Papal Conclave Takes New Route to the Ancient Ways

Editor’s note: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was picked Wednesday, March 13, 2013, as the 266th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years, he will be called Pope Francis.

In the days before the Conclave entered the Sistine Chapel to choose a new pope to succeed Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign his office in nearly 600 years, Dartmouth’s Randall Balmer, the Mandel Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Department of Religion, and Christopher MacEvitt, an associate professor of religion, talked with Dartmouth Now about the process of picking the new pope.

With Cardinals entering the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope, the spectacle of the conclave merges a centuries-old script with spur-of-the-moment improv, but the likelihood of a radical reformer emerging from the gathering is very slim, observers say.

For the last two weeks they’ve just been making things up,” says Christopher MacEvitt, an associate professor of religion who specializes in 12th- and 13th-century Christian communities. “This is unprecedented. They’ve been dealing with questions like ‘what do we call the former pope?’ and ‘where is the former pope going to live?’”

But now that the 115 Cardinal electors have filed into the chapel and the order “Extra omnes” (“Everybody out”) has been pronounced, the process returns to one that has been in place for some 800 years. True to history, the basic philosophy of the next pope will be dictated by his predecessors, in this case John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both firm conservatives who named every man in the College of Cardinals, says Professor Randall Balmer, the Mandel Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and chair of the Department of Religion.

If the Cardinals pick a relatively young pope, he could have a profound effect on the future of the Church through this power of appointment. That will likely be part of the calculus as the cardinals deliberate.

Balmer and MacEvitt agree that one skill likely to be at the top of the next pope’s job description is the ability to manage the church bureaucracy and deal with scandals within the Vatican bureaucracy.

“That’s been a problem under Benedict. There has not been a lot of control over the Curia—the Vatican bureaucracy,” MacEvitt says. “They are not going to be discussing things like celibacy and woman priests, things like that. It’s not on the floor. But there was a report that Benedict wrote about the VatiLeaks scandal. It is a secret report, we don’t really know what it says, but the Cardinals have requested to see it.”

The VatiLeaks scandal erupted after some of the pope’s personal papers were stolen and published in the press, revealing infighting and corruption within the Curia. This, along with the problems of mismanagement within the Vatican bank and the continuing child sexual abuse scandals, awaits whoever is elected, Balmer says.

Reform in the sense of a more transparent Vatican bureaucracy and greater communication to the leadership outside the Curia is likely a top concern among the electors, but there is little indication that radical reform is on the horizon, Balmer says. Church edicts including the prohibition of the use of contraceptives and the prohibition of women from the hierarchy—which have moved many Catholics, particularly in North America, to leave the faith or to give less weight to Catholic dictates—will likely remain in force under the next pope, Balmer says.

“I don’t see much dissent among the Catholic hierarchy,” Balmer says. “I don’t hear those voices in the Catholic hierarchy here in America. And the Vatican, quite frankly, has tried to quash those dissident voices in various ways. The new pope is going to have to decide whether or not to pursue that policy or to allow those voices to be heard.”

If the Cardinals pick a relatively young pope, he could have a profound effect on the future of the Church through this power of appointment. That will likely be part of the calculus as the cardinals deliberate.

Balmer and MacEvitt agree that one skill likely to be at the top of the next pope’s job description is the ability to manage the church bureaucracy and deal with scandals within the Vatican bureaucracy.

“That’s been a problem under Benedict. There has not been a lot of control over the Curia—the Vatican bureaucracy,” MacEvitt says. “They are not going to be discussing things like celibacy and woman priests, things like that. It’s not on the floor. But there was a report that Benedict wrote about the VatiLeaks scandal. It is a secret report, we don’t really know what it says, but the Cardinals have requested to see it.”

The VatiLeaks scandal erupted after some of the pope’s personal papers were stolen and published in the press, revealing infighting and corruption within the Curia. This, along with the problems of mismanagement within the Vatican bank and the continuing child sexual abuse scandals, awaits whoever is elected, Balmer says.

Reform in the sense of a more transparent Vatican bureaucracy and greater communication to the leadership outside the Curia is likely a top concern among the electors, but there is little indication that radical reform is on the horizon, Balmer says. Church edicts including the prohibition of the use of contraceptives and the prohibition of women from the hierarchy—which have moved many Catholics, particularly in North America, to leave the faith or to give less weight to Catholic dictates—will likely remain in force under the next pope, Balmer says.

“I don’t see much dissent among the Catholic hierarchy,” Balmer says. “I don’t hear those voices in the Catholic hierarchy here in America. And the Vatican, quite frankly, has tried to quash those dissident voices in various ways. The new pope is going to have to decide whether or not to pursue that policy or to allow those voices to be heard.”