Where in the world do popes come from?

Papal homelands, by the numbers.

One hundred and thirty three cardinals are expected on Wednesday to walk into the Sistine Chapel. Once 89 of them agree on the next Bishop of Rome, one will walk out a pope, and the other 132 will exit as cardinals.

Was Pope Gelasius I an African? It’s hard to say.

Pope Francis has appointed cardinals from all over the world, giving the Church the most geographically diverse group of cardinals.

But what country will see one of its native sons step out on the balcony to greet the Church as the next pope? Will the Church see a return to Italian-born pontiffs, after 47 years of popes from other parts of the world?

Only time will tell — but looking at the history of papal geography, The Pillar found some fascinating trends worth noting, in the lead up to 2025’s conclave.

Here’s a look at the numbers.

A lot of speculation centers around whether the next pope will be Italian. It’s not hard to see why: of the 266 popes from St Peter through Francis, 212 were born in Italy.

How long without an Italian?

That the Church has seen three popes in a row who were not born in Italy is historically unusual.

In fact, during the entire history of the Church, there have only been two non-Italian streaks longer than that of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.

The longest and most famous non-Italian period of the papacy was the Avignon Papacy in the fourteenth century.

King Philip IV of France had been in an extended conflict with Pope Boniface VIII: the pope excommunicated Philip and the king retaliated by having his soldiers seize and imprison the pope, who died a month later.

(Whether the imprisonment and death were cause-and-effect was disputed even at the time, but it seems fair to say that France and the papacy were distinctly in conflict with each other.)

After another Italian pope, Benedict XI, lasted less than year, before King Philip was able to take advantage of a deadlocked conclave to pressure the cardinals to elect the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who became Clement V in 1305.

Clement moved the papal court to the city of Avignon in the south of modern France.

The rest of the Church did not take particularly well to this move. The period was sometimes called the "Babylonian captivity" of the papacy, by Catholics who believed that the successor of Peter belonged in Rome.

But Clement was the first of seven popes, whose reigns spanned 74 years, who were born in France.

The pontiffs spent most of those 74 years in Avignon, until Pope Gregory XI, the last of that French streak, moved his court back to Rome in 1376, and was succeeded by Urban VI, who had been born in Naples.

But well before the Avignon affair, there was an earlier period with five non-Italian popes in a row.

In 1048, the Bavarian-born Poppo von Brixen — bishop of the diocese of Brixen in the Tyrol region of northern Italy — was elected pope and took the name Damasus II. He died later that same year, but was succeeded by a Frenchman, another German, and then two more Frenchmen, before another Italian was elected pope in September 1061.

Because of the short reigns of everyone involved, that eleventh century non-Italian period lasted only 13 years, though it included five popes not born in Italy.

On the flip side, there have been some very long stretches of Church history in which all of the popes have been Italian, and the Church is still within living memory of the very longest such stretch in ecclesiastical history.

From the death of Hadrian VI (born in what is now the Netherlands) in 1523 to the death of John Paul I in 1978, there was a 455-year stretch in which only Italians were elected to the chair of St. Peter.

That was by far the longest all-Italian run in Church history. But there are two other very long ones.

The second longest all-Italian set of papacies began in 314, when Pope St. Miltiades, born in the Roman province of Africa, mostly in modern day Tunisia, died.

Militades was succeeded by Italian-born Pope St. Sylvester I. For 290 years, from 314 to the death of Gregory I in 604, every pope whose birthplace is known was of Italian origin.

Some of the popes during that era are men about whom history knows very little. And in three cases — Pope St. Mark, Pope Liberius, and Pope St. Boniface I — historians have no idea of a birthplace. But since all three were clergy serving in the Diocese of Rome before being chosen as pope, it’s likely that they too were Italian.

The third longest all-Italian period ran from 741, when the Syrian-born Pope St. Gregory III died, until 996, when the German-born Gregory V was elected.

Those three all-Italian periods, during very different parts of Church and world history, suggest there have been shifts in how the papacy sits within world affairs over time.

And as The Pillar looked at the birthplaces of the popes throughout history, there were indeed some interesting patterns — which could say something about the future of the papacy.

The seven ages of the papacy

From the time of St. Peter until just after the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the papacy drew men from across Mediterranean world. Italy is the most represented: 20 out of the 28 popes with known birthplaces during that period were born within the bounds of modern Italy.

It’s also interesting to note that in an era in which long-distance travel by water was often easier than by land, popes came from a “shores of the Mediterranean” set of papal homelands.

That was also an era in which historical records are pretty scanty. There are five popes for whom there is no recorded birth place: Evaristus, Telesphorus, Callistus, Anterus, and Dionysius

After the Council of Nicea and the establishment of Constantinople as the second capital of the Roman Empire by Contantine, the papacy went through a more local phase, during the late Empire and the Kingdom of Italy.

In 476 the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustus, was deposed. Odoacer, the leader of the Goths, became King of Italy. Odoacer and the Goths followed the Arian heresy, which put limits on the papacy’s political power.

All 22 popes during that period whose birthplaces are known were born in Italy, and it’s likely that the three whose birth places were not recorded were Italian as well.

From 535 to 554 A.D. the Emperor Justinian waged the Gothic Wars up-and-down the Italian peninsula, wrecking widespread destruction but regaining imperial control over Italy for a time. This also served to bring the See of Rome back into closer contact with the wider Byzantine Roman world. Sometimes, perhaps, the contact was a little closer than the papacy would have liked, as during some of that period the selection of a pope required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor.

The result was that again there were a number of popes from the wider Mediterranean world, including one from modern day Croatia, three from Greece, four from Syria, and Theodore I, who was born in Jerusalem itself.

However, as the Byzantine rulers came increasingly under the sway of the Iconoclasm heresy and the Empire began to shrink in the face of the rapid expansion of Islam, Rome’s connections with the East began to diminish again as the 700s drew on.

As the papacy’s connection with the Byzantine Emperors waned, the influence of the Frankish kingdom increased. In 756, the Frankish King Pepin the Short made the Donation of Pepin, giving the pope direct political control of several areas of Italy, including the area around Rome and the island of Sicily and Sardinia.

In 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the emperor of the Western Roman Empire. By that point, the political power supporting the papacy was no longer from across the Mediterranean, but rather from across the Alps, a reorientation towards northern and western Europe.

However, throughout that period — during which the kings of what would become Germany and France were becoming the protectors fo the papacy — the popes were all from Italy. And as the 800s moved into the 900s, the papacy became enmeshed in the most corrupt kind of aristocratic Roman politics.

The period from Pope Formosus, whose five year pontificate from 891 to 896 was notoriously followed by his posthumous trail in the Cadaver Synod of 897, to John XII (955 to 965) has been called the Saeculum obscurum — the Dark Age — or more colorfully, the “Pornocracy”, because of the claim that many of the popes of that era were controlled by their mistresses.

As the Church entered the second millenium, the major powers interacting with the papacy were primarily in northern Europe. The corrupt infighting of the Saeculum obscurum was first replaced with candidates supported by King Otto of Germany, who took a robust approach to influencing the conclave, mostly by besieging Rome when his candidate was not initially selected.

Italy still produced the majority of the popes during the medieval period; 71% of the 89 popes elected from 965 to 1534 were born in Italy. But that period also saw the highest percentage of non-Italian popes until the modern era.

But the international phase of the medieval papacy came to an end with the shattering of Western Christendom in the Reformation.

The Italian-born Pope Paul III called the Council of Trent to formulate the Church’s response to Protestantism. While other countries which had contributed many medieval popes remained Catholic, it was only Italians who were elected to the papacy as the Church struggled through first the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, and then the secularizing forces of the Enlightenment and the rise of nationalism.

Even as the College of Cardinals became much more international after World War II, the papacy continued to be occupied by Italians.

Pope John XXIII self consciously sought a new relationship with the modern world as he called the Vatican II council, and so his election makes a reasonable starting point for the modern papacy.

John XXII and his two immediate successors were Italians, but since 1978 we have had three popes elected from three different countries: Poland, Germany, and Argentina.

With Italians now making up only 14% of voting-age cardinals, even if they make up a larger percentage of frequently talked-about papabile, it’s unclear where the non-Italian streak will continue.

But the mere fact that half of the popes in this modern period have been non-Italian makes a significant change relative to other periods in Church history.

How many African popes?

Africa is among the most vibrant areas of the Church today, one where the Catholic population is rising despite active persecution in several countries, and where Mass attendance is reported to be at the highest rates in the world.

The continent’s bishops and cardinals have also taken on a new prominence in the Church in recent decades. The Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar formed the central resistance to the declaration, Fiducia supplicans, and Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo — the president of that Symposium of Episcopal Conferences — is considered to be among the papabile in this year’s conclave.

As pundits ask whether it is “time for an African pope,” people often ask whether a new pope from Africa would be the first.

At least two popes — Pope St. Victor I and Pope St. Miltiades — were born in in the Roman Province of Africa, a region that encompassed parts of modern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

The exact place of their birth is not known. In order to place those popes on a modern map, we assigned them to Tunisia — home to Carthage, which by the Imperial period had become a major Roman city.

One additional pope is sometimes listed as African, Gelasius I.

But The Pillar’s research came short of concluding that definitively.

In a letter to Emperor Anastasius, Gelasius described himself as Romanus natus — Roman born.

In the Liber Pontificalis, an early history of the popes, Gelasius is described as Afer — African.

The combination of these two may indicate that Gelasius was born in Rome but of African ancestry. Or it may mean that he was born in Africa but was born a Roman citizen.

At the time of St. Augustine of Hippo (born in North Africa and Bishop of Hippo Regius on the Mediterranean coast of modern Algeria) North Africa was thoroughly integrated into the Roman world.

By the time Gelesius was elected pope, 62 years after the death of St. Augustine, North Africa had been ruled by the Vandals for more than 50 years, the last of the Roman emperors had been deposed, and travel around the western Mediterranean had decreased significantly.

It’s certainly possible that Gelasius I was born in Africa, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

Still, with Africa a larger and more important part of the Church now than at any point since patristic age, it seems likely that even 2025 is not the conclave which elects an African-born cardinal for th first time in more than 1,500 years. But that day is probably not too far off.

Throughout Church history, the geography of the popes has reflected the parts of the world which are most active in the life of the Church and most closely in contact with Rome. Today, that circle is geographically wider than ever, with 69 different countries represented among the cardinals — which makes the sphere for potential popes wider than at any other time in Church history.