With days to go, cardinals set to scrutinize ‘front-runners’
Parolin and Tagle come under the microscope. Will their chances survive?
With just a few days before the cardinal electors enter the Sistine Chapel to elect a pope, the conventional wisdom is that the next pope will likely be elected from among a pool of a few apparent front-runners, and probably fast.
By conventional wisdom, at the top of the heap are Cardinals Pietro Parolin and Luis Tagle, both Curial officials who are seen as known commodities — and thus steady hands at the tiller — by the far-flung members of the College of Cardinals.
But some of The Pillar’s sources close to the general congregations of cardinals say that cardinals at all stops of the body’s theological spectrum are feeling uncertain about how they’ll cast their initial votes, and the race remains more open than most media accounts would frame it.
In short, by most accounts, neither Parolin nor Tagle has shown enough leadership since the death of Pope Francis to lock up an early round election — even if one or both starts out strong in the first round of voting Wednesday.
Instead, there are probably five or six cardinals who will garner early support, including the Hungarian Cardinal Peter Erdö and the emerging support for American Cardinal Robert Prevost, who reportedly now includes the influential Honduran Cardinal Óscar Maradiaga among his supporters — with Maradiaga already widely credited with engineering Francis’ 2013 election, some say his support for Prevost reveals something about the cardinal himself, and suggests he might be touted as the real continuity candidate after the Francis papacy.
But in recent days, some cardinals have told The Pillar that the embarrassment of financial and sexual scandals during the Francis papacy weighs heavily on the minds of many cardinal electors — and that among their most pressing concerns is to be sure that man elected to be pontiff does not bring to the apostolic palace the sort of baggage that could become a source of scandal from the beginning of his papacy.
In other words, in the days remaining before the conclave, cardinals will be “kicking the tires” on the prospects of a Parolin or Tagle papacy — and according to Vatican officials and other sources close to the process, the issues under discussion might well to stall the momentum of the putative papal pacesetters.
Three days ahead of the conclave, the question now is clear: will Parolin and Tagle survive the microscope?