Papabile: Papal predictions thread

[Sheilbh]

I've no idea. It still looks very open with, if anyone, Scola as the faint front-runner.

Personally I like the look of Cardinals Ravasi, Sarah, Robles and Braz de Aviz. They strike me as the more interesting papabili.

Edit: Incidentally on O'Malley I think he'll get a lot of votes in the first round. Normally the Cardinals like to vote for undoubtedly holy candidates, who've no chance of winning, in the first round. For example I think in 1978 Basil Hume (another religious) did very well in the first vote.

[Caliga]

Black smoke for round one.

ROUND TWO.  FIGHT!

[Caliga]

Edit: Incidentally on O'Malley I think he'll get a lot of votes in the first round. Normally the Cardinals like to vote for undoubtedly holy candidates, who've no chance of winning, in the first round. For example I think in 1978 Basil Hume (another religious) did very well in the first vote.

Aren't they all... religious?  I'm not sure how you could get more religious than a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

[Eddie Teach]

Presumably he means the ones who don't have a mistress and several kids.

[The Larch]

Edit: Incidentally on O'Malley I think he'll get a lot of votes in the first round. Normally the Cardinals like to vote for undoubtedly holy candidates, who've no chance of winning, in the first round. For example I think in 1978 Basil Hume (another religious) did very well in the first vote.

Aren't they all... religious?  I'm not sure how you could get more religious than a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

I guess he means that there are cardinals that are more veered towards spirituality and theology while others are more into diplomatic or managerial roles.

[fhdz]

Edit: Incidentally on O'Malley I think he'll get a lot of votes in the first round. Normally the Cardinals like to vote for undoubtedly holy candidates, who've no chance of winning, in the first round. For example I think in 1978 Basil Hume (another religious) did very well in the first vote.

Aren't they all... religious?  I'm not sure how you could get more religious than a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

He means monks.

[Razgovory]

Edit: Incidentally on O'Malley I think he'll get a lot of votes in the first round. Normally the Cardinals like to vote for undoubtedly holy candidates, who've no chance of winning, in the first round. For example I think in 1978 Basil Hume (another religious) did very well in the first vote.

Aren't they all... religious?  I'm not sure how you could get more religious than a Roman Catholic Cardinal.

You don't have to be religious to be a cardinal.  You don't even have to be a priest.

[jimmy olsen]

Thought this was an interesting article on the conclave from an insider's perspective.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/03/12/3713246.htm

The peculiar dynamics of Conclave 2013
George Weigel ABC Religion and Ethics Updated 13 Mar 2013 (First posted 12 Mar 2013)

Alejandro Bermudez, capo of the Catholic News Agency and a shrewd observer of ecclesiastical affairs, told me something during the 2005 conclave that I've tried to remember. Every conclave, he said, is a unique microculture and you can't predict what will happen within it simply by reading the pre-conclave tea leaves. Things happen inside conclaves, away from the world and the buzz, that can shape papal elections - and pontificates - in surprising ways.

History bears that out. Let me point to two examples that might have some relevance to the conclave of 2013.

The conclave that elected of John XXIII in 1958 was wide-open, with some cardinals wanting to extend, so to speak, both the policy and the style of Pius XII, and others wanting to sweep out the rooms of the Apostolic Palace, let in some fresh air and take a different approach to the Church's engagement with the twentieth century. A small but disciplined bloc of French cardinals, committed to forwarding the candidacy of the former nuncio to Paris, Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, hung in for ballot after ballot until they had assembled a winning coalition.

The second conclave of 1978 was even more dramatic, and provided perhaps a clearer example of how each conclave microculture is unique. The first conclave of 1978 - brilliantly organized behind the scenes by Giovanni Cardinal Benelli of Florence, Paul VI's former chief of staff - had swiftly elected the hitherto obscure Albino Cardinal Luciani of Venice in one day. Then John Paul I died after a 33-day pontificate and the College of Cardinals found themselves spiritually and psychologically traumatized.

As one elector in the 1978 conclaves put it to me years later, the sudden death of John Paul I was "a message from the Lord, quite out of the ordinary ... This was an intervention from the Lord to teach us something." The lesson they learned was that the Italian hegemony of the papacy could be broken after 455 years, given the availability of a charismatic Pole named Karol Wojtyla, who was elected as John Paul II.

The conclave of 2013 has its own unique framework, within which such unexpected intra-conclave dynamics will emerge and play themselves out. For one thing, not only does no Cardinal have anything resembling the stature and authority of Joseph Ratzinger in 2005, but there is also a sense that the Church is in uncharted and perilous waters because of the abdication of Benedict XVI, an act that really has no precedent. Will this abdication set up pressures on future popes, some of which cannot be imagined today? Does the possibility, already being bruited, that a very young man could be elected pope (because "he can do this for 15 years and then retire") suggest a fundamental alteration in Catholic understandings of the papacy, changes that reduce the papacy to a Catholic variant on role of the archbishopric of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion?

Even more significantly, one of the most striking things about this conclave is that there is no progressive candidate, as there was in 2005 with Carlo Maria Martini. The old post-Vatican II progressive versus conservative division is not the framework-setting issue for this conclave. Instead, it is the division between Old Church and New Church, between institutional-maintenance Catholicism and what I call "Evangelical Catholicism." And along that fault-line there are two different approaches to what is indisputably a major issue as the conclave is enclosed: the reform of the Roman Curia.

There were, as there are before every conclave, concerns about the Vatican bureaucracy in 2005. But today there is a widespread and firmly held conviction that the central administrative machinery of the Church is broken. Needless to say, most of the curial Cardinals involved in that machinery (who make us around 20% of the conclave) have a different view. This disconnect between the reformers' perceptions of what has gone wrong and the defensiveness of many curial Cardinals has led to an undercurrent of anger that was not discernible in 2005.

This has been exacerbated by a strong reaction against what is perceived as an excessive and failed re-Italianization of the Vatican, the results of which were to make Benedict XVI's life and work far more difficult. As one Italian friend, a distinguished academic and active Catholic layman, put it to me, "our [Italian] culture has become corrupt" - and he believed, sadly, that that corruption had seeped behind the walls of the Vatican through the re-Italianization of the Roman Curia.

The party of institutional maintenance would likely favour some tinkering with the Vatican bureaucracy, chiefly in terms of increased competence at the highest levels of curial leadership. The evangelical-Catholic forces, on the other hand, want a root-and-branch reform that would dramatically change the Curia's institutional culture, so that the Church's central administrative machinery becomes an instrument of the New Evangelization, not an impediment to it.

Within that difference of approach lies another burning question: What is to be done about various unmistakable issues of corruption that were surfaced, if in a sleazy way, in the so-called Vatileaks affair? Again, the party of reform - the evangelical-Catholic party - would favour a swift housecleaning, while the institutional-maintenance party would, most likely, deal with the most egregious offenses (and offenders) without addressing what seem to some to be systematic patterns of decay.

The fundamental direction of twenty-first-century Catholicism seems set. Whether the venue is Africa, Asia, Latin America or the North Atlantic world, the Catholicism with a future is a robustly evangelical, dynamically orthodox Catholicism that invites the world into friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, that defends the dignity of every human life and the "first freedom" of religious liberty for all, and that models a more humane way of life amidst the chill winds of postmodern nihilism and scepticism.

The question that will begin to be answered when the white smoke goes up is whether that process of deep Catholic reform, in the service of profound conversion and renewed evangelical energy, will be accelerated by the new pope.

[Martinus]

Thought this was an interesting article on the conclave from an insider's perspective.

Wouldn't an "article on the conclave from an insider's perspective" have to be written by a cardinal? 

[Martim Silva]

I will support CdM's pick of Schönborn.

Benedict XVI could still have had some influence over the election, and if the Italian media are right the new Pope will be mostly about fighting the homossexual lobby that was formed within the Church (which is why two Popes are needed). And also why the reason the homossexual cardinal O'Brien was kicked from the Cardinalhood before the Conclave (to let the deviants without a leader in the vote).

Schönborn is well-know for zero tolerance for Child abuse, so he will be very bad news for homossexual priests. And he is under 70 and from Europe.

Alternatively, the Hungarian cardinal doesn't look bad.

All American Cardinals are over-eager to talk to the media, so they're out. Not to mention the Canadian one said being a Pope would be 'a nightmare'.

From South America, the brazilian Scherer is nice, nut he's also too obsessed with the media and appeared in talkshows. Not what the Church would want for a Pope.

[garbon]

Schönborn is well-know for zero tolerance for Child abuse, so he will be very bad news for homossexual priests.

[Valmy]

Whether the venue is Africa, Asia, Latin America or the North Atlantic world, the Catholicism with a future is a robustly evangelical, dynamically orthodox Catholicism that invites the world into friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, that defends the dignity of every human life and the "first freedom" of religious liberty for all, and that models a more humane way of life amidst the chill winds of postmodern nihilism and scepticism.

Didn't he leave out a rather important continent for the Vatican?

[Barrister]

Whether the venue is Africa, Asia, Latin America or the North Atlantic world, the Catholicism with a future is a robustly evangelical, dynamically orthodox Catholicism that invites the world into friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ, that defends the dignity of every human life and the "first freedom" of religious liberty for all, and that models a more humane way of life amidst the chill winds of postmodern nihilism and scepticism.

Didn't he leave out a rather important continent for the Vatican?

I didn't think Australia or Antarctica were all that important to the Vatican...

[Eddie Teach]

Maybe Valmy misread Atlantic as American.

[Valmy]

Maybe Valmy misread Atlantic as American.

Ooops yeah.  I thought he left out Euroland.