Francis 2.0? A Canadian pope? Here’s what you can expect from the conclave

Michael Higgins, author of 'The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis,' talks about his predictions for the conclave.

As cardinals start the conclave to elect the next pope, one expert says there’s a good chance the church’s most senior officials will choose a leader similar to Francis with a more progressive and non-traditional approach to the papacy.

“I think a very significant majority of the cardinal electors are very pro-Francis,” Michael Higgins, author of “The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis,” said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday. “Many of them come from the peripheries, from the margins, which Francis loved. ... I think they were touched by his style.”

At the same time, some of the cardinals over the age of 80 who are ineligible to vote in the conclave may have influenced cardinal electors to consider returning to a pre-Francis era with a more conservative approach to the papacy, said Higgins, Basilian distinguished fellow of contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.

The cardinal electors who will elect the new pope will begin the secretive process to elect the successor to Francis starting Wednesday. Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, was known for his outreach to the marginalized, such as the poor, migrants and the LGBTQ2+ community, and for focusing on mercy, inclusion and humility over doctrine.

From the “quantifiable point of view,” Higgins sees most of the cardinals as being satisfied with how Francis ran the church of about 1.4 billion Catholics.

Out of 133 cardinal electors in the conclave, around 80 per cent of the eligible voters at 108 were chosen by Francis from 70 countries.

 “It’s not unreasonable to assume they have some deep sympathy with the way (Francis ran) the church,” Higgins said.

Still, Higgins quoted the old saying that a fat pope follows a thin pope -- an adage that speaks to a perception that papal conclaves tend to choose a pope with a different ideology than the previous pope.

Will Pope Francis’s vision live on?

As Francis embarked on building a more inclusive church, critics say he deepened the divide between conservative and liberal believers. But Higgins believes the tensions are “exaggerated.”

“I don’t know how that tension will play itself out,” he said. “We don’t know because we’re not in the room (with the cardinal electors).”

“I suspect that there are more conservative bishops and archbishops than there are cardinals, and the bishops and archbishops are not in the conclave,” he added.

Ricardo da Silva, a Jesuit priest and journalist with the Catholic publication America Magazine and producer of the Inside the Vatican podcast, believes the “media narratives” can sometimes overstate the “internal divisions” between conservatives and progressives.

There’s reason to believe the next pope will continue Francis’s vision of a “field hospital” church that is open to everyone and allows more participation and consultations with its members, he said in an email to CTVNews.ca on Tuesday.

As voices outside of the United States and Canada have grown, he expects the church’s future will “more deeply reflect its global reality.”

Catholics in other parts of the world have pressing priorities such as war, poverty and the impacts of climate change, he said.

Many of the cardinals see the church, like Francis, as a “global community called to confront pressing concerns like poverty, injustice and the search for peace,” he added.

“In my experience, the church is not nearly as polarized elsewhere as it often appears in the United States,” he said, noting that he was born in Europe, raised in Africa and lived in Europe and South America for a significant period.

However, it wouldn’t be realistic or fair to expect the next pope would be just like Francis, said Randy Boyagoda, a Catholic writer and commentator on the Catholic church and English department professor at the University of Toronto.

The question is whether the new pope will continue the “messy” ways, as Francis put it, of taking the church into the world and onto the streets, to be close to the downtrodden, Boyagoda said in a phone interview with CTVNews.ca on Tuesday, and also inviting more dialogue on longstanding issues such as the role of women’s participation in decision-making and leadership of the church. Or, he wonders if the next Catholic church leader will seek to communicate more clearly the established church teaching and practice.

Leading contenders

Anticipation about who will become the next pope is building beyond the Catholic community.

Experts and participants say gambling to guess the next pope is growing popular globally, such as cash bets on websites and online games, The Associated Press reported on May 3.

The College of Cardinals Report, created by Catholic journalists and researchers, made a list of 22 leading cardinal candidates to be pope.

While media and the public have made lists and bets on who the new pope will be, Higgins said it could end up being someone not on anyone’s radar.

However, experts think it’s unlikely a Canadian will become pope.

Higgins said the conclave has numerous unknowns, such as the “chemistry” of the cardinal electors as they get to know each other while sequestered inside the Vatican quarters and decide who they think would best lead the Catholic church.

“So we can list people we think are most likely the contenders, but more often than not we get it wrong,” he said.

As for serious contenders, Higgins named a few that were often mentioned in media and in The College of Cardinals Report.

He said Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines is a top papabile, or a possible pope. The 67-year-old Jesuit cardinal has been called the “Asian Francis,” according to The College of Cardinals Report.

“His style is very much the Francis style,” Higgins said. “He’s affable, he’s tactile. People like him. He has a sense of humour. He has a lot of the qualities of (Pope Francis).”

Another top papabile is Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, Higgins said. The 70-year-old is “highly regarded” by secular diplomats and desires to be close to the poor like Francis, according to The College of Cardinals Report.

“Now he’s an Italian and he’s a career diplomat, by which I mean that he has spent nearly all his life as a Vatican ambassador and as a member of the central apparatus or the curia of the church,” Higgins said. “Those are the two primary contenders in the minds of most people, but we don’t know how that plays out in the first ballot, and so we don’t know if there’s going to be a dark horse or a third or fourth candidate that will come up from the middle.”