After Pope Francis’s death, reflections turn toward a pivotal conclave

Nearby was Rebecca Pawloski, an adjunct professor at the John Felice Rome Center, who sat on a folding stool beside French and Spanish teenagers, and a middle-aged couple, who prayed the rosary and wept quietly. Following Italian tradition, Pawloski says, the crowd applauded when the closed casket holding the body of Pope Francis, who died April 21 at age 88, came into view on a large screen beside the altar.

Presidents, royals, and red-robed cardinals attended the funeral mass, a solemn but at times celebratory ceremony punctuated by Gregorian chants and the reading of Latin verses. A homily by Giovanni Battista Re, the 91-year-old dean of the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, drew generous applause, Pawloski says, emphasizing Francis’s first trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa to visit Mediterranean migrants. The applause crescendoed when the cardinal recognized the Pope’s peace initiatives— “a poignant moment with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump in attendance,” she told Loyola Today.

When the funeral ended at noon, Pawloski walked home beside the Tiber River, “pondering the many events of these past days and thinking of the upcoming conclave,” she says.

A world hungry for ‘wisdom figures’

Conclave—the secret, closed-door voting process to elect the next pope—is on the minds of many Loyola faculty and students, particularly given the University’s strong connections to Pope Francis and his Ignatian values.

Scheduled to begin on May 7 in the Sistine Chapel, the confidential conclave proceedings fictionalized in director Edward Berger’s eponymous film, will continue until a new pope is elected, with the votes of 133 eligible cardinal electors under the age of 80 in the College of Cardinals determining Pope Francis’s successor. The choice could have profound ramifications for the University, some 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, and the broader geopolitical landscape.

“What the world is hungry for are wisdom figures,” says Michael Murphy, director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. “As a global leader, is there anybody who has anywhere near the credibility and integrity of Pope Francis? Understanding learnedness, dialoguing civilly and deeply, not forgetting the smallest person in the room or the most frail or vulnerable. Any good human can recognize the value of that.”

“Most people probably did not recognize just how ‘Jesuit’ Francis was,” notes Father Joe Wagner, S.J., a campus minister at the John Felice Rome Center. “His openness to ‘todos, todos, todos,’ his insistence on carefully listening to all and to the movement of the Spirit, and his constant calls for attention to the poor and the marginalized—all these he brought from his identity as a Jesuit.”

For Miguel Díaz, the John Courtney Murray, S.J. University Chair in Public Service at Loyola, the selection also carries important institutional ramifications—as a measure of Loyola’s ties to the Vatican’s inner circle, and as an indicator of the papacy’s continued support for Loyola’s Building Bridges Initiative, a program Pope Francis helped ignite, which engages university students, from Africa to Asia to the Americas, in synodal dialogue about global issues, such as migration, energy policy, and ecology.

Perhaps most crucially, says Díaz, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See under former President Barack Obama, the choice is likely to be a powerful signal of the Church’s evolving mission and ecclesiastic direction. “It would be a real tragedy if we did not continue down the path of reform in addressing what the Second Vatican Council called the ‘signs of the times,’” Díaz says.

Who is papabile?

Yet, the question of who the cardinal electors will choose as pontiff is far from clear. One of the looming questions, says Michael Canaris, a Loyola associate professor specializing in Ignatian spirituality and immigration studies, is whether the voting delegates will choose someone cut from the same cloth as Pope Francis or a traditionalist who pushes back against his reforms.

Pope Francis’s letter to U.S. bishops objecting to mass deportation, his professed nonjudgment of LGBTQ individuals, and his encyclical letter Laudato Si’ on the importance of ecological stewardship, have been celebrated in progressive circles, but drawn criticism from more conservative cardinals, Canaris says.  

Also core to Francis’s papacy was an emphasis on synodality—a theological framework that Canaris says views all Church members, including laypeople, as “People of God” who share responsibility for discerning the Church’s mission and foundational teachings.

But the next Pope might contest that interpretation. Several leading opposition candidates, including 72-year-old Péter Erdő, a Hungarian cardinal who has served as the Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest since 2003, take the view the Church is “softening around the edges of doctrinal purity,” Canaris says.

According to the Vatican News, Pope Francis has appointed 108 cardinals, well over the two-thirds supermajority needed to elect a new pope. However, that seemingly favorable statistical balance does not necessarily imply the electors will choose a pope who follows in Francis’s footsteps.

“The conclave is a curious phenomenon,” says Father David McCallum, S.J., founder of Contemplative Leaders in Action, an Ignatian leadership program for young adults. “While the internet provides plenty of data about the viable candidates and there are, no doubt, betting pools in play about the most likely ‘papabile,’ the actual outcome is more unpredictable. There’s even a saying that ‘If one goes into the conclave as a pope, he’ll come out a cardinal.’”

Another factor nudging the scales could be that Pope Francis’s cardinal selections reflect a deliberate move away from the historically Eurocentric nature of the church’s leadership and an expansion of the voting authority in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Countries like Haiti, Tonga, and Rwanda saw their first cardinals anointed under Pope Francis, Canaris says, and even in Europe, which accounts for 40% of the voting delegation, Francis has preferenced cardinals from smaller cities, such as Marseille, France, to large metropolises.

“Generally, it seems that facility with multiple languages, international experience, and impeccable character are all advantages,” McCallum says. “It is a little less clear going forward to what extent one’s region of origin will be decisive.”

Waiting for the white smoke

What is clear is that cardinals’ deliberations in conclave will be shrouded in secrecy. Doors are closed to the public and correspondence with anyone outside the conclave is forbidden, “except in cases of proven and urgent necessity,” according to the Apostolic Constitution. Throughout the proceedings, cardinals take up private rooms in the Domus Marthae Sanctae, or Saint Martha’s House, a guest house adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, and are prohibited from having contact with the outside world.

Twice-folded paper votes deposited in an urn during balloting are counted by three cardinals randomly selected to be scrutineers. Voting continues until a candidate receives two-thirds of the votes. After each round, a ceremonial plume of smoke rises from a stovepipe chimney atop the Sistine Chapel: Black smoke means the voting was inconclusive and will need to resume; white smoke means the cardinals have chosen a new pope.

Once the conclave elects a pope, the dean of the College of Cardinals, currently Battista Re, confirms acceptance, and the candidate selects a papal name. He then walks onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, where the senior cardinal deacon announces to the crowd, “habemus papam,” the Latin phrase for “we have a pope.”

Like many of his Loyola colleagues, Díaz, who remembers sitting at Pope Francis’s desk in May 2022 to promote the Building Bridges Initiative, is awaiting the arrival of the white smoke with bated breath. He recalls Pope Francis laughing in his wheelchair as Diaz sang Adiós Muchachos, a 1927 Argentinian tango about a dying man bidding farewell to his friends.

“If the Church is going to be alive and not become a museum,” Díaz says, “then I would hope that the men responsible for electing the next pope have enough sense to say, ‘There’s no turning back.’”