Consider This from NPR - Prelude to a conclave: understanding the selection process of a new pope

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

Days before the beginning of the conclave to select the next pope, NPR's Scott Detrow is in Rome. He speaks with Sylvia Poggioli about the rituals and ceremonies involved in the upcoming election at the Vatican. We also hear from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, about this moment for the Catholic Church, and what it's like being a seasoned veteran of the conclave process. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's Sunday morning and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, is getting ready for Mass. Every member of the College of Cardinals is assigned a Roman church that they're nominally in charge of. And days before the beginning of the conclave to select the next pope, Dolan is visiting his church to celebrate 1115 Mass. The ceremonies and rituals surrounding the death of one pope and the election of another all take place in ornate ancient cathedrals. That is not the scene at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mount Mario, in a residential Roman neighborhood.

It looks like scores of other parish churches around the globe. The Statue of Jesus isn't sculpted by Michelangelo. It's a painted plaster of Jesus with a sacred heart and red robes. The prayers of the faithful are read by an Italian teenager wearing a hoodie. Dolan delivers his homily in Italian. He tells the congregation that Our Lady of Guadalupe is his second parish after St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. And he asks them to pray for him and the other cardinals, saying they need the Holy Spirit as they enter the upcoming conclave. Then he recalls Pope Francis' advice to keep homilies short and says, enough.

When Mass ends, Cardinal Dolan stands at the door of the church greeting parishioners, posing for pictures with children, to see babies. Mama mia, trovarvi qui. Grazie, buona domenica a tutti, eh? And after that, he spends a few minutes with another important contingency, the media. Reporters from all over the world crowd around him, asking questions about the coming conclave and what he wants to see in the next pope.

You know we're blessed because with all the popes we've recently had, you see so many great characteristics, and you kind of hope that maybe we could blend them all. I'm thinking obviously of Papa Francesco. I think to have Benedict XVI with his intense intellect. I'm thinking of Pope St. John Paul II with his courage and his call, his call to follow Jesus. If we get a beautiful combination, that'll be a blessing. What are you taking from your experience in 2013?

How has that affected how you're approaching this? It helps. I was so nervous last time, and I thought, now what do I do? But now I feel kind of seasoned, a little more relaxed. Consider this. Cardinal Dolan begins this week as a member of the College of Cardinals. Starting Wednesday, he, like any of his peers, could become the next pope.

Coming up, NPR's Sylvia Paggioli explains what happens in a conclave. From NPR, I'm Scott Detro. You may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to NPR. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Whatever changes that brings, NPR's commitment to reporting the facts won't change. Join the movement to defend public media. Visit donate.npr.org. On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast,

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It is a bright sunny day here in St. Peter's Square. The square is filled with tourists and religious pilgrims, which is common. What's uncommon are the signs of preparation for the conclave all around us. The conclave begins Wednesday. There are big platforms with TV lights for the media, huge TV monitors around the square so that people can watch feeds of the Sistine Chapel chimney. There are wooden fences to corral the expected crowds of hundreds of thousands who will crowd the square when a pope is chosen. Sylvia Paggioli has covered the Vatican and several conclaves for

NPR and she joins me on the edge of Vatican City to talk through what's to come. Welcome Sylvia. Thank you for having me here. Let's start with this setting. You and I are both looking out at St. Peter's Basilica at the square right now and if we crane our necks just enough from where we're sitting we can see the edge of the Sistine Chapel chimney with that that was just put in place. Can we start by talking about the significance of where we're located right now? Well that Sistine Chapel, it's the one with all the wall and the ceiling, magnificent frescoes that Michelangelo completed in 1512. We can't see it, but there's a copper pipe that leads from the chimney to a cast iron

stove inside the chapel where the Cardinals' ballots will be burned. The color of the smoke will signal the results of the ballot in black for no pope elected and white smoke when there is a new pope. And one hand this is an election just like any other election, right? There's caucusing going on, there's votes that are going to be cast. On the other hand, there's this extreme pageantry and ritual. You've covered a number of conclaves. What makes this process so unique? Well, precisely that. I think the colorful ritual and, of course, the secrecy. When they enter the conclave, the cardinals take a note of secrecy on penalty of excommunication,

and they must make their decision without any outside influence. To ensure they'll be held in comunicado from the rest of the world as they vote, mobile phones are banned. There's no TV, no radio, no newspapers. In addition, Vatican workers have installed a raised wooden flooring, not just to protect the marble floors below, but perhaps also to hide electronic jamming equipment, and Vatican security will sweep the chapel for hidden microphones and other listening devices. Despite our best attempts, I guess.

Obviously, the focus is on this ritual that begins on Wednesday. But a lot's going on right now, and that's a process that's pretty important to the eventual outcome. Walk us through what the Cardinals have been up to in the days since Pope Francis' funeral. Well, all the Cardinals, voting age, and even the over 80-year-olds, have been meeting in what are called congregations, discussing many issues that the Catholic Church is now facing.

A serious deficit in the Vatican finances to clerical sex abuse scandals that have come to light throughout the world, and these are scandals that have been dealt with very, very poorly by most of the national churches. The Cardinals are expected to observe secrecy, but there have been some leaks that suggest the various factions have begun to face off. The progressives who embrace the reforms of Pope Francis, the conservatives and traditionalists

who want to slow down the pace of reform, if not reverse it completely, and the centrists who are somewhere in between. Who makes up the College of Cardinals? There are 53 voting age cardinals from Europe, 17 from South America, 16 from North America, 18 from Africa, and 23 from Asia. The total comes to 135. Two are too sick to attend, which means 133 will elect the new pope

compared to 115 in the last conclave that elected Jorge Bergoglio. The novelty this time is that many of the carnals have never met. So they're now getting to know each other, making alliances and promoting their candidates or even themselves as future popes. When we think about the blocs here, there's a lot of focus on the geography. You just mentioned the different locations they come from. There's also this focus on which pope appointed them. Are these both the important

factors to think about? Yeah, very much so. Pope Francis appointed some 80 percent of the voting cardinals and he chose men from far away countries where there had never been cardinals before. His picks are not necessarily all progressives, but they reflect the fact that the growth of Catholicism has shifted from Europe and North America to the global South. So let's look ahead to Wednesday morning when you and I and the rest of the NPR team will be settling in here to look at a chimney with binoculars. What all is going to happen to begin this, this ritual? A mass will be celebrated in St. Peter's in the morning, and in the afternoon the cardinals

will be escorted by Vatican Gendendarme to the Sistine Chapel. Once inside, the master of liturgical celebrations will say the words, extra omnis, meaning all who aren't cardinal electors get out. After that, the door is shut, conclave after all means with key, and the waiting begins. So when they're in the Sistine Chapel, they're sitting there in silence but but can we assume that there is politicking, there is debating, there is campaigning going on in the other spaces when they're all together? Well many of us have seen the movie Conclave that suggested that there's quite a lot of communication and scheming between Cardinals and nuns and

other Vatican prelates at the residence where the Cardinals take their meals and are lodged when not in the Sistine Chapel. I think that's pretty exaggerated, but there's no question that they certainly do talk and caucus among themselves. And I want to ask you the two questions that I feel like you've probably been fielding from everybody you've come across the last couple weeks. The first question is, how long do you think it's going to take? Do we have any sense how long this could be? My guess is that the latest by Friday, we should hear the name of the new pope. And second question, do you have a guess on who it might be or at least the type of person

we're thinking about? Well, I can tell you who the favorites are according to the leading Vaticanisti. Those are the veteran journalists who cover the Vatican. There's the current Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, 70 years old, a veteran diplomat. He's journalists who cover the Vatican. There's the current Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, 70 years old, a veteran diplomat. He's the architect of the Vatican's rapprochement with China, which makes him disliked by many conservatives. He could be described as a centrist.

Then there's another Italian, Pier Battista Pizzaballa, the 60-year-old Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, who offered himself in exchange for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. And he said to have support of both ends of the conservative and progressive spectrum. Then there's Luis Antonio Tagle, 67 years old, from the Philippines, Asia's biggest Catholic country, who's seen as very much in the Francis mold. And then there are several others that have been mentioned in the last few days. At the same time, there's also been an uptick

in negative rumors and fake news on social media about some of the frontrunners, and that's a sign that there are some very strong papabili possible popes. That is NPR's Sylvia Poggioli. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartleman and edited by Courtney Dorning.

Our executive producer is Sammy Ettingen. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detre. You may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to NPR. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Whatever changes that brings, NPR's commitment to reporting the facts won't change. Join the movement to defend public media. Visit donate.npr.org. Does the idea of listening to political news freak you out?

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