Cardinals finish pre-conclave meetings in Vatican day before voting for pope starts. The 133 cardinal electors will begin the process of choosing the new pope when the conclave begins in the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday afternoon and they cast their first vote.

Cardinals have wrapped up their pre-conclave meetings in the Vatican, trying to identify a possible new pontiff to follow Pope Francis who died on 21 April at the age of 88.

The 133 cardinal electors from 70 countries seem fundamentally united in insisting that the question before them isn’t so much whether the Catholic Church gets its first Asian or African pontiff or if he is a conservative or progressive. 

Rather, they say the primary task is to find a pope who can be both a pastor and a teacher and someone who can unite the church and preach peace.

“We need a superman!” said Cardinal William Seng Chye Goh, the 67-year-old archbishop of Singapore.

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It is a big task given the sexual abuse and financials scandals that have harmed the church’s reputation and secularising trends in many parts of the world that are turning people away from organised religion.

Add to that the Holy See’s dire financial state and often dysfunctional bureaucracy and the job of being pope in the 21st century seems a daunting one.

Of the 133 cardinals who will vote, Pope Francis named 108 of them but there is an element of uncertainty about the election since many of them didn’t know one another before last week.

That means they haven’t had much time to establish who among them is best suited to lead the 1.4 billion-strong church.

The cardinals held their last day of pre-conclave meetings on Tuesday, during which Pope Francis’ ring and his official seal were destroyed in one of the final formal rites of the transition of his pontificate to the next.

The cardinals will begin the process of choosing the new pope when the conclave begins in the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday afternoon and the cardinals cast their first vote.

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Assuming no candidate secures the necessary two-thirds majority, or 89 votes, the cardinals will retire for the day and return on Thursday.

They will have two ballots in the morning and then two in the afternoon, until a winner is found.

Asked what the priorities of the cardinal electors were, Goh told reporters the top issue was that the new pope must be able to spread the Catholic faith and “make the church relevant in today’s time. How to reach out to young people, how to show a face of love, joy and hope.”

A pope for the future

But beyond that, there are real-world geopolitical concerns to take into consideration.

The Catholic Church is growing in Africa and Asia, both in numbers of baptised faithful and vocations to the priesthood and women’s religious orders.

However, it is shrinking in traditionally Catholic strongholds of Europe, with empty churches and the faithful formally leaving the church in places like Germany, many citing the abuse scandals.

“Asia is ripe for evangelisation and the harvest of vocations,” said the Reverand Robert Reyes, who studied in the seminary with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Filipino cardinal considered a contender to be the first Asian pope.

But whether the incoming pope needs to reflect the new face of the Catholic Church and inspire the faithful in parts of the world where the momentum of growth is already underway is one of the questions the cardinals will inevitably deal with during the conclave.

Pope Francis was the first Latin American pontiff and the region still counts the majority of the world’s Catholics.

Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the retired archbishop of Mumbai, thinks the church needs to become more Asian, culturally and spiritually.

The “centre of gravity of the world is shifting toward Asia,” he said. “The Asian church has much to give to the world.”

At 80, Gracias isn’t able to participate in the conclave but India has four cardinal-electors and overall Asia has 23, making it the second-biggest voting bloc after Europe, which has 53.

One of the big geopolitical issues facing the cardinals is China and the estimated 12 million Catholics living there.

Under Pope Francis, the Vatican signed a controversial agreement with Beijing in 2018 governing the appointment of bishops, which many conservatives decried as a sell-out of the underground Chinese Catholics who had remained loyal to Rome during decades of communist persecution.

The Vatican defended that accord as the best deal it could get but it remains to be seen if Pope Francis’ successor will honour the policy.

The church in Africa

According to Vatican statistics, Catholics represent 3.3% of the population in Asia but those numbers are growing, especially in terms of seminarians, as they are in Africa, where Catholics represent about 20% of the population.

Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa and another cardinal who regularly features on lists of possible pope, said he is in Rome to elect a pontiff for all the world’s Catholics.

“I am not here for the Congo, I am not here for Africa, I am here for the universal church. That is our concern, the universal church,” he told reporters.

“When we are done, I will return to Kinshasa and I will put back on my archbishop of Kinshasa hat and the struggle continues.”