While American journalist David von Drehle has enjoyed a highly distinguished career, including stints with both the Washington Post and Time, I doubt that he’ll look back at a piece he filed on me on March 14, 2013, the day after the election of Pope Francis, as one of his professional highlights.
Published by Time and headlined “John L Allen Jr: The Man Who Picked the Pope”, the story styled me as a savant who, swimming against the tide, had correctly forecast the selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the successor to Pope Benedict XVI.
“While the rest of the journalistic pack was focused on the Italian Cardinal [Angelo] Scola, the Brazilian Cardinal [Odilo] Scherer and the Canadian Cardinal [Marc] Ouellet, the Vatican expert for the National Catholic Reporter recalled the man who finished second in the balloting the last time a pope was chosen,” von Drehle wrote, referring to the newspaper I worked for at the time.
“The fact that Allen, virtually alone, gave props in advance to the eventual pope was a vindication of his own hard-won expertise in covering one of the world’s most opaque bureaucracies,” he added.
“Compared with the glibness of the Vatican media crush, Allen’s scoop resounded across the Internet.”
Von Drehle concluded: “For one brief moment, we were reminded that genuine knowledge matters, while tweets fade.”
In retrospect, I suspect he’d love to have those lines back, for two very good reasons. First, I was hardly alone in flagging Bergoglio as a serious prospect, since everyone knew the cardinals had kicked the tyres on him eight years before.
Secondly, Bergoglio actually was just one of 24 profiles of possible popes I’d written in the run-up to the election, a crop that included Scola, Scherer, Ouellet and all the other also-rans for whose inclusion von Drehle mocked other pundits.
Frankly, if I’d had the time, I would have done a “what about him?” piece on every single one of the 115 cardinals who processed into the Sistine Chapel on March 12, 2013 – and I still would have felt just a slight tinge of uncertainty, given the long-shot possibility that a non-cardinal could be elected.
In other words, Nostradamus I definitely was not.
In fact, my record vis-Ã -vis conclave forecasts is even worse than the 2013 example makes it seem. Prior to the 2005 election, I had published a biography of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the final chapter of which contained four reasons why he would never be pope – a point of which Benedict XVI wryly reminded me, more than once, after his election.
To be fair, von Drehle’s agenda in that 2013 piece wasn’t so much to praise me as the National Catholic Reporter, since both his family and NCR are based in Kansas City, so there was a little home cooking going on.
Nonetheless, the essay, and its overly laudatory conclusions about my own perspicacity, stands as a cautionary tale about the hazards of papal forecasting, a cottage industry currently experiencing one of its periodic boom cycles with perceptions of mounting health challenges around Pope Francis.
As the drumbeat of speculation gathers force, there are two common misconceptions that should be dismissed from the beginning.
The first is that there is some inner circle of seers, like the oracle at Delphi, who can deliver advance knowledge of what’s going to happen.
Want proof that no matter how lofty someone’s credentials may seem, they’re not actually infallible? Consider that on March 8, 2013, Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record, surveyed eight of the country’s leading Vatican experts, asking each for three picks as to who would be the next pope. Forever and a day, there’s been an assumption that Italians must have some privileged insider understanding of such matters, since the papacy is physically located in Italy and no culture on earth devotes greater resources to understanding its dynamics.
What did these celebrated Italian sages forecast, including the current and former Vatican experts for Corriere: a celebrated Vatican writer for ANSA, Italy’s version of the Associated Press; perhaps the country’s foremost political journalist; and the most famous and widely quoted living Italian historian of the Second Vatican Council? Five had Scherer, five had Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, four had Scola, and the rest of the picks were scattered among a variety of basically implausible figures. Not a single one had Bergoglio among their top three possibilities. In other words, be cautious about alleged expertise.
On the other hand, there’s an equal-and-opposite myth, which holds that the outcome of a papal election is so unknowable as to make any exercise in prediction a fool’s errand. This fallacy is expressed in the classic bit of alleged conclave wisdom: “Those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk.”
As with so many classic one-liners, it has a superficial whiff of wisdom but upon closer examination tur ns out to be bunkum.
If we take the nine conclaves of the last century, beginning with the election of Benedict XV in 1914 and bringing things forward to Pope Francis in 2013, it turns out that a cardinal considered a prohibitive favourite beforehand actually won three times: Pius XII in 1939, Paul VI in 1963 and Benedict XVI in 2005.
In four instances, a cardinal considered a “B-list” candidate, meaning someone entirely plausible if not exactly the betting favourite, prevailed: Benedict XV, Pius XI, John Paul I and Francis himself.
Only twice did an absolute surprise which almost no one saw coming occur, with the elections of John XXIII in 1958 and John Paul II, the first non-Italian in more than 500 years, in 1978.
In other words, had you bet the favourite over the last century according to the experts, you would have won handily three times, and had you spread your money over some midform possibilities too, you would have come out significantly ahead overall.
The moral here is that just because surprises are possible doesn’t mean they’re inevitable. More often than not, people who are paying close attention, who have good sources and are able to correct for their own biases, can come up with a set of reasonable possibilities, and the odds are fairly good – over the 100 years, it’s been seven out of nine – that the next pope will be somewhere in their mix.
In other words, the fact that alleged experts aren’t always correct doesn’t mean there’s no value to what they say. As with prognostications in any walk of life – who’s going to win the Premier League next year, say, or who’s going to prevail in the American elections, or which brand of car is likely to top the sales charts – the rule of thumb probably is to take expertise with a grain of salt, but don’t disregard it either.
Right now, to be honest, Pope Francis does not seem a pontiff hastening towards his end. The Vatican has announced plans for a major outing to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore in September, and in October he plans to preside over the concluding Synod of Bishops on Synodality in the Vatican .
Next year, by all accounts, he fully expects to lead celebrations of the great jubilee of 2025.
Despite all that, when you have the oldest reigning pope in the last 120 years, and one with a concentric set of health challenges, speculation about what may come next is inevitable. The best advice, facing what is destined to be a gathering wave of prediction, is to pay attention – but, at the same time, to hedge your bets.
In the meantime, I’ll be polishing my profiles of everyone who could even vaguely be considered a plausible candidate – just to be sure that, once again, while I may not necessarily be right, it’s at least unlikely that I’ll be completely wrong.