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Saturday, 3 May 2025

Dinner parties, listening and lobbying. What goes on behind closed doors to elect a pope

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Cardinal Vincent Nichols attends an interview at the Venerable English College, in Rome, Friday, May 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

BY NICOLE WINFIELD

Updated 7:20 AM GMT+1, May 3, 2025

ROME (AP) — Rome is bustling with jasmine blooming and tourists swarming. But behind closed doors, these are the days of dinner parties, coffee klatches and private meetings as cardinals in town to elect a successor to Pope Francis suss out who among them has the stuff to be next.

It was in this period of pre-conclave huddling in March of 2013 that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the retired archbishop of Westminster, and other reform-minded Europeans began pushing the candidacy of an Argentine Jesuit named Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Their dinner table lobbying worked and Pope Francis won on the fifth ballot.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols may have inherited Murphy-O’Connor’s position as archbishop of Westminster. But he’s not taking on the job as the front-man papal lobbyist in these days of canvassing of cardinals to try to identify who among them should be the next pope.

“We’re of quite different styles,” Nichols said Friday, chuckling during an interview in the Venerable English College, the storied British seminary in downtown Rome where Nichols studied in the 1960s. “Cardinal Cormac would love to be at the center of the party. I’m a little more reserved than that and a little bit more introverted.”

Nevertheless, Nichols, 79, provided an insider’s view of what’s going on among his fellow cardinal-electors, between meals of Rome’s famous carbonara — as they get to know one another. They all descended on Rome to bid farewell to the pope and are now meeting informally before the start of the May 7 conclave.

Nichols says he is spending these days before he and his fellow cardinals are sequestered listening. The routine calls for cardinals to meet each morning in a Vatican auditorium to discuss the needs of the Catholic Church and the type of person who can lead it. These meetings are open to all cardinals, including those over 80, while the conclave itself in the Sistine Chapel is limited to cardinals who haven’t yet reached 80.

With the exception of an afternoon Mass — part of the nine days of official mourning for Francis — the rest of the day is free. Cardinals have been seen around town taking walks or eating out, trying to remain incognito.

‘Not a boys’ brigade that marches in step’

Nichols said a picture of the future pope is beginning to emerge, at least in his mind, as cardinals look back at Francis’ 12-year pontificate and see where to go from here.

“I suppose we’re looking for somebody who even in their manner not only expresses the depth of the faith, but also its openness as well,” said Nichols.

Pope Benedict XVI named Nichols archbishop of Westminster in 2009, but he didn’t become a cardinal until 2014, when Francis tapped him in his first batch of cardinals. Francis went on to name Nichols as a member of several important Vatican offices, including the powerful dicastery for bishops, which vets bishop nominations around the world.

“My experience so far, to be quite honest with you, is there’s a lot of attentive listening,” Nichols said. “That’s listening to the people who might have an idea today of who they think is the best candidate, and I wouldn’t be surprised if by Monday they might have changed their mind.”

Nichols said the picture that is emerging is of seeing Francis’ pontificate in continuity with the more doctrinaire papacies of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and of appreciating the multicultural reality of the Catholic Church today. Francis greatly expanded the College of Cardinals to include cardinals from far-flung places like Tonga and Mongolia, rather than the traditional centers of European Catholicism.

Yes, divisions and disagreements have been aired. “But I can never remember a time when Catholics all agreed about everything,” Nichols said.

“We’re not a boys’ brigade that marches in step.” But he said he sensed that cardinals believe Francis’ reforming papacy and radical call to prioritize the poor and marginalized, to care for the planet and all its people, needed further consolidating with another papacy.

“There’s a sense that the initiatives that this man of such originality took, they probably do need rooting a bit more to give them that stability and evident continuity,” Nichols said. “So that these aren’t just the ideas of one person, one charismatic person, but they are actually consistently part of how the church reflects on humanity, our own humanity and our world.”

‘Team Bergoglio’

In his book “The Great Reformer,” Francis’ biographer Austen Ivereigh described the 2013 conclave and how Nichols’ predecessor, Murphy-O’Connor and other reform-minded Europeans seized the opportunity to push Bergoglio after it was clear the Italians were fighting among themselves over the Italian candidate.

“Team Bergoglio,” as these reform-minded cardinals came to be known, had tried to talk up Bergoglio in the 2005 conclave, but failed to get their man through after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s momentum grew and Bergoglio bowed out.

In 2013, with many too old to vote in the conclave itself, “Team Bergoglio” talked up the Argentine at dinner parties around Rome in the days before the conclave. The aim was to ensure Bergoglio could secure at least 25 votes on the first ballot to establish himself as a serious candidate, the book said.

“The Great Reformer” recounts a dinner party at the North American College, the U.S. seminary in Rome, on March 5, 2013 to which Murphy-O’Connor and Australian Cardinal George Pell were invited and where the British cardinal talked up the qualities of a possible first Latin American pope.

“He held a number of these dinners, and I think there were a few of them involved, a few who had grown convinced that Bergoglio was what the church needed,” Ivereigh said Friday.

Nichols doesn’t have any such calculations or preferred candidate, at least that he is willing to share.

“For me, it’s no good going into a conclave thinking it’s like a political election and I want my side to win. I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m going to go in certainly with my own thoughts but ready to change them, to listen and maybe try and persuade others to change theirs too.”

Thursday, 1 May 2025

Over the next several days, Letters from Rome 2025 will post reflections on the future of the papacy and the qualities to be sought in a new pope by Catholics with a broad knowledge of the Church and its impact on the twenty-first-century world. The first of these appears below.—XR II

A Pope We Can Take for Granted

by Matthew J. Franck

I recently announced, on the website of another publication, that I would, if nominated and elected, serve as president of the United States. Since I don’t intend to campaign, with all that entails, my “candidacy” could be regarded as entirely tongue-in-cheek. But I wrote as I did because being president of the United States is something I can actually imagine myself doing. The job comes with high demands, but also certain powers, and certain limits on those powers. To do it supremely well, in a time of crisis, calls for very great gifts. But to do it merely well, in ordinary times (which is most of the time, including now), calls for a level of character, knowledge, and judgment that literally thousands of Americans possess.

Not so the papacy. I cannot imagine being pope, and not just because I am not a priest. To succeed to the chair of St. Peter is a prospect that no one can contemplate without fear and trembling. The bishop of Rome, set over and above all other bishops in the apostolic succession, is the successor of a man whom Jesus himself singled out as the rock on which his Church would be built. He presides, in Vatican City, over what Mary Ann Glendon has called “the last absolute monarchy in the West.” It may be a microstate whose annual budget is little more than a rounding error for the U.S. Treasury, but it sorely needs reform of its financial and administrative affairs. More importantly, he shepherds a worldwide flock of almost a billion and a half, and chooses its local bishops. There is considerable disarray and continuing scandal, with the wounds of the Church’s sexual-abuse crisis still festering after decades, and a continuing shortage of clerical and religious vocations.

And on top of all this, the pope is chief among the guardians of the deposit of faith. In concert with his fellow bishops, and through the various dicasteries of the Curia, he is responsible for saying what it means—what it meant in the beginning, means now, and ever shall mean—to be a Catholic Christian. The knock on Pope Francis was that he sowed confusion about this; I have often said so myself. But it is not a thing to be wondered at that a man should fall short of this most demanding vocation of all. The prayer of the Church for the repose of Francis’s soul should be that the Lord show mercy to a servant who loved him so, and strove to do his will by his best lights.

Francis, as many have said, had two very tough acts to follow in John Paul II (philosopher, statesman, evangelist par excellence) and Benedict XVI (perhaps the most gifted and astute theologian of the last seventy-five years). Yet, though one of these men has already been canonized, neither of them ran a flawless pontificate, either. What should we ask of the next pope?

What I pray most for in the papacy is the same thing I most want to see in the American presidency. Just as I don’t want to worry about what’s happening in Washington, I want a level of trust in the pope so high and solid that I need not concern myself most of the time with what is going on in Rome. Pope Francis was inclined, in an expression he used himself, to “make a mess” from time to time. And I get the idea that Catholics might sometimes need to be shaken out of their complacency, the rut of “being Catholic” without really doing what the Church’s bridegroom asks of us. But even the most salutary of messes need cleaning up at some point, and it was this that Francis neglected.

For the last dozen years, each headline, tweet, or rumor about something Francis had said or done—whether extemporaneously or deliberately—was cause for uttering the prayerful question, “dear Lord, what now?” It is not a good thing to raise the anxiety levels of the faithful—and especially not to do it so often, and with so little resolution of their doubts, so little reassurance that they can count on the Holy Father in all things that matter to the faith of this generation, and of all those yet to come.

That expression “deposit of faith” is an interesting one—not perhaps intended as a banking metaphor, but readable that way. And “faith” can of course mean “trust”: To pledge one’s faith is to declare one can be trusted, and to have faith in another is to trust him. To follow out the banker’s metaphor: Trust is a moral capital that earns interest, and grows greater over time when invested in the right securities. Pope Francis, it must be said, spent some of that moral capital in dubious ventures, squandering too much of the trust of the faithful. The next pope will perforce embark on his pontificate with a smaller nest egg in this respect, and will have some sober rebuilding to do.

I don’t want to obsess over my 401(k). I don’t want to lose any sleep over the future of the rule of law in my country. And I don’t want to worry about whether the Catholic faith is in trustworthy hands. In every Mass, we join our priests in praying for the Holy Father. What I hope this next conclave gives us is a pope we so implicitly trust that we can—though we never should—join in that prayer perfunctorily, casually, free from all distress and anxiety.

Forget the American presidency. The papacy is the hardest calling in the world. And to be so good at it that the sheep everywhere can take the shepherd for granted is a very tall order indeed. It will take a great stirring of the Holy Spirit, in the conclave and in the man it chooses. But this is what the Church needs now.

Matthew J. Franck is a contributing editor at Public Discourse.

What the Church Needs Now: A Good Father

by Nathaniel Peters

Given that we speak of the pope as the Holy Father, perhaps a reflection on fatherhood can offer some insights into what the Church needs in the next pontificate. A good father loves his children by keeping order in the home. Children need to know what they can expect from their parents. Parents, in turn, need to treat their children fairly and not play favorites. Discipline should be clear and regular, firm but not harsh, edifying without being humiliating or insulting. Parents should explain why they are acting as they do in terms that children can understand.

This means that the next pope should restore order in the Church. The faithful should know what they expect from him, what he is thinking, and how he is likely to act. Yes, the pope’s job is to challenge and correct, but it is also to comfort and not berate or belittle. The faithful should not be left waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In a related vein, the next pope should insist on the regular, stable application of the rule of law within the Church. During the previous pontificate, there were numerous cases in which laws were bent or not applied to those who found favor in the pope and his trusted advisors. The most infamous are connected to sexual predation and are well known: Marko Rupnik, Gustavo Zanchetta, Juan Barros, and Ariel Alberto Principi.

This needs to stop. The next pope must have the courage to appoint good men to root out and expose the sexual and financial corruption present in the Church. The Song of Songs speaks of catching “the little foxes that spoil the vineyards,” which the Church fathers took to signify heretics, though the metaphor works for the corrupt, too. The next pope needs to root out the vermin and destroy their lairs.

A good father teaches his children the truth about themselves and the world around them. He hands on skills, lore, and family traditions. But most importantly, he tells children their own story, from the way their parents met to the fact that God has created them to love him and the world that he ordered well. He leaves room for them to question and discern, but provides a bedrock of belief on which they can build their lives. He teaches them right from wrong and inspires a vision of what the moral life looks like when lived well.

The next pope needs to take seriously his role as custodian of the Church’s doctrinal and moral tradition. He must strengthen his brethren with charity and clarity. This begins with an appreciation and respect for rigorous, clear thinking rooted in the Church’s tradition, and a sense of how it provides the foundation for her pastoral work. The next pope should recognize that sound theology and liturgical beauty are essential means of encountering Jesus for modern people who inhabit an increasingly dry and ugly world.

During the last days of the previous pontificate, numerous outlets reported an increasing number of conversions to the Catholic faith in the U.S., France, and Britain. I thought about conversion some months ago as I read David Lodge’s satires of Catholic life in the 1950s–1970s. It struck me that few of Lodge’s characters lived their faith out of a vibrant love of God or a sense that it was the path to holiness and true flourishing. Catholicism for them seemed akin to a congenital condition to be managed, like diabetes or high cholesterol, or a relationship with an emotionally stunted family member. Some of Lodge’s characters might have reasons for staying Catholic, but few could give reasons for entering the Church.

The next pope should embrace those in the Church who feel this way and propose to them a more excellent way. As Ross Douthat recently put it, we live in “an age of extinction” in which technology-driven change puts pressure on social institutions and inherited beliefs. Catholicism will flourish insofar as it is chosen and practiced, not inherited and taken for granted. It will require spiritual fathers who provide sound answers to the question “Why should I become Catholic?” The next pope needs to be able to do so, joyfully.

In short, the next pope should understand that beauty and tradition are important and attractive to the faithful, that justice and order are for the Church’s good, and that doctrinal clarity and stability make the Church a shelter in the midst of the storms of our age. He must be more wedded to the Church’s tradition and the structure of his office than to his own judgment, zealous for souls and their salvation in Christ. In this way may he truly be a Servant of the Servants of God.

Nathaniel Peters is the director of the Morningside Institute and a contributing editor at Public Discourse.This letter is adapted from “Pope Francis: A Candid Assessment.”