"The Devil also participates in the Conclave". No one can predict the outcome.

Why no one bet on Bergoglio and Wojtyła: "The devil also participates in the Conclave"

NB THE DEVIL DOES NOT HAVE THE FINAL SAY

Despite the enormous coverage of the Conclaves, the result is often unexpected. Keys to an information gap: opacity, power struggles, and Vatican dramas

The ways of the Vatican are inscrutable: when it is impossible to guess the new Pope. A forgotten episode in the eventful life of Jorge Bergoglio. After having been almost everything in the Argentine Church, the Jesuit authority ignored him due to power balances that were difficult to explain. A prematurely retired Bergoglio was transferred to a peripheral town, where he lived for a few months between prayer, depression, and introspection. The melancholy of the Chinese vase. “Under the new Jesuit leadership, Bergoglio had entered a period of decline within the Society. He was a priest without projection, without an assigned mission, with the emotional impact that this has on a Jesuit, which undermines Ignatian vitality. And while it is true that after each administration, provincials “rise and fall” in their degree of influence, in Bergoglio's case, due to the power he had represented, the change was significant. He reached 55 with a feeling of having reached the end of his career,” says Marcelo Larraquy in Pray for Him, a biography of Bergoglio.

Then, a hierarchical carom brought Bergoglio back to the front row. You already know what happened next, but let's return to the moment of exile, in Larraquy's words: "He had lost the vivacity and creativity that the students at the Colegio Inmaculada de Santa Fe recognized in him. He remained withdrawn, sitting or talking on the phone in the gallery booth. Because of his listless gait, some referred to him as 'the knight of the sad figure'; abandoned by his Order, he bore little resemblance to the man who, during his leadership of the Society, seemed to have a clear idea of ​​where he wanted to go... If someone had told him back then that one day he would be appointed Supreme Pontiff of the Church, he would have smiled at the folly." But if during his Argentine exile, Bergoglio would have thought anyone who considered him a candidate for papacy was crazy, even more problematic is that almost no journalists detected that he would be elected Pope in 2013, despite the fact that in the previous Conclave (2005) he had challenged Ratzinger for the position, achieving up to 40 votes in one of the votes. Or as Los Electroduendes said: "The ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and sometimes God [the Vatican and the press] gets his wires crossed."

The Favorites

Before the 2013 Conclave, ABC published an article about the SIX cardinals favorites to be the next Pope. None of them were Bergoglio. El País published an article about the NINE cardinals favorites to be the next Pope. None of them were Bergoglio. El Mundo published an article about the twelve cardinals favored to be the next Pope. None of them were Bergoglio. 0 out of 12. That's bad luck! El País then covered Bergoglio's unexpected election this way: "The predictions said that to replace Benedict XVI there would be a very close fight between an Italian cardinal representing power and money and a Brazilian preferred by the Curia. The only faint hope was that perhaps this American cardinal with a friendly face and Franciscan sandals would manage to charm the Holy Spirit... However... when the Vatican curtains finally opened, the surprise was there." And El Mundo: "The future of the Church is at the 'end of the world.' This is how the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio modestly and modestly confessed on the balcony of St. Peter's the extraordinary surprise that the designation as Benedict XVI's successor had caused him." 

In defense of the honor of the Spanish press, we can say that Bergoglio's election caught almost everyone off guard; practically all the world's media ignored him, even though, we insist, he had been in the mix in the previous Conclave. Before the 2013 Conclave, the Argentine newspaper Clarín, which one might imagine was better informed about Francis's chances, published an article on the favorites in which it named 11 cardinals.

Most of the Italian press, perhaps due to its bias toward local candidates, also failed to get the point across in that Conclave. Corriere della Sera ran a pool of its eight leading Vatican journalists and analysts. Ten candidates emerged. None of them was Bergoglio. Professional bettors fared no better in the 2013 Conclave. In an average of bets compiled by the New York Times, Bergoglio appeared in fifteenth place with a 4% chance of winning. With the Conclave underway, La Repubblica launched another round of bets in which Bergoglio appeared at a distant 41 to 1 (at the time of this article, Bergoglio had finished second in the first ballot of the Conclave and had become the strongest rival).

Not even the all-powerful Italian Bishops' Conference was spared from this blunder, having lobbied heavily (along with a section of the local press) in favor of the bookmakers' favorite, Cardinal Angelo Scola. Seconds after the white smoke erupted, the Italian Bishops' Conference issued the following statement: "Our Secretary General wishes to express the sentiments of the entire Italian Church regarding the election of Cardinal Angelo Scola as successor to Peter. To the new Pope, the Italian Church promises from now on its unconditional and reverential obedience." Oops! Yes, you read that correctly, the Conclave elected Bergoglio... and the Italian Bishops' Conference announced Scola. "It was a cut-and-paste problem," the Italian Episcopate's communications director later argued. That said, and in the midst of the media storm surrounding the Conclave that will elect Francis/Bergoglio's successor, the questions arise. Why are thousands of stories published about papal favorites in the days leading up to the Conclaves, in true Eurovision style, and they all miss the mark like a fairground shotgun? Do journalists simply speculate? Is there no one left with good Vatican information because veteran journalists have retired and religious media coverage is in retreat? Is the Vatican the last global institution shielded from indiscretions? Are Conclaves unpredictable due to their own internal dynamics? We want to know.

Place your bets

A little historical context to get started. September 1503, papal Conclave, Roman bookmakers listed Francesco Piccolomini as the favorite (10 to 3 in betting, a 33% chance of winning), followed by Giuliano della Rover and Georges d'Amboise. Piccolomini won, being named the 215th Pope of the Catholic Church under the name of Pius III. That is to say, the bettors were right on that occasion, but since this is a story about the unpredictability of Conclaves, or about the inscrutability of the Vatican, Pius III's papacy took a dramatic U-turn 26 days later, with the unexpected death of the new pope. What did he die of? Officially, after his gout worsened. Unofficially, after being poisoned by an enemy faction (these kinds of friendly Vatican brawls, typical of the era, naturally made predictions very difficult). In the next Conclave with bets, in 1521, all the futurologists were exposed. The twenty papal candidates in the running—led by Giulio de' Medici (4 to 1 in the betting odds) followed by Alessandro Farnese (5 to 1)—ended up being derailed… in favor of someone who wasn't even in the Conclave, Hadrian of Utrecht (future papal name: Hadrian VI), who, to top it all off, wasn't even Italian (pay attention to Hadrian's heresy: there wouldn't be another foreign/non-Italian Pope until 455 years later: Karol Wojtyla). How did Hadrian manage to become Pope if he had so little interest in the office that he didn't even show up for the Conclave? It is suspected that he was a manipulative finger-pointing by Charles I of Spain and V of Germany (whose tutor Hadrian had been). Hadrian VI died after just over a year in office.

Even murkier was the Conclave of 1590, when Cardinals Montalto and Sforza “secretly joined forces in support of Niccolo Sfondrato. They are said to have made fortunes betting on him, at odds of 10 to 1, the day before his election as Pope Urban VII,” according to the paper Forecasting the Outcome of Closed-Door Decisions: Evidence from 500 Years of Betting on Papal Conclaves, by Professors Leighton Vaughan Williams and David Paton. We asked Leighton Vaughan Williams, a professor at Nottingham Trent University, about the blunder in predictions for the Conclave won by Francis: “Cardinal Bergoglio wasn't among the bookmakers' favorites, so he wasn't mentioned prominently in the press, although he wasn't completely ignored either. La Stampa, for example, did point to him as one of the main contenders. In other words, there wasn't complete silence; it just so happens that bookmakers' favorites tend to be more cited in the media.”

A cursed interview

Let's now jump to the turbulent elections of 1978. The sudden death of John Paul I, 33 days after his election, was followed by another Conclave in a state of shock, which also seemed to affect the press… The AP news agency counted nine favorites, and they were wrong, as a Pole whom almost everyone had ignored won: John Paul II. The big favorite in the Conclave in which John Paul II made the splash was the Italian Cardinal Giuseppe Siri. In the days leading up to the Conclave, the local press reported that Siri had secured at least 50 votes in the first ballot. In what in retrospect appears to be an overconfidence contrary to the Vatican's usual prudence and opacity, Giuseppe Siri decided to give an interview to the Gazetta del Popolo… in which he didn't mince words regarding his plans for the Church if he were elected Pope: to dismantle the Second Vatican Council. According to Siri, Pope John XXIII had done almost irreparable damage to the Church by trying to modernize the institution. "A predictable Pope would always be followed by an unpredictable one." Although Siri gave the interview with the understanding that it would be published after the cardinals were already locked in the Conclave, the newspaper decided to publish it earlier (it seems that Siri was extremely rude to the journalist he interviewed, and the media outlet didn't like it). The publication was a bombshell. “Several cardinals were seen holding newspapers before entering the Conclave. Cardinal Siri had shot himself in the foot,” writes Gerard O'Connell in his book, The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave That Changed History. In the first round of voting, Siri received less than half the votes initially attributed to him by the Italian press. By the fourth round, he was already out of the running. Was John Paul II proclaimed Pope thanks to the interview in which Siri spoke—loudly—too much? Something played a role. “Several cardinals told me that by giving that interview before the Conclave, Siri had shown a lack of judgment and prudence,” according to O'Connell. Since surprises are frequent, it's not easy to establish a pattern, but an article by Rod Crosby in the National Catholic Reporter, prior to Bergoglio's Conclave, attempted to do so. We're talking about the pendulum theory. A predictable Pope would always be followed by an unpredictable one. “Like a Swiss watch, since 1878, each election has swung between the favorite and the total surprise. In 2005, 1963, 1939, 1914, and 1878, the cardinals played it safe [by voting for the favorite], while in 1978 (twice), 1958, 1922, and 1903 they took risks [by voting for the outsider], often to break a deadlocked Conclave.”

Indeed, the problem isn't always that journalists lack reliable sources—or the Vatican, the last institution opaque to gossipmongers in an era when the White House broadcasts its nonsense 24/7 to a digital audience eager for informational entertainment—but that the voting process also favors surprises. Cardinals locked in, voting and voting until someone wins two-thirds? Can a few votes stop the favorite indefinitely? Can a consensus third candidate finally prevent the cardinals from being locked in the Conclave for life? Furthermore, many of the cardinals were barely connected to each other beforehand. Therefore, there are many possibilities for unexpected results. “The most recent favorite to be elected Pope was Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) in 2005. Pope Francis was not among the betting favorites, but there is no systematic pattern in which the favorite wins and then is unlikely to do so again the next time. As in political elections and other events, sometimes the favorite wins, sometimes not.

“There is no reason to believe the favorite will win in 2025, although it is very possible,” concludes Vaughan Williams, in the Galician style, a nebulous northern territory that is perhaps the most appropriate if one wants to play the Conclave lottery. Or as the Vatican saying goes, “whoever goes to the Conclave as Pope, comes out as cardinal.” In a journalistic context, we could translate this as: going for the wool (betting wildly on a favorite to become Pope) and coming back shorn.

Blindly

We spoke with David Paton, professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School, about the relationship between betting, the media, and the volatility of closed-door Conclaves. QUESTION: Why are some Conclaves so unpredictable? ANSWER: They are not always. For example, although Cardinal Ratzinger did not start out as the betting favorite, as the decision drew closer, he eventually became the favorite. In 1958, Cardinal Roncali [John XXIII] was also the betting favorite. However, the uncertainty is much greater than in other markets. One reason is that betting markets for papal elections are what are known as "betting behind closed doors" markets, meaning that decision-making takes place behind closed doors rather than (as in horse racing or sports competitions) in full view of everyone. This means that more private information is available only to participants, and it is much harder for bettors to trust the reliability of the information that leaks out. "In a Conclave, it is much harder for bettors to trust the reliability of the information that leaks out." Q. In the last Conclave, hardly any media outlet in the world mentioned Bergoglio as a candidate. How is this possible? Did journalists have misinformation, is the Vatican unpredictable, or a bit of both? A. Francis had been a candidate in the previous elections, so it was a surprise that very few people mentioned him before the vote. There were one or two exceptions; For example, journalist John Allen highlighted this in one of his articles. Interestingly, during the voting, Vatican Insider posted information on Twitter indicating that Cardinal Bergoglio was attracting many votes and was a serious contender. This was echoed by a major outlet like The Guardian. Despite this, his chances of being elected didn't change much at the bookmakers; he remained a longshot. Once again, the betting markets failed to process the publicly available information. We'll see if they perform better this time. Dirty War

Five years after the 2013 Conclave, Honduran Cardinal Óscar Andrés Maradiaga revealed in a book the dirty tricks played on Bergoglio in the middle of the 2013 Conclave. When the Argentine cleric began to lead the voting, unidentified rivals took desperate measures, such as spreading gossip that Bergoglio was a bad candidate because he had two newscasts left... "Someone supporting another Papabile cardinal spread the word that Bergoglio was sick, that he was missing a lung. I spoke with other cardinals and said, 'Okay, I'll ask the Archbishop of Buenos Aires [Bergoglio] if these things are really true.' When I went to find him, I apologized for the question I was about to ask. Bergoglio was very surprised by the question, but confirmed that, apart from sciatica and a small operation on his left lung to remove a cyst when he was young, he had no serious health problems. It was a real relief: the Holy Spirit, despite the obstacles posed by the cliques, was breathing on the right person," Madariaga explained. But the Holy Spirit would not be alone in the Conclaves; an old antagonist of his would also make an appearance: the devil. O'Connell showed in his book that malicious rumors about Bergoglio had been numerous during the 2013 Conclave: "When I commented to a cardinal about the efforts to thwart Bergoglio's path to the papacy, he told me: 'The devil also participates in the Conclave.' In these diabolical circumstances, with so many interests at stake above and below, it no longer seems so serious that sometimes no one can predict the winner of the Conclave.

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