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How Are Popes and Other World Religious Leaders Chosen?

How Are Popes and Other World Religious Leaders Chosen?

Last updated on: April 26, 2025 at 11:31 am by Richard Ostling

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How Are Popes and Other World Religious Leaders Chosen? 2025-04-26T11:31:33-04:00 Richard Ostling

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The late Pope greets his flock: election of his successor will be shrouded in secrecy / pixabay.com

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Today’s majestic open-air funeral for Pope Francis is now followed by election of the next pope by the College of Cardinals in a process shrouded in secrecy. (Indeed, the Latin root for “conclave” means “locked room.”) Its legendary status was underscored in January when the fictionalized movie thriller “Conclave” was nominated for Best Picture and other Oscars.

It’s fair to say Francis and Buddhism’s Dalai Lama have been the world’s two best-known religious leaders. This year, there’s also considerable interest in the coming succession to the current Lama, who turns 90 on July 6. By remarkable coincidence, two other global leadership positions are in the news. A new archbishop of Canterbury to preside over the 42-nation Anglican Communion is being chosen in England. And last week a new analysis addressed complications over the future succession to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, 85, the titular “first among equals” in the hierarchy of some 200 million Eastern Orthodox Christians.

With the coming Vatican conclave, some liberals may carp that no women have ever been priests and thus papal electors. But papal appointments have gradually made the sacred college far more representative of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

John XXIII’s surprise

Consider the 1958 election of Pope John XXIII, the supposed “interim” pontiff who astonished the church and world by summoning the epochal Second Vatican Council. Of the 51 cardinals from 21 countries present and voting (Communist dictators barred two others from attending), the 17 Italians were over-represented with 33% of the votes, and only 35% came from outside Europe.

Francis remarkably extended the college’s geography by giving 24 nations their first-ever cardinals, including the unlikely Central African Republic, Haiti, Iran, Mongolia, Myanmar, and Sweden. Of the 135 cardinals eligible to choose his successor (though an edict limits the total to 120!), press reports put Italians at 13% and other Europeans 27%, making a non-European majority of 60%. The Asia-Pacific and Africa-Mideast will have historic highs of 18% and 14% respectively, raising odds those growing flocks could produce a pope. After Francis of Argentina, a second pontiff from Latin America (with 18%) is most unlikely, and North Americans (10%) do not figure in early buzz.

Analysts anticipate a wide-open field, which could mean a longer-than-usual conclave. Many cardinals have never met each other, so speeches during their daily General Congregation, and private conversations otherwise, will shape their momentous choice. Though cardinals age 80 and above do not participate in the conclave, they could be influential in this prior politicking.

Since Francis appointed 80% of the electors, some suppose the next holy father will perpetuate his style and outlook. But the old adage that “a fat pope follows a thin pope” reminds us that the cardinals may desire change. Consider that the progressive Francis was chosen after the shocking resignation of the conservative Benedict XVI, and the reformist John XXIII succeeded the rigorist Pius XII.

John Paul II’s rules

The 92 rules governing the transition were defined by Pope John Paul II in his 1996 apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis (“The Lord’s Universal Flock”). The current version incorporates changes by Benedict in 2007 and 2013, with added provisions to overcome a rare extended deadlock to reach the required two-thirds majority. See text here: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_22021996_universi-dominici-gregis.html/.

The conclave quarters are carefully debugged, electors surrender their cellphones, and each one vows before God under threat of excommunication “to maintain rigorous secrecy with regard to all matters in any way related to the election of the Roman Pontiff.” No accurate historical record is allowed, so rumors, speculation and purportedly accurate leaks will persist. The secrecy tradition is partly an anachronism left over from centuries when the popes ruled central Italy as major political and economic players and secular interests sought to tilt the elections.

Today the pope is the monarch of only the tiny Vatican city-state whereas the Dalai Lama is traditionally the temporal as well as spiritual leader of the nation of Tibet. Communist China invaded and ended that regime in 1951. To assure his personal safety, the current Lama escaped to India in 1959, established a government in exile, and became a revered global teacher. In March, he revealed details of frustrating diplomacy in “Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle With China for My Land and My People” (William Morrow), reviewed here: https://religionunplugged.com/news/voice-for-the-voiceless-the-dalai-lamas-struggle-for-tibetan-autonomy-and-cultural-survival/

Succession intrigue stems from the Buddhist belief that a soul undergoes countless deaths and rebirths as humans or into other species determined by karma, the accumulation of good and bad deeds in each life. The current and next Dalai Lamas are seen as reincarnations of Avalokiteśvara, a bodhisattva who could leave that cycle and enter Nirvana but instead returns in his successor to serve suffering humanity.

A “free world” Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama announced in 2011 that any supposed successor designated by atheistic Chinese officialdom upon his death would be fraudulent. The new book now specifies that “the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world,” not occupied Tibet. The Lama may say more upon his July birthday. His Gaden Phodrang Trust office will manage the traditional process by which senior Buddhists will search for the reincarnated new leader, a young boy to be identified through his behavior and esoteric divination.

There are also political aspects in picking the new archbishop of Canterbury, who presides over both the declining Church of England and the growing Anglican Communion elsewhere (though Africans who dispute England’s church blessings for same-sex couples refuse to recognize the archbishop’s global leadership). Officially, he is appointed by King Charles III as the church’s Supreme Governor, but in reality the king merely rubber-stamps the recommendation from Prime Minister Keir Starmer, an atheist whose predecessor in the office, Rishi Sunak, is Hindu.

The prime minister’s appointments secretary is heavily involved, but church delegates on the Crown Nominations Commission will control the selection through confidential inquiries. (The commission’s chair is a lay Anglican, Lord Jonathan Evans, former chief of the MI5 intelligence service.) The Catholic process will be rapid compared with the situation in England. Archbishop Justin Welby, who announced his retirement last November after mishandling a sexual-abuse scandal, left office January 6. Yet none of the English or international delegates who’ll elect the new archbishop have even been appointed yet, according to a Religion News Service (RNS) report this week.

Politics also shadows the next Ecumenical Patriarch. A 1923 treaty requires that he be a citizen of Turkey. His once-mighty see located in Istanbul, Turkey, is now a vulnerable remnant of perhaps 5,000 ethnic Greeks under Muslim rule. The the local synod will have few eligible candidates to choose from, and Turkey has shut the patriarchate’s Halki seminary the past 54 years. An April 17 RNS analysis contends “the obvious choice” will be America’s 57-year-old Greek Orthodox Archbishop Elpidophoros. He is a native of Turkey, but this year nationalists have been urging the regime to revoke his citizenship and bar him from consideration. The current and next patriarchs face a severe breach with the church of Russia, Orthodoxy’s largest branch by far, because after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Bartholomew unilaterally recognized the independence of a young Ukrainian Orthodox church that broke away from the nation’s traditional Moscow-aligned church.

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