Divine Providence and the Papal Conclave

When I first con/reverted to Catholicism in high school, I naively thought that God chose the pope. After all, the Catholic Church is Christ’s Church, Christ has promised that he will lead it, and the pope is his vicar on earth.

As I grew in understanding about the Faith, I came to think that this is simply not true. A lot of bad things happen in Church history, including the election of bad popes. Surely these men were not those best suited for the job, and thus they must not have been chosen by God. With another conclave looming, this same sentiment is making the rounds on social media. In particular, I have seen the following 1997 quotation from Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger), answering the question of whether the Holy Spirit chooses the pope.

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope. . . . I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.

Yet, while God can perhaps be said to leave space for our freedom in some sense of that phrase, it is important to note that God’s providence extends infallibly over all things. God is the universal cause of all effects. There is nothing and can be nothing which is not the result of his will (even if he works through intermediary causes like cardinals). As such, St. Thomas Aquinas affirms that the will of God is the cause of all things.¹ Since the divine will is omnipotent, it never fails to bring about what God wills.² Since the divine will is simple, God never “changes his mind.”³ Therefore, all things are subject to God’s infallible providential plan.⁴

While this does not, of course, remove contingency from contingent things nor free will from free things, contingency and free will must be wrapped up into God’s infallible plan. If not, God’s providence will be fallible, and God would be said to rule the universe like a man operating a machine that often gets away from him or like a teacher trying, but often failing, to wrangle a classroom of rambunctious children. Men might need to have back-up plans in case their first plan fails, but there can be no failure with God, no divine Plan B. Accordingly, St. Augustine says:

For He is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills, not on account of His suffering what He wills not; for if that should befall Him, He would by no means be omnipotent.⁵

So how does this relate to a papal conclave? Well, in a very important sense, God does choose the next pope. The votes of the cardinal electors are real, created effects and therefore they must be the effects of the universal, simple, and omnipotent will of God. It cannot be the case that God is truly intending for the cardinals to elect Cardinal Q yet his intention fails, nor is that he is uninvolved with the actions that the cardinals take (since their actions are real things, and all things are governed by God).

This does not mean that God’s plan is always for the best man to receive the job. In a vacuum, we might expect that God would always will for the best candidate to be elected, but, as we have already mentioned, we know that the job has sometimes gone to bad men. The reason for this is that the individual parts of the world in which we live are not in a vacuum; they are all interrelated to each other. Accordingly, God often permits mistakes or less-than-ideal choices in order to bring about some other and higher good than the good of a great pope. Sometimes the Church needs to be humbled. Sometimes we might need to learn to pray harder for the Church in the future.

The cardinals, of course, ought to attempt to elect the best man. If they do not do so, and especially if they fail to do so on account of some moral failure, then they will depart from God’s justice, just as every sin is a departure from God’s justice. But this does not mean that they escape divine providence, for God sometimes permits us to fail for some greater good. Similarly, St. Augustine says:

Unbelievers act against the will of God when they do not believe his gospel, but they do not on that account defeat his will.⁶

And St. Thomas says:

Hence that which seems to depart from the divine will in one order, returns into it in another order; as does the sinner, who by sin falls away from the divine will as much as lies in him, yet falls back into the order of that will, when by its justice he is punished.⁷

God may not will a bad selection for its own sake, but he will permit it for the higher good of the Church and the world. A bad election, while a mistake for the cardinals, is not a mistake or a hiccup in God’s plan, for he intends (but does not cause) the mistake. Thus, even if Pope Alexander VI was a bad pope, he was not pope apart from or despite God’s providential plan. That papacy was, perhaps, a real scandal for the Church and brought about true evils, but it still had a role to play in bringing about some good (e.g. to remind the cardinals of the importance of their role as electors).

I think that this ought to give us hope. While it is far from a guarantee that the cardinals will choose the man best suited for the job, or even that they will make a good decision, nevertheless, we know that God’s plan will be fulfilled, and God works all things toward the good of those who love him (Rom 8:28).

We may get a great pope or we may get a bad one. Most likely, we will get something in between. But in any event, all shall be well. No matter who is elected, God has a plan that not even the cardinal electors can screw up.

1. ST I, q. 19, a. 4.

2. ST I, q. 19, a. 6.

3. ST I, q. 19, a. 7.

4. ST I, q. 103, a. 5 and a. 7, ScG Bk. 3, Ch. 64, and De Veritate, q. 5, a. 2.

5. City of God, Bk. 5, Ch. 9.

6. The Spirit and the Letter, 33. 58.

7. ST I, q. 19, a. 6.