Christianity and Catholicism in Africa, I'd like to see a pope from there as representation. It'd also probably be the first black pope (there were a few African popes from long ago, but they were probably not dark skinned).
There are others from Africa but those two seem the foremost. It is tricky for me to decide between the two. Sarah seems like he would rapidly reverse Francis's worst tendencies, but I worry he might be too heavy-handed by being such a major lurch in the other direction. Turkson seems like he would be a bit more moderate in regards to that. He at least seems like he'd probably preserve some of the things I like about Francis while avoiding the parts I didn't. So I think I'd go with Turkson.
I did avoid most normative stuff in this post, because I share the betting pool (and the betting pool document) with a wide circle of friends and coworkers, and I don't want to alienate anyone by saying that I think Francis was a bad pope and that I hope for a new pope who will reverse many of his acts.
If you just gave me supreme power over elections and let me pick the pope, I doubt it would be a cardinal at all. I'd obviously give it a great deal of thought, but, off the top of my head, I'd probably give it to someone I know personally and trust on that basis. My former pastor, Fr. Patrick Hipwell, comes to mind. He would be a bomb dropped on the Vatican, but I suspect in a good way. A couple of professors I had in Rome (Fr. Michael Tavuzzi -- who, alas, I scared off the Internet in 2009 -- would also be a bomb, in a different way, but again I suspect a good way).
If you limit me to bishops (reasonable!), the first two names that come to my mind are Bishop Charles Morerod of Fribourg, who once pranked me very effectively but also helped B16 negotiate with SSPX -- seems like a good mix, but needs more vetting, but we could use a Dominican pope -- and Archbishop Charles Chaput, formerly of Philadelphia, who consistently impresses me with his sober writing.
Of serious names, though? I'll follow Buckley's rule: the most Ratzingerian candidate who can win. From what I've been hearing, that's probably +Erdo or possibly +Eijk. +Sarah (from what I have been hearing since I posted this) is not even in the running in the conservative lane, which seems too bad, but maybe he *is* a bit Too Much for the throne, but I don't know. I'm one of those degenerates who doesn't think it's a bad thing if the Church becomes visibly smaller as long as it clarifies what it is and what it stands for in the process. Might even be good. It's probably happening anyway no matter who becomes pope. Saving remnant, etc. etc.. So Sarah still seems probably good to me, but unelectable.
Really, though, I know very little about any of the serious candidates and would therefore pay very close attention to the interventions at the general congregations, which I would rely on to help make up my mind. (Also: much prayer and fasting.) I'd also be doing a lot of research on the side about each papabile's involvement in the abuse scandals, direct or indirect, because I'll bet the cardinals themselves are politely sweeping their collective complicity under the rug instead of talking about it. I didn't learn much about the papabili's abuse scandal involvement for this article for precisely that reason: being bad on abuse probably doesn't preclude anyone from being elected pope, unless it was really embarrassing.
I instinctively distrust +Turkson. That's not fair of me. (It is instinctive, based on little more than having read his bio on College of Cardinals Report.) Nevertheless, I'd need a lot of reassurances to support him. A black Pope would be lovely, but I won't force it. I really want and NEED the Church to be color-blind in the long run.
</loose thoughts>
I know this was an incredibly trivial part of the essay, but as a Brit, I feel like I should offer a slight counterpoint to the depiction of our politics on the left-right spectrum.
We haven't had a genuinely far-right party of any prominence since the decline of the BNP more than a decade or so ago, and far-right politics today seems mostly limited to street-thuggery. Farage is basically a Thatcherite libertarian with a keen nose for populist wedge issues and shameless knack for self-promotion, whilst Reform - led by libertarians but with a working-class voter base with much more left-wing views on the economy - has yet to cohere into much more than a grab-bag of variegated dissent.
It was the idea of the Lib Dems as far-left though that really made me go "hmmmm". Traditionally, they are the party of the vague, squidgy centre, sitting between the more hard-edged Tories on the right (who the Lib Dems chose over Labour as coalition partners in the hung parliament of 2010), and the more working-class Labour on the left, although they do stand apart from both in terms of their tendency to defend civil liberties. Stereotypically, their voters are genteel, NIMBYish, comfortably-off property owners in the west London suburbs and the nicer parts of the countryside, who wish to maintain a socioeconomic status quo that has worked out pretty well for them, but to feel nice about doing so - and certainly not like nasty Tories! They are broadly socially progressive, but in much the same way that the establishment of both parties has generally been broadly socially progressive for decades (Sunak, Badenoch and indeed current-iteration Starmer being somewhat to the right of the mid-late 2010s consensus on social values), with a greater tendency to favour migration and internationalism, but again, less out of ideology and more out of a desire for niceness, sensible-ness, and moderation.
I think the Corbyn movement could genuinely be counted as approaching far-left, and the Green party could potentially be the closest thing we have today, but again, they have a crunchy, de-growth, NIMBYish rural wing that maybe problematises this a little. Starmer's Labour party though does seem reasonable to put as being to the right of the Lib Dems, at least over the last couple of years, as it has largely maintained austerity (with noted exceptions for unionised public-sector workers, who are now their core constituency post de-industrialisation), whilst letting itself drift rightwards on cultural issues along with the general cultural vibe shift.
Basically though, all three main parties have failed to be honest about the fact that due to an aging population our health and pensions spending is slowly devouring the rest of the budget, and so absent any decisive commitment to either substantially raise taxes or substantially lower spending, they all in practice carry out the same austerity economics, generally whilst drifting with the winds of wider shifts in social attitudes, with only minor variations between them (hence to a large extent the surging popularity of Reform, despite their incoherence and the unpopularity of their leader's actual positions. E.g., there is little appetite for Putin sympathising on the British right, which generally still idolises the assertive liberal internationalism of Churchill/Thatcher).
(I realise as I write this that I have in fact completely failed to challenge the basic idea that our current left-right spectrum goes Lib Dems-Labour-Tories-Reform...I just think there are some nuances that would be helpful to point out too).
(Also: I think Pizzaballa).
Purely from the perspective of policy analysis, I find it interesting that you mention the fiscal policy of the major UK parties because Labour pledged not to raise taxes but then imposed means-testing on the winter fuel payment, and James and I have a whole article about that:
https://decivitate.substack.com/p/give-the-rich-more-money
(As for the next Pope, I just hope that whoever it is continues celebrating certain important Masses, like Holy Thursday, in places like prisons, because it seems to me that, especially given who Jesus' disciples were when they became his disciples, such as Matthew being a tax collector, Jesus of Nazareth would have been far more likely to wash the feet of prisoners rather than bishops.)
Congratulations on the new Pope (from a Rerum Novarum enjoyer) - I'm not a Catholic so I don't really have standing to comment on the internal needs of the Catholic Church, but I will say that I hope for another pastor who is able to reach and inspire people outside the Catholic Church like me, just as Francis did (intellectually as well as morally - I read Laudato Si' way back in 2016 when I was bored at work and skiving, and it opened my mind). Also, as a radical vegan environmentalist who has come to realise that any attempt to value all life that doesn't include unborn human beings is hypocritical and close-hearted, I found Pope Francis' approach particularly encouraging.
Re the effect of means testing on tax rates...oh, my sweet summer child, you know nothing of how distortive they can be! The winter fuel payment is now granted only to recipients of the means-tested pension credit, so (if I've understood this correctly) if you were to earn a single penny over the pension credit threshold (£227.10/week), you would then loose access to the entire £200-300 winter fuel payment in one go. So for a pensioner earning a penny below the threshold that would presumably mean a potential marginal effective tax rate on the next pound of income of 30,000% from the loss of the winter fuel payment alone (caveat: I'm bad at maths). And we also means test the income tax free allowance of £12,570, meaning (at least according to wikipedia) an effective marginal rate of 62% on income between 100k and 120k, compared with a marginal rate of 42% on incomes between 120k and 125k and 47% on incomes above 125k, even before any loss of means tested benefits is taken into account (Do I need to add that I found your article persuasive?)
Zooming out a bit: Ruling out any rise in the main broad-based taxes, ie income tax, VAT and national insurance (a pledge they have already fudged severely after increasing employers' national insurance - whilst saying that, actually, they only meant they wouldn't raise employees' national insurance, even though they never specified this at the time) despite a massive deficit has led the Labour government instead to pursue narrow tax rises/spending cuts that have hit small parts of the population very hard, hence the increasingly noisy dissent. The worst I think has been the cuts to the personal independence payment, which is for equipment and other support to help the disabled enter the workplace - which makes sense even in cold heartless accountancy terms, as well as simply in terms of giving effective help to those in need.
I admit, when I wrote the paragraph you originally mentioned, what I originally wrote was just:
> For example, in England, there are four parties, but they all fit on the same spectrum: far-left, center-left, center-right, far-right.
Then I stared at it for a while and said, "James Joseph Heaney, are you trying to tell me that New Labour under Tony Blair was a center-left party?"
That was when I added:
> 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.
Because, yes, whenever you look closely at the parties, it (almost) always turns out to be much weirder and more dynamic than the spectrum suggests. There are 20 axes to British politics -- and American politics, for that matter! -- but it usually just takes too dang long to explain them all.
Anyway, that's my belated reply to your OP. I won't wade into your and Daniel's discussion of means-testing, because re-reading that article still makes my brain tired (there was SO MUCH MATH on that one), but I will say that I am touched and pleased to learn that Pope Francis was able to reach out to your heart with Laudato Si' and invite you into the fetal rights movement. That is very, very good, and I'm glad to have heard of it.
I'm going to suggest that if you do want to further discuss means-testing and its distortionary effects, which I'd be happy to do, that the discussion be moved to the actual article so that the comments section of this one stays on the actual topic of this article.
So, y'all have a pope:
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/new-pope-conclave-day-two-05-08-25
It's Robert Prevost. Is this good? Bad? He doesn't seem to have been on anyone's radar.
*I* am bad because Prevost emerged as a serious candidate over the weekend and I thought about updating my article with updated odds (sell +Sarah, buy +Erdo, sell +Pizzaballa, buy +Prevost, buy +Mamberti) and I didn't. Got busy. I failed the readers! I'm sorry!
Will he be good? This is the hardest question. Popes aren't usually very predictable based on their past lives as bishops, especially not relatively obscure bishops like +Prevost. I certainly didn't expect Pope Francis to govern in anything like the way he did -- and I doubt the conservative conclave that elected him expected it, either. Unlike presidents, whom I think you can get a fairly good bead on during the campaign -- certainly in the first hundred days -- I don't expect to know whether Pope Leo will be a good pope for a couple of years.
So far, I have seen both good signs and bad signs from Pope Leo XIV. I will mention two:
* He has the whiff of the abuse scandal about him, as The Pillar reported Monday. Nothing egregious, only questionable. The cardinals knew about it, but questionable things can be answered and I guess they were satisfied with the answers, but quite frankly I don't trust the cardinals on the abuse stuff. I would certainly have preferred someone without even a whiff, and will look into it more. We know +Maradiaga was a huge supporter of +Prevost and +Maradiaga has more than a whiff. Bad.
* He was at Villanova in the 1970s, home of the oldest undergraduate pro-life student group in the country, founded in 1974 in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade. I have been told (and am attempting to confirm) that Pope Leo co-founded that group. Good! One often gets the sense from more progressive bishops that protection for the unborn is something grudgingly accepted because you can't be a pro-abortion cardinal, to the point where taking it seriously has become a fault line and (for me) something of a litmus test. (If you can be squishy on killing children, you can be squishy on abusing them -- and anything else, up to and including Jesus.) But if Pope Leo understands the importance of abortion within the wider web of Catholic Social Teaching, and was brave enough to articulate it to a *very* hostile world in 1974 (before the Evangelical pro-life turn), that's encouraging.
We mustn't read too much into this very small amount of information, though. (One is only a rumor!) We shall see.
Just letting you know that I was watching the announcement today at work and, by timing (or the Holy Spirit, one never knows), two coworkers stopped by just before Pope Leo was introduced. One coworker was asking how liberal or conservative he is and I first explained that I had never heard of him before. Then I thought of this article and talked about how you can't equate Catholic theological leanings with American political leanings!
I failed pretty miserably at translating the blessing, though.