Who will be the next Pope?

For the next few (days/weeks/hopefully not months) the eyes of the world- especially the Catholic world- will be on the Vatican City as the conclave of Cardinals decides who will be the next Pope; the next leader of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about the Catholic Church, or the process of choosing a Pope, or almost anything else. Luckily, you have had to try incredibly hard to go somewhere on the Internet without learning about the Pope recently, so I’ve been able to pick up a few things.

In simplest terms, you must meet two requirements to become Pope:

·      Be Catholic

·      Be a man

Unfortunately, since there are about 1 billion Catholics in the world, and that means there’s probably about 500 million people who could become Pope if we only used these two requirements. That’s a lot. You can add another requirement on the list to narrow down the field, which is

·      Be a cardinal

That takes out many of those 500 million possibilities, and a few more when we take out the St. Louis Cardinals. The cardinals (not those cardinals) elect the next pope, and generally they elect someone from amongst themselves. Since this trend has been ongoing for the last 600 years, I doubt this will change any time soon.

Of course, becoming a cardinal has its own special set of requirements and unless you’re already one, chances are you won’t become one before the next Pope is chosen. Sorry. 

The cardinals are probably looking for certain qualities when they elect the next Pope. Most of these are qualitative, and since I, again, know nothing about the Catholic Church, I can’t begin to make an accurate prediction of the next Pope based on those. However, I can at least take a shot at some of the quantitative aspects of Popes; specifically, age and birthplace.

Only cardinals under 80 years old are invited to the conclave, so age can be considered an important factor. You don’t want a Pope that is too old, because you want continuity in the position. But every cardinal right now is over 50 (as it just so happens), so there’s a fairly small range of ages for possible Pope-elects. Surprising (or not), the average age for a new Pope since 1700 is right in the middle of that range: 65.

Birthplace probably also plays a role in the election of Popes, even though most cardinals would probably deny it. 19 of the 23 Popes since 1700 have been born in Italy; the remaining Popes were born in countries fairly close to Italy: Germany, Poland, and Austria (2).

Thus, without further ado, I present

THE POPE CALCULATOR

What are your chances of being Pope?

You can calculate the odds that any one person would have of becoming Pope based on their age and birthplace. Simply input the values into this equation:

Where     d = distance of birthplace from Rome, in miles

And       a = age, in years

The closer a P value is to 1, the greater the chance is of a given person being elected Pope.

What does this equation tell us about who is most likely to be Pope? I didn’t have time to apply the equation to all potential cardinals and I certainly don’t have time to apply it to every Catholic male, but I was able to identify some cardinals on my own that fit the parameters of the equation well and CNN also had a handy list of twelve potential popes. Let’s apply my equation to those twelve popes first:

Of this group, Christoph Schonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, has the best chance of becoming Pope. I wouldn’t find this terribly surprising given that CNN probably understands the papal contenders better than I do. Peter Turkson, who is from Ghana and would be the first modern African Pope, is a close second behind Schonborn.

However, I also encountered ten more cardinals with larger values of P. Seven of these had a value of P > 0.9:

Giuseppe Betori, Archbishop of Florence, is the clear leading candidate to become Pope, at least from a statistical perspective. However, I’m sure the members of the papal conclave will weigh qualitative values much higher than quantitative ones, so I don’t expect my predictions here to be correct, but having a good score through my equation certainly wouldn’t hurt. Regardless, all eyes will be on Rome in the coming days as we anticipate the election of the next Pope.