And just like that, it was all over, with a puff of white smoke. The film Conclave is no longer being as mercilessly advertised online. Fantapapa, the Italian website which briefly allowed punters to bet (for earthly glory, not for money) on the outcome of the conclave is closed (till the next papal election, that is).
A north American of mixed heritage has become Pope, confirming the break in European Popes represented by Pope Francis (born in Argentina of Italian immigrant parents), and adding in both the inevitable political speculation about how an American Pope will interact with the American President and interest in how the Pope’s family story intersects with that of the Caribbean, and the Afro-Creole community of Louisiana. (The story of the Pope’s maternal grandparents was first reported on 9 May, after his election, in the New York Times following the work of a Louisiana genealogist; in the Dominican Republic, El Día was quick to celebrate the “direct blood connection” to the country; in the past, the Pope himself has tended to emphasise the European immigrant origins of his grandparents).
Most newspapers, both in the Anglosphere and beyond, have focussed on the Chicago birthplace of Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, as the means of identifying him. (‘Il Papa Americano’ screamed Il Messaggero – an Italian daily based in Rome – on its front page on the day he was elected; Il Tempo simply stated ‘Un Americano a Roma’).
But how American?
The Catholic Press Agency of Bosnia carried an interview with the 80-year-old Cardinal Vinko Puljić, who stood next to the new Pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as he was first introduced to the masses as Pope. Puljić made clear his estimation what it means to have an ‘American’ Pope, saying “we know, it is true, that America often has the need to be a ‘patron’ over others”, but stressing that the new Pope would look only to Christ.
In Peru, the situation has been rather different, where instead of his American-ness the focus has been on Robert Prevost’s Peruvian nationality (since 2015), proclaiming him the first Peruvian Pope and taking delight in the fact that, in his first address, he spoke in Spanish as well as Italian.
El Comercio, a local paper, caught up with a Peruvian who had emigrated to Italy in the 1990s, Úrsula Cateriano, celebrating on the streets of Rome, expressing her disbelief when she first found out a compatriot had become Pope: “It can’t be – from Peru!”. Elsewhere the newspaper quoted the Papal Nuncio to Peru declaring: “he’s more Peruvian than American” and noting his criticisms on the Peruvian political elite. (“I don’t know who would pass if we put them all through a lie detector test”, he is reported to have said.)
Television meanwhile carried footage of Prevost as Archbishop of Chiclayo processing through the streets in a face mask during the pandemic. Other papers carried articles noting the new Pope’s love of ceviche. The YouTube channel of Peruvian media personality Jaime Bayly spoke of his personal “joy, pride and surprise” – as Peruvians, he says, “we are accustomed to losing”.
Inevitably for some there was disappointment, if not dismay, that their candidate had not been successful, and what this might suggest about the direction of the church.
The headline in Il Giornale, a conservative Italian newspaper, was blunt: ‘The dream of a Eurocentric church goes up in smoke’. As the editor put it in a video editorial, after this election “perhaps there will never be another Italian or European successor to St Peter” – a situation he described as a “geopolitical missed opportunity”. (La Republicca, in contrast, pointed to the Pope’s Italian grandfather – a language teacher, something much admired by Translator).
Some Hungarian pro-government papers had hoped for the election of Péter Erdő, believed to be close to the government of Viktor Orbán and elements of its Christian nationalist agenda. Shortly after the conclave, Erdő himself emphasised how the new Pope’s choice of name Leo XIV indicated rather this attachment to social justice, while noting: “it was not his citizenship or nationality that played a role, but rather his experience and his network of human relations”. Orbán welcomed the new Pope while saying he didn’t expect many changes from Pope Francis.
In Canada, home to two candidates thought of being papabile – Marc Oullet and Mark Czerny – there were always doubts about whether they could be elected. “Forget it! Many of our Cardinals are too old or too young”, noted Le Journal de Québec ahead of the conclave, consulting Alain Pronkin, who literally wrote a book (in 2018) entitled Qui succédera au pape François? (Who will succeed Pope Francis?). Czerny, while younger than Oullet, was marked down because he is a Jesuit (like Francis): “if we rely on the past, the chances of electing a Jesuit twice in a row are quite slim”.
In Germany too, there were doubts about whether the country could relive the 2005 moment when the German Joseph Ratzinger became Pope as Benedict XVI, sparking the iconic headline “Wir sind Papst” (We are the Pope) in Germany’s biggest tabloid newspaper Bild and, if Stern is to be believed, a feast of champagne and ice-cream in the Vatican. (Despite this, one of our Translator editors found herself listening to the Cologne-based domradio.de and its daily coverage of the conclave with fun facts and Vatican-related anecdotes by its editor Renardo Schlegelmilch.)
A series of interviews of African bishops conducted by Crux before the conclave, including from South Sudan and Cameroon, suggested the hope that the election of a new Pope would represent a break. “I don’t want a Pope like Francis… I want a Pope who thinks and acts like Christ”, one told Crux, in a memorable phrase. But would this necessarily mean a Pope from Africa?
After the results of this week’s conclave came in the Guinean news website Ledjely.com confessed to “disappointment for all those, particularly in Africa, who hoped – without really believing – that the Catholic Church would follow through on its logic of opening up to the periphery”, while hoping that the Pope’s time in Peru would indicate preoccupations – and conservative stances on sexuality and gender – which might chime with African Catholics. In Nigeria, media outlets published a comment from Reno Omokri, former aide to the Nigerian president and social-media influencer (2.6 million followers on X) invoking the bible: “Please give Black Africans and Africans in the diaspora hope that they are not just ‘fetchers of water and hewers of wood in the House of God’”.
Against this disappointment, RFI.com carried an interview with Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel – close to the conservative Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, Archibishop of Kinshasa, stressing that an African Pope was simply a matter of time: “as there were in the past, there will be new African popes… we are not in a hurry”.
On the other hand, the mother of Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, an Italian, and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, expressed rather her joy that her son had not been made Pope: when he gets home “I’ll make him polenta”, she told journalists, while noting that he was still young enough, at 60, to get a second chance.
Here is what we at Translator were reading or listening to from beyond the Anglosphere in the run-up to the conclave, looking for morsels of deeper interest for you amongst the swirls of speculation:
Philippines
There was much excitement in the Philippines about the possibility of an Asian Pope, with Cardinal Tagle considered one of the papabile – the frontrunners with a real chance of being elected. “Is it time for the first modern-day Asian Pope?” asked the independent Filipino news site, Rappler.
In the midst of the media frenzy, Tagle found himself the target of various smear campaigns, including right-wing critics declaring videos of the Cardinal performing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ at Karaoke as ‘unchristian’.
More seriously, he was criticised by some for not speaking up enough during the brutal drug war unleashed by former President Rodrigo Duterte (now in detention in The Hague).
Rappler, which itself was attacked under Duterte’s presidency for documenting the drug war, leapt to Tagle’s defence noting that he kept an open line with the Duterte government, funded drug-rehabilitation projects, and joined protests. Just two months after Duterte started the drug war, Tagle condemned extrajudicial killings and other forms of murder in a public address on 28 August 2016.
His closest associates told Rappler that the cardinal often chose “a non-confrontational approach seeking to address morality rather than specific political figures”, preferring to use metaphors that condemned arrogant “kings” who resort to violence. In 2017, on the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 8 September, Tagle issued his strongest words against the drug war killings of then-president Rodrigo Duterte: “We cannot govern the nation by killing”.
As the conclave began in the Vatican, Rappler pointed out how different it was from earlier conclaves, noting the shift in the centre of gravity in the Roman Catholic church away from Europe and towards the Global South. A century ago, European dominance was reflected in the fact that over 90% of Cardinals were from Europe. As recently as 2013, the figure was 52% (broadly the same as it had been in 2005). By 2025, it was 39%. Fifteen countries represented in the college of Cardinals had not previously been represented: Haiti, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, Rwanda, Tonga, Malaysia, Sweden, Luxembourg, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Paraguay, South Sudan and Serbia.
But one of the most fascinating articles run by Rappler in its extensive coverage was an opinion piece by a Filipino researcher living outside the country about what the fervent hope for Tagle’s elevation says about the personality politics in the country, and a national desire to be popular.
“Is our pursuit of a Filipino Pope a genuine expression of spiritual aspiration, or does it mask a reluctance to confront a dysfunctional political landscape and a seeming shying away from mature, critical social discourse?
Are we prepared for the global magnifying glass that comes with such a prominent position, a scrutiny that will inevitably dissect the contradictions between our devout Christianity and Catholicism and our often flawed political and social realities?”
After the election was over, Rappler streamed a news conference in the Vatican with the three Cardinals from the Philippines.
Italy
As the host of the conclave, and as a country which has produced more Popes than any other (but not since 1978), there was inevitably huge interest in the papal election – and the hope of an Italian pope, whether conservative or not, with three candidates in the frame.
Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage in Italian, Translator has picked out three articles which give something more.
First, an article by Renato Gabrieli for Open, a news website supporting young Italian journalists, about Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State since 2013 and considered a quasi-automatic papabile for that reason.
But, reading between the lines, Gabrieli’s article pointed to two additional – highly indirect – indications of Parolin’s positioning as a conventional, moderating force, and his chances.
One was a rumour according to which Cardinal Beniamino Stella, seen as a major sponsor of Parolin and hailing from the same Italian region of Veneto, had criticised some of Pope Francis’s unorthodox policies, in particular that of having a nun elected in a dicastero that has jurisdiction on (male) bishops. To those well-versed in Vatican affairs the message was: such things won’t happen under Parolin’s papacy.
The other was an article by Infovaticana. In the past, this online publication, quite popular in the Spanish-speaking blogosphere, was very critical of Parolin, himself a fierce opponent of the reintroduction of mass said in Latin. Now, they are not ashamed to call Parolin “the lesser evil”.
Second, for the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, the transcript of a wide-ranging conversation in February (that is, before the death of Pope Francis) between editor Matteo Matzuzzi and Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. The article is entitled ‘Alla fine di un mondo’ [At The End of a World], in reference to the apocalyptic situation in Gaza (where there is a small Catholic community which has lost everything) and the challenges of reaching back to the world before. “Everyone is stopped”, Pizzaballa says at one point, “everyone is locked in his own religious narrative”.
The article is full of interest. At one point there is a discussion of aligning the date of Easter between the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity, a live issue in the diocese covered by Pizzaballa (which covers Palestine, Jordan, Israel and Cyprus), where both traditions co-exist, sometimes within one family. But there are problems. “Moscow will never get along with Rome on the date of Easter”, he notes, “but if Moscow and Rome did find an agreement, would the Protestants or the evangelical churches follow?”.
The experience of being a Catholic leader in the Middle East can inform the church in Europe, Pizzaballa says. “We have always been a minority church”, he notes: “This may seem like a drama to you, we are used to it.”
More broadly, however, he agrees with the notion that the world is now entering a “post-secular” phase. But Pizzaballa refuses re-entrenchment behind positions and rituals that have come to feel anachronistic. Central to his idea of Christianity is the idea of faith as an experience lived both as community and testimony: “In order to be convincing, one has to first be convinced himself”.
Third, a profile in Corriere di Bologna of the local archbishop Matteo Maria Zuppi, seen by some as “an Italian Bergoglio” (in reference to Pope Francis). Termed a “prete di strada e di altare” (literally a “priest of the streets and the altar”) as per a definition by theologian Vito Mancuso, Zuppi has dedicated his life to helping and living in close contact with the poor. In 2017, when Pope Francis paid him first official visit, he made a point to spend their time at a local migrants’ centre.
At the same time, Zuppi stands out for his diplomatic talents. It was him who Francis appointed to negotiate with Russia when the latter was (and still is) forcibly abducting Ukrainian children from their families in the attempt to Russify them.
This mix of Franciscan love of the poor and political nous makes Zuppi the perfect successor to Francis – the one who could more convincingly spearhead his project of a new Catholic church, closer to the wretched of the earth and less engaged in rearguard battles and theological disputes. Ironically, that may have made his election less likely. Favourites rarely make it through a conclave.
As author Claudia Baccarani concludes, there is a reason why the phrase “chi entra Papa, esce cardinale” [he who enters as a Pope, exits as a Cardinal] has become proverbial.
Democratic Republic of Congo
“On the streets of Kinshasa people can’t stop talking about the possibility of Cardinal Ambongo becoming Pope”, reported Patrick Ilunga, Kinshasa correspondent for The East African newspaper, ahead of the election of the new Pope.
Alongside Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah and Ghanian Cardinal Peter Kodak Appiah Turkson, Ambongo had been seen as the “voice of Africa” in the conclave. But, as the article also noted, he’s a controversial figure at home. (Before the conclave began, there were rumours in Kinshasa – soon debunked as fake news – that the Vatican had already rejected his candidacy for being “too political, rather than a theologian”.)
Ambongo’s sermons have often been taken as activist, and oppositional to the regime of President Félix Tshisekedi, a relationship described in the article as “frosty and marked by mistrust”. In April 2024, the Attorney General requested a judicial file be opened against Ambongo, prompting a collective public protest from the country’s bishops. In his Christmas message last year, he accused the nation’s leaders of failing the people.
“We note that our country is today in a comatose state, we note that those who come from outside can afford to play with the Congolese nation because the main cause of our misfortune, the main cause of the lack of peace in our country is not people from outside, is not foreigners, it is not the evil Rwanda; it is first and foremost us Congolese. Our irresponsibility has led us to take actions that are not conducive to peace in our country.”
Beyond what now happens in Kinshasa, Leo XIV will need to deal with the decision made by his predecessor to push for the beatification of former Belgian King Baudouin, hugely controversial in the DRC for his role in the country’s bloody decolonisation in 1960 and his attempt to rhetorically cover up the brutal violence of Belgian rule under his nineteenth century predecessor Leopold II (under colonial rule, Kinshasa was called Léopoldville).
Baudouin reigned from 1951 to 1993. Belgium’s rapid, bloody and self-serving retreat from colonial rule opened the way to the country becoming a plaything in the Cold War, while Brussels tried to manipulate the situation to maintain its own economic interests. The assassination of the DRC’s first post-independence leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 is widely seen as a national disaster.
Ambongo has called the matter a “black mark” against the possibility of Baudouin’s ultimate beatification: “we’re going to look into the past”.
The following members of the Translator team contributed to this multi-Dispatch: CE, ML, ZN, TMH, BS, NH.