Possible Papal Posts

 

 

 Anti-papal Catholics

I've been talking about this for years now, and I was sure that I had written numerous posts on the subject, but it turns out that, other than one unfinished piece in the draft folder, apparently I never wrote anything down, which is a shame because it's a topic worth talking about.

Everyone knows about Catholic leaders in the far right...

"I mean it's kind of jaw-dropping," Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon told the BBC on Friday, speaking of Leo's election.

"It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he's had against American senior politicians," said Bannon, a hard-right Trump loyalist, practising Catholic and former altar boy.

... but I'm mainly interested in those at the bottom.
   
 If you were paying close attention, you might have spotted them before, but these anti-papal Catholics really became a thing during the first Trump Administration. They almost always had the same backstory. They got sucked into right-wing media's indoctrination process, initially attracted to what seemed a pro-Church message. Much as with secular evangelicals (whom we have discussed before), they came to define their faith on less and less spiritual terms. Under John Paul II, and even more importantly Benedict, there was little danger of cognitive dissonance. Opus Dei and Fox News are not at all strange bedfellows, but when the Jesuit-affiliated Francis took the office, the disconnect became obvious. And when the cult of personality formed around Trump, it became fairly common to see people who weren't just Catholic but who had built their entire identities around their religion openly choosing a purely secular (and often profane) political figure over their own Pope.

The "Trump effect"?

For close watchers of the Catholic Church, the election of a U.S. pope seemed impossible. The "Trump effect" on the U.S. and global order changed that, papal expert Massimo Faggioli told NPR.

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— NPR (@npr.org) May 9, 2025 at 12:25 PM

    It is unwise to draw inferences from an unequal data set of three, but in the course of a few days, we saw three striking examples of candidates perceived as anti-Trump figures winning elections they were favored to lose (or, in the case of Prevost, not even supposed to be in the running). In Canada and Australia, the ministers from the relatively pro-Trump parties who were expected to be the new prime ministers actually lost their seats. In the case of the conclave, this was a historically fast decision, suggesting that this was not a difficult choice for the College of Cardinals.

They did not see that coming

    One conclave story, mainly of interest to political scientists and statistics nerds (in other words, our readership), was how badly the prediction markets missed this. Prevost was a well-known figure in the Church, something of a protégé of Pope Francis, and a likely beneficiary of the previously mentioned pattern we’d seen in Canada and Australia. Though certainly a long shot, it was difficult to explain why he was showing up at less than half a percent in the betting markets, particularly given their historical tendency to greatly overvalue other long-shot candidates.

    This miss raises all sorts of interesting questions. One of the big arguments for wisdom-of-the-crowd-type approaches is that they can supposedly accurately assign weights to a range of information that would be difficult to incorporate into a traditional model. They should be able to do a reasonably good job even without having polling data. That doesn't seem to be the case here (they missed Francis too). How have prediction markets fared in other low-data, high-information situations?

Allison Morrow writing for CNN:

The conclave markets’ big miss this week reflects the limits of their predictive powers.

In sports betting, you’ve got thousands of data points about individual athletes, team stats going back decades and any number of informed opinions from professional commentators. Political winds can be volatile, but polling and voter data are practically endless at the national level.

In pope betting, the data are far more scarce.

“The papal conclave markets are one of the ones that you’d expect to be the least well-calibrated since they only get a data point every decade or two,” Eric Zitzewitz, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, told CNN. “And the process is much more opaque than almost any other political selection process… No tell-all memoirs, even well after the fact.”

Plenty of academics and journalists offered insights into who might be among the favorites based on their various CVs and reputations in the church. Pietro Parolin and Luis Antonio Tagle were among the favorites heading into the conclave on Wednesday. And, as election forecaster Nate Silver noted Friday, Parolin’s chances shot up as the white smoke emerged, “presumably on the assumption that the quick decision was good news for the frontrunners.”

Of course, the dynamics inside the Sistine Chapel were impossible for market participants to gauge from the outside. All any of us regular people could do was watch “Conclave” and, based on the movie, assume there’s plenty of drama and shifting allegiances.

Bottom line: Even in a highly liquid market, which crowd-wisdom theory holds should be more accurate, there are simply no tools to measure what Catholics believe is the spirit of God guiding the cardinals’ choice.

“The Holy Spirit is indeed a wily one,” Zitzewitz said.