In March 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina gave a roughly four-minute speech at one of the closed-door meetings in the Vatican before the conclave to elect the next pope. The short remarks, envisioning a church that got out of its insular comfort zones and self-referential habits, went over big.
When the cardinals voted in the Sistine Chapel days later, they picked him to lead the way forward, and he emerged as Pope Francis.
On Monday, after hundreds of thousands of faithful came to Francis’ funeral and burial over the weekend, cardinals will begin a critical week of such meetings, where church leaders, including those considered papabili, or pope material, will give brief statements about the major issues facing the church. Those meetings began the day after Francis died, but they will now pick up in intensity, becoming a short campaign trail leading to next month’s conclave.
They give the cardinals — especially those under the age of 80, who can vote in the conclave — a chance to feel one another out and gauge priorities, agendas and charisma. The meetings, so-called general congregations, are also a forum for potential flameouts. The first rule of papal campaigning is that there is no papal campaigning. In other words, self-aggrandizement and transparent politicking are taboo in the non-campaign campaign.
Or, as Vatican experts like to say: Whoever enters the conclave as pope exits a cardinal.
Not always, though. In 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the dean of the College of Cardinals, gave a humdinger of a funeral homily for Pope John Paul II — he famously denounced “a dictatorship of relativism” — then entered the conclave with momentum and emerged on the balcony as Benedict XVI.
In this case, the homily at Francis’ funeral on Saturday was delivered by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the current dean of the College of Cardinals, who at 91 cannot vote in the conclave and is not considered a plausible choice. Still, he seized the moment to put his thumb on the scale, pointing out the enormous crowds drawn to Francis’ charisma and vision of the church as he made an implicit argument that his fellow cardinals needed to pick someone in Francis’ mold.
“He was also a pope attentive to the signs of the times,” Cardinal Re said, “and what the Holy Spirit was awakening in the church.”
Francis had no such prime-time platform for a stump speech. He instead impressed his fellow cardinals with his humbleness and the incisiveness of his remarks at the general congregations. “A natural homo politicus,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s foreign minister and a close aide to Francis, said in a recent interview in referring to his political skills, including on the world stage. “He quite likes politics. It’s not alien to him.”
This year’s conclave could start as early as May 6, and the challenge for the potential candidates heading into this week’s meetings is to be as adept as Francis in winning support without seeming to seek it. They also need to find the right message for the moment, about whether to follow, reverse or leap ahead of Francis’ footsteps. Many of the cardinals who will cast ballots were named by Francis in far-flung countries — “the peripheries,” he called them — that don’t usually have such high-ranking prelates. Some Vatican experts said that could benefit big-name candidates, like Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle from the Philippines, who is sometimes called the “Asian Francis.”
There are many other contenders, including some who are more progressive, and others who are more conservative.
Publicly anyway, the most papabile cardinals usually lie low, letting allied kingmakers do the dirty work, but they can’t tread so softly that they leave no mark.
On Sunday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was Francis’ second-in-command and is viewed by many in the Vatican as a strong candidate, gave a homily at St. Peter’s Square to about 200,000 at a special Mass for young people. But scores of cardinal electors were there too.
He spoke admiringly of Francis. “We must welcome his legacy and make it part of our lives,” he said.
Cardinal Parolin knows the world well at a time when it is in flux. He also knows many of the cardinal voters and implemented Francis’ vision, but he is seen as more measured, which could make him more amenable to a large bloc of more moderate voters. And he is Italian, a potential help as there is a sense that Italian cardinals — and some other Europeans — would like a break from the peripheries. A man of the Vatican, Cardinal Parolin is also seen as much less hostile than Francis was to the Curia, the Roman bureaucracy that runs the church.
The young people in the crowd at Sunday’s special Mass were less interested in the inner workings of the Vatican than in having a pope to inspire them.
“More inclusion,” said Lara Cappuccelli, 19, from Italy’s Piedmont region.
On Sunday, reporters were asking the Vatican spokesman when the conclave might begin. He said he didn’t know.
That, too, is something that will be decided only by the general congregations.
