Election of the Day: Vatican City

In the mid-19th century, the Papal States–those portions of Italy under direct political control of the Catholic Church–made up roughly a third of the future Italian State’s territory. Political control of much of central Italy by the Catholic church, at the time, was both a tradition dating back a thousand years, and a very unstable arrangement. There were signs of that instability in the upheavals of 1848, in which Romans rose up against the Church and declared a Republic; this was quickly reversed and Papal order reinstated, thanks to French military aid. Less significant but not trivial uprisings in northern cities such as Bologna, Ravenna, and Ferrara, and well as Ancona and Umbria, did not produce significant political changes or reforms immediately, but portended trouble for this increasingly anachronistic political arrangement.

While Guiseppe Mazzini, the utopian idealist of Italian unification, was busy with the short-lived Roman Republic in 1848, a more practical and politically powerful vision of unification was brewing in Turin, the center of the House of Savoy’s Kingdom of Sardinia (encompassing modern-day Piedmont, the Island of Sardinia, as well as Nice and a few other border regions of modern-day France). Mazzini had a vision, but King Victor Emmanuel II and his Prime Minister, Count Cavour, had a plan. The political and military weakness of the Papal States were exposed in the second war of Italian Unification, in 1859, when most of them were lost to Savoy’s expansionist project. The primary antagonist of forces of the House of Savoy in that war was the Austro-Hungarian empire, who lost Lombardy and other Northeastern Italian regions. But a number of important territorial gains took place outside of areas of Hapsburg control. Smaller Duchies (Tuscany, Modena, Parma) signed on to the unification project with varying degrees of enthusiasm. (They’d cling to Venice for a few more years.) But many of the cities of the Northern portion of the Papal states, most notably Bologna, really did view the Sardinian forces as liberators. Bologna, a city long associated with intellectuals, artists, free thinkers, was a hotbed of ideological currents that ran against Rome: liberalism, socialism, Italian nationalism, and anticlericalism were broadly popular and adherents to any and all of them saw a better future with a modern liberal-democratic nation-state than with a reactionary theocracy. It’s perhaps an oversimplification to say the invaders were welcomed with open arms, but not by much. In 1859 and 1860, The Papal States lost around 70% of their population and territory.

Rome, the center of Catholic power, was another matter. But after 1860, Rome could only hold off the newly unified irredentist regime to their North with the help of the French. France had agreed to aid the project of Italian unification in 1859 by withdrawing military support to Austria, in exchange for Western territorial concessions (this is when Nice became a French city, not an Italian one). But Paris wouldn’t agree to abandon Rome, in part for domestic political reasons. (It would make reactionary Catholics angry, and France had a bunch of those.) The Italian project marched on through the 1860’s, taking Venice mid-decade and wearing down the Sicilian resistance throughout the decade. The risorgimento reached its completion, territorially at least, thanks to the Franco-Prussian War. This war presented a serious military challenge to Napolean III, but was important enough to him to pull troops from Rome and send them North. Once the French left, Rome was effectively defenseless, and the end of Catholic sovereign power came to an end, outside of 100 acres or so.

The Vatican City, the rump state of the papal states, could arguably be said to have been born in 1870, when they lost all practical control to Rome, but were left alone in their little corner of the city. Church elites were quite reluctant to grant any legitimacy to secular Italy, and did not recognize their control of Rome or maintain any relations with them. The Kingdom of Italy continued to leave them alone, but made no promises to continue to do so. Between 1870 and 1929, no Pope (there were four of them) left the 109 acres that comprise the Vatican City, on the theory that doing so would lend legitimacy to what was, by their lights, a fundamentally illegitimate state.

While a case could be made that 1870 was the true birth of the modern Vatican City, most would put that at 1929, the year of the Lateran treaty, which ended the near-60 year impasse. The Vatican City got official recognition as a sovereign state, a non-trivial pile of money (compensation for the loss of the Papal States territory), and a number changes to church-state relations in Italy, such as mandatory religious education, some say over civil marriage laws, and Catholicism as the official state religion. Italy, in return, got the opportunity for its leader (chap named Benny something or another) to pander to conservative Catholics, and an end to the Papal boycott of their country. And thus, the silliest country on a planet full of silly countries was formally born.

Beginning on Wednesday evening, this silly country will choose their next silly dictator. Except they won’t, because the citizenry of the country (around 400-500 citizens at any given time) and the electorate (all 133 Cardinals in the world under the age of 80, 108 of whom were appointed by Pope Francis) have a relatively modest overlap; probably no more than 10% of the electorate resides in the Vatican at the time of the vote. The procedure is shrouded in mystery but the basics are simple enough: the Cardinals vote (not from an official ballot, they just write down a name) and the votes are counted. This continues until one candidate gets 2/3 of the vote. There can be up to four votes a day. If 33 ballots have not produced a winner, voting then shifts to a top-2 runoff. Of course, “dictator-for-life of a tiny, silly country” is a fairly minor part of the job of the Pope, but it is part of it, so here we are.

Obviously “polling” in the conventional sense of the term can’t help us much here. But conventional wisdom (and the gambling community) seems to think there’s a few contenders whose chances are better than the rest. The best odds, at slightly better than a 1 in 4 chance, go to Pietro Parolin, Pope Francis’ Secretary of State:

It seems that everyone knows Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state under Francis. Cardinal Parolin will preside over the papal election and has emerged as a leading compromise candidate.

A quiet, plodding Italian with a famously inscrutable poker face, Cardinal Parolin, 70, is deeply cautious. But at a time of global upheaval, that is not necessarily a disqualifier. Even his backers grant that he lacks Francis’ charisma and global symbolism — but as the leader of the Vatican machinery for the past decade, he enacted Francis’ vision.

Cardinals have talked about Cardinal Parolin as someone who could have a steady, bureaucratic hand on the church’s wheel. His critics on the left question his past comments about same-sex marriage, which he called a “defeat for humanity,” and his lack of pastoral experience. His critics on the right criticize his role in the church’s efforts to make inroads in China, which has required negotiations with Communist leaders.

The odds are similar (slightly worse than one in four chance) for the man who would be the first Filipino pope:

Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle, 67, a liberal-leaning cardinal from the Philippines, has for years been deemed a front-runner to be pope and would be the first pope from Southeast Asia.

An ally of Francis who has worked at the Vatican in recent years, Cardinal Tagle has a highly personable approach in line with Francis’ attention to the poor and those in need in developing countries.

At the Vatican, Cardinal Tagle has overseen missionary work. Widely known by his nickname “Chito,” he is often called the “Asian Francis” for his ability to connect with the poor, his call for action against climate change and his criticism of the “harsh” stance adopted by some Catholic clerics toward gay people, divorced people and unwed mothers. 

There are three other contenders who are currently paying out at roughly 10-1: Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and another Francis ally; Pierbattista Pizzaballa, another Italian who was serving as the leader of the Church in Jerusalem on 10/7 and famously offered himself to be exchanged for one of the hostages, and the Hungarian Archbishop Peter Erdo, who is considered the best chance for those who want a return to Benedict (his reluctance to criticize Orban’s regime, even when they openly attacked Francis, frustrated many allies of Francis but enthused the rump Benedict faction). This could be over later today, or it could more than a week before we know who the next Pope is.