Cardinals look on as the body of Pope Francis is transferred into the Basilica at St Peter’s Square in Vatican City on Wednesday. The College of Cardinals is preparing for a conclave to elect the next pontiff, after days of funeral rites and observances conclude.
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Pope Francis’ death has set centuries-old machinery into motion within the Roman Catholic Church: From around the world, cardinals are converging on the Vatican, first to mourn and honor Francis, and later, to cast their votes for his successor.
But the composition of today’s College of Cardinals — and the electors who will form the all-important conclave — is unlike any that came before.
Here’s a brief guide:
There are 135 cardinal electors
Not every cardinal can vote in the conclave: Those who choose the next pope must be younger than 80 years old, for instance. Of the 252 cardinals at the time of Francis’ death, 135 are electors.
Francis appointed 108 of the 135 cardinal electors, according to the Vatican’s tally.
Church rules call for conclaves to begin 15 to 20 days after a pope dies or resigns. Cardinals can start the proceedings before the 15-day mark, but only if all electors are present.
College of Cardinals is no longer majority-European
Under Pope Francis, the College of Cardinals came closer to reflecting the global Catholic Church, a fitting legacy for the first pope from South America.
With the current composition of the college, this will be “the least European conclave in history,” Gregg Gassman, a librarian who edits the Pontifacts podcast, told NPR.
Francis reached far and wide to give countries such as Haiti, Laos and Rwanda their first-ever cardinals. His papacy also saw Asia’s representation in the College of Cardinals grow to 17%, with 23 electors — second only to Europe.
At least 70 countries now have elector cardinals, the Vatican says, including 10 from the U.S. In contrast, the 2013 conclave that elected Francis was made up of cardinals from 48 countries, according to the Catholic News Service.
Europe accounts for about 40% of the electors, while having just over 20% of the world’s Catholic community, the Vatican said in March. Its 53 electors are more than twice the number of any other geographic region, but the makeup of the new conclave will still reflect a century of change.
Only Europeans participated in the 1922 conclave, Gassman said. Of the four cardinals who were in the U.S. or Canada at the time, he added, three couldn’t get to Rome quickly enough by boat before the conclave started, and the fourth opted not to travel.
“They had to extend the rules to allow for more travel time” after that conclave, Gassman said. “And then as soon as they did that, airplanes became more of a thing.”
How the conclave will play out
The 2025 conclave promises to be a complex gathering, according to experts like Massimo Faggioli, a church historian and professor at Villanova University outside Philadelphia.
“It’s really a much more complicated chemistry this time,” Faggioli told NPR’s Leila Fadel. “Because also, there’s a very complicated international situation which affects different cardinals, different local churches in different ways. So this time it’s even more difficult than usual to make predictions, even on the agenda of the conclave.”
It’s especially hard, several experts told NPR, to predict how the opinions of a historically diverse group of electors will coalesce into choosing who will succeed Pope Francis.
For one thing, there are concerns that the size of the College of Cardinals, with more than 130 electors, could make it difficult to reach a consensus.
“They don’t know each other. They rarely meet, and only for some celebrations” that don’t last long, said Kurt Martens, ordinary professor of canon law at the School of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. The result, he added, is that factions might be more likely to spring up and divide the conclave.
“What the conclave and the next pope cannot do is to ignore and deny the changing features of global Catholicism, which is much less European, much less white, less North American and more Global South,” Villanova’s Faggioli said, “meaning not necessarily liberal but surely much more critical of capitalism as it is today.”
Deans have a high-profile platform
The job of calling cardinals to the Vatican and overseeing the conclave falls to the dean of the College of Cardinals. In the film Conclave, Ralph Fiennes portrays the powerful figure.
Deans wield significant influence over the gathering, including presiding over a special Mass and delivering a homily in which they can suggest themes and priorities for electors to consider. Some deans have even been chosen as pope, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
The current dean, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, is 91. Because of his age, he will celebrate the high-profile Mass, but neither Re nor the vice dean, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, 81, will join the conclave. It will instead be overseen by the most senior elector: Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was Francis’ secretary of state.
For the cardinal electors, “it’s an enormous responsibility” to choose the next pope, Catholic University’s Martens said. “It’s an enormous tension that is on you.”
Uncertainty is a time-honored part of the process, Martens added.
“Those who hope that they will become pope — remember there’s a saying, the one who enters the conclave as pope comes out as a cardinal, so the favorite never wins.”
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