PopeWatch 2013: Blowing Black Smoke

VATICAN CITY -- A plume of black smoke issuing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel signaled that the first day of the College of Cardinals' papal conclave had ended and that, predictably, its members had not yet selected a replacement for retired Pope Benedict XVI. The princes of the Catholic Church, however, are not the only ones blowing smoke, and over the past month there has been an abundance of idle, often whimsical, and sometimes even feel-good chatter about who the next pope will be. With an ever-canny sense of how things are rather than how people want them to be, the editors of Religion, Politics, and Sex decided to look at the presumed frontrunners in the papal race and make our predictions not just on who the next pope will be but also on who it definitely will not be.

The members of the conclave are, of course, literally sworn to secrecy in this regard, so public speculation falls to lower-ranking clergy, the media, and bookmakers. Some of their top choices, however, are so absolutely unlikely that they have presumably been proposed merely as red herrings to boost the payoff for bets on candidates they think actually have a chance or to jolly along various special interest groups.

There has also been quite a bit of discussion about the moral characteristics of various candidates and factors such as the presumable impact of things like their roles in either covering up or exposing the Church's child sex abuse scandals. But these factors have no bearing on whether a candidate would make what is considered to be a good pope and are therefore irrelevant and will have no impact whatsoever on the decision reached by the conclave. If the new pope is a genuinely good person, wants to make protecting children from predatory priests his cause celebre, etc., that is all great, but it has nothing to do with his viability as a candidate.

Following are some of the top choices whose names are being bandied about on the news. We are presenting them here in reverse order, from least to most likely to be elected.



* Cardinal Peter Turkson (Ghana). Really? No, really? Anyone suggesting that Turkson has any chance at all of being elected pope is doing so for purposes of misdirection, to lead Africans in particular and blacks in general to feel more important within the Church than they really are, or as a joke. His qualities as a Church leader are, in fact, completely meaningless simply because he is black. This may seem like an extreme contention, but consider what we learned when Obama got elected, e.g., that a certain proportion of the population will become mentally unhinged when a black is elected to a particular high office for the first time. A global sex abuse scandal is one thing and something the Church can obviously survive just fine, but a black man in a miter would be the death of Catholicism as we know it. Just as Americans who were admittedly almost illiterate before Obama was elected suddenly affected expert knowledge of Constitutional law to justify their irrational hatred for the first black U.S. president, closet racists throughout the Catholic Church would suddenly start spouting references to obscure canon laws disseminated by the plethora of hatemongering schismatic websites that would pop up. Catholicism would experience a literal decimation, with one in 10 of its members abandoning the Church immediately, and there is a reasonable chance that any number of pretender popes would be elected within particular geographical areas. The cardinals are more likely to drink a vat of poisoned Kool-Aid than propagate such a monumental disaster.

* Cardinal Timothy Dolan (United States). Almost no chance. Americans are notoriously bad at seeing themselves as others see them and do not realize that the United States is perceived by many people throughout the world as militaristic, imperialistic, hypocritical, and a busy-body. Election of an American would lead to widespread perception that the Vatican had been suborned by the United States and this is something that the conclave is going to be sensitive to.

* Marc Oullet (Canada). Slightly better chance than Dolan, but he is still a Norde Americano and from a nation that is often seen as a client state of the United States, so the fear of appearance of undue political influence on the Vatican remains a consideration.

* Peter Erdo (Hungary). OK, now we're getting on track, and this guy dodges all the bullets of the afore-mentioned candidates, making him a viable contender. But the Vatican has already had its "Eastern European" ticket punched in recent memory so there is no strategic advantage associated with electing him.

* Odilo Scherer (Brazil). This one might actually have a reasonable chance. Sure, he is a South American, but is just about as white as most Italians, and the sense is that the powerbrokers in the Church could use him as a tool (e.g., much the way George W. Bush was puppeted by rightwing business interests). This would also be a sop to Third Worlders and give them an inflated sense of their place in the Church.

* Angelo Scola. This is the one! Or, someone who is so much like him as to be almost indistinguishable. One can almost sense a zeitgeist, if not a heilig geist, among the Italian cardinals, a palpable desire to "take back the papacy." Germans and Poles have had their time in the sun and they are as exotic as this bunch is ever going to want to deal with, so it is time for the pendulum to swing back toward what the papacy has been for the majority of its history.



So, those are our predictions! If this were like a U.S. presidential election you would be able to see the candidates at the top of our list dropping off one by one, but with this contest we won't know until it is done. In the meantime, go ahead and keep giggling about the black guy, sagely speculating about the Brazilian, etc., and tell us that we're wrong now -- because in a couple of days it will be too late and we will have an Italian pope again.