Gotta say, thank you very much for sharing your insights into the 2025 conclave. I love reading them; your takes and bringing into focus people largely overlooked by English speaking media.
I'd love to know where you look for information and (you've probably answered this before but I'll ask anyway) was there anything that you think may have happened prior to the 2013 conclave that influenced appointing Francis as Pope?
Once again thank you for sharing your takes, I'm looking forward to your posts!
Hello!
So to answer your second question first: yes, I know a fair amount about the dynamics leading up to the conclave that elected Francis twelve years ago, although a lot of it is stuff I've actually learned fairly recently. While official balloting counts of papal conclaves do not exist, unofficial counts do tend to emerge afterwards, and from the ones for 2013 we see the future Pope Francis (i.e. Jorge Mario Bergoglio) initially positioned as one of three softcore/mainstream conservative vote-getters, along with Canada's Marc Ouellet and Italy's Angelo Scola. Bergoglio then cannibalizes the votes of moderate cardinals Sean Patrick O'Malley (USA) and Odilo Scherer (Brazil), and finally picks up more and more of Ouellet's supporters until he defeats Scola after five ballots.
This is in part speculative, but the conventional wisdom/widespread educated guess is that Bergoglio started as a Latin American regional favorite who then gradually became the "anyone but Scola" candidate because of how the math shook out. It should be remembered that the 2013 conclave, unlike this year's, was, or at least seemed, fairly ideologically homogeneous; everyone in it had been appointed by John Paul II or Benedict XVI (themselves very similar to each other in most ways), and there was not a clear "progressive" option. What happened with Pope Francis as time went on was that it turned out that the Latin American cultural and theological environment that he came up in, when "scaled up" to the global Church, looked very different from Euro "conservative Catholicism". What we got from that was twelve years of a Pope who didn't actually make any major changes to Catholic doctrine and who had plenty of "hot mic" moments about women or gays of the sort one would expect from an elderly Peronist living and working in Italy, but who was enormously more concerned with what kind of place the Church was--how welcoming it was--for people who just "weren't like" the Central European and Northern Italian aristocrats and academics around John Paul and Benedict.
Also, people forget this today, but as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio came across as much more doctrinaire and conservative, especially on issues related to sex, than he did as Pope. You can still find lots of LGBT South Americans, including LGBT South American Catholics, who have a very different and much less positive opinion of Francis than do similar people from other parts of the world. Suddenly having to deal with a worldwide constituency genuinely changed his way of looking at some things. The same might happen with a successor who isn't as good on these issues (then again it might not). With Cardinal Ambongo (papabile, deeply homophobic but otherwise Francis-aligned Archbishop of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo) in particular there are reasons to believe that if he became Pope it'd be politically and logistically very difficult for him to reverse Francis's more pro-LGBT decisions, even though he might want to.
The Latin American cardinals of twelve years ago, who weren't well-understood in the West and who ended up producing, arguably even imposing, a Pope who reigned the way Francis did, are today the African and Asian cardinals who don't like gay people very much and often aren't crazy about women either, but who over the past week have mostly been interested in talking about climate change, decentralizing Church governance structures, and fighting terrorism through interreligious dialogue.
As to where I look for information: I first found these sources by Googling the cardinals' names and reading anything that didn't look like generic Global North boilerplate, but some that I've found that way are ACI Africa, 9News Nigeria, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Kaniva Tonga News, Radio New Zealand, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier, and the Straits Times out of Singapore.
I hope some of this helps/is of interest to you!
