How to Improve the Process of Picking a Pope

The rules that govern the election of a new pope have been refined and rewritten for centuries. But the process still isn’t perfect.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How to Improve the Process of Picking a Pope by
Duncan Mavin read by Catharine Vassilopolos. When Cardinal Jorge Bergogio
arrived in Rome for a papal conclave in March twenty thirteen,
he brought only one small suit case, the Jesuit from Argentina.
Was not expecting to be elected the next pope, but

(00:23):
elected he was in a fifth round ballot whose results
appeared to reflect the desire for an outsider to reform
the papal bureaucracy. Just over twelve years later, Pope Francis's
death sets the stage for a new conclave to decide
who will shape the Catholic Church's next era. Arcane, anachronistic

(00:44):
and hidden behind firmly closed doors, the papal conclave seems
like a process etched in stone, yet the rules that
govern it have been refined, tweaked, and overhauled for centuries,
and with particular vigor in the past few decades. Papal
conclave mechanics have made for a best selling novel and
an acclaimed movie, But is the process fit for purpose?

(01:06):
Andrew Mackenzie, an economist and specialist in mechanism design at
Rutgers University says there's still room for improvement. Mackenzie specializes
in analyzing elections like the conclave, where the candidates are
included among the voters. Other examples include a country electing
a president, a board of directors seeking to hire a

(01:28):
CEO internally and from the board itself, or an academic
department selecting a new department head. He wrote in a
twenty nineteen paper titled an Axiomatic Analysis of the Papal Conclave.
If the goal is to base the decision on honest
opinions about the best candidates, Mackenzie notes, and if there
is concerns some selectors will feel pressure to cast their

(01:51):
votes in a certain way, a secret ballot with a
super majority winner makes sense. That's how the papal process
currently works. A conclave begins fifteen to twenty days after
a pope's death, when up to one hundred twenty cardinals
under the age of eighty are locked in the Sistine
Chapel to vote for a successor by secret ballot. If

(02:12):
no candidate gets two thirds of the votes, the ballot
papers are burned, releasing black smoke, signifying the failure to
reach a decision. And another ballot is held. A guiding
principle is that electors should be protected from the temptation
to defy God. Mackenzie wrote, despite being the living men
best trained to let God speak through them, the electors

(02:35):
are but men, and therefore sinners, and therefore imperfect instruments
through which God may communicate. If the cardinals still haven't
selected a winner after thirty four failed ballots, one last
round is held, with voting restricted to just the two
most popular candidates from the previous round. That final vote
requires that two thirds of the cardinals must put their

(02:57):
support behind a single candidate, at which pointin a plume
of white smoke signals that a new pope has been chosen.
Something close to the modern conclave came together in the
twelfth and thirteen centuries. Prior to that, the voting game
was not even proper. Multiple popes could be elected simultaneously,
creating a temporary schism in the church, wrote economists Laslo

(03:20):
Kotzi and Ballash Siklai in their twenty fifteen paper Electing
the Pope. To eliminate this awful situation, the third Lateran
Council eleven seventy nine prescribed a two thirds majority of
all voting cardinals, with the aim that no one faction
could force through their candidate. But the system was still faulty.

(03:42):
For centuries, only a few cardinals were physically able to
get to Rome for the vote, and voting could drag
out for years. Factions based on location or progressiveness were
also likely to vote together under the influence of a
handful of powerful voters. Kotzi and Siklai noted one important
adjustment came from the sixteen twenty one to sixteen twenty

(04:03):
two Laws of Pope Gregory the Fifteenth. Mackenzie describes them
as the first thorough constitutions governing the election of a
pope written by a pope, which prohibited candidates from voting
for themselves. Gregory the Fifteenth sought to ensure each cardinal's
choice would be guided by the Holy Spirit, free from
self interest and bribery, and from the influence of peers

(04:26):
and outsiders such as secular kings. Of course, secret ballots
make it impossible to tell if someone voted for himself,
but Gregory the Fifteenth had a fix for this too,
a ballot that allowed an elector to sign and then
conceal his signature. In the exceptional event that an elector
received exactly the minimum number of votes required to win,

(04:48):
the signatures would be checked to verify that he did
not nominate himself. Mackenzie wrote this process, known as achesus,
removed the incentive to vote for oneself as it could
no longer unger impact the final results. But in nineteen
oh four, Pope Pious the Tenth undid Gregory the Fifteenth's
efforts to prohibit self nomination, ordering that voter's names once

(05:10):
again be excluded from ballots. In nineteen forty five, the
controversial Pope Pius the twelfth, critics point out he never
condemned the Holocaust, kicked off more back and forth changes.
He ordered that the margin of a winning vote must
be two thirds plus one, so that even if the
winner voted for himself, he'd still have the two thirds

(05:31):
majority support. Subsequent popes had differing views, and the required
majority swung between a Pious Sine Mackenzie's term two thirds
plus one and the simpler Gregorian two thirds. The thirty
four ballot limit was also introduced during this back and
forth by Pope John Paul the Second in nineteen ninety

(05:51):
six in the pursuit of a two thirds or two
thirds plus one majority. A final ballot with just two
candidates seems like a good way to speed up the
decision making process, but in practice it may slow the
process down, Mackenzie said, if the cardinals are deadlocked and
there is not enough support coalescing behind a single candidate.

(06:13):
To this, Mackenzie offers another solution, randomization. The idea is simple.
Each cardinal puts his nomination in a jar, then one
is selected at random. He says. The prohibition on self
voting could be enforced any number of ways, such as
by giving the cardinals a deck of cards with the
names of all the candidates and requiring them to dispose

(06:34):
of their own card before voting. All of the cardinals
would also have to pledge to support the winner, no
matter whose name is pulled. It would be a radical departure,
mackenzie concedes, but could fit the objective of selecting a
candidate in accordance with the wishes of a higher power.
This system sounds risky, he says, but is it risky

(06:55):
if there is faith that the random outcome is the
will of God.