On the morning of the conclave — a time of frenzied speculation and more than a bit of guesswork — Commonweal editor-at-large Mollie Wilson O’Reilly appeared in an op-ed for MSNBC to help level set conclave watchers’ expectations ahead of the first ballots.
O’Reilly, who has covered papal transitions before, recalls her experience of the conclave which elected Pope Francis in a surprise twist. “In 2013, I had an assignment to write a quick reaction piece as soon as the new pope was announced,” O’Reilly explained. “I read a lot of experts’ lists and rankings of all the front-runners, just as many are doing now. It did me no good: I heard ‘Bergoglio’ and had to start my research from scratch (‘He’s a Jesuit? That can’t be right!’).” The lesson? Even the most-informed Vaticanologists ultimately have no clue who will step out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Square in just a few days.
O’Reilly also reminded MSNBC readers that Vatican politics can be hard to decipher from across the Atlantic: “the American view of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’—already an awkward fit for American Catholics—is a truly inadequate framework for understanding the priorities and divisions of the Catholic hierarchy in the Vatican,” she explained. The next pope may well—and probably will—unsettle our easy categories and standard ideological divisions, just as Francis did. And even when Vatican-watchers think they understand the new pope, they can always be surprised, just as they were when Francis’s papacy took unexpected turns.
Ultimately, O’Reilly argues that the best way to watch the conclave is to embrace its mystery: “In the end, that may be the most interesting fact about the next pope — how little any of us know or can predict about what will happen next,” she writes. “We should prepare to be surprised, not only by the name announced from the balcony, but also by who that man decides to be once he dons the white cassock, and where he will take the church between now and the next time a conclave gathers.”
The full article, which was published on May 7, can be found here. For more coverage of the papal transition, see Commonweal’s twice-daily “Interregnum Report,” a round-up of the most important news we’re following during this momentous turnover.
