How Will We Know Whether the Holy Spirit Has Chosen the Pope?

          The Pope Holds the Keys of Heaven Given to Peter by Jesus (Matthew 16:19)

This morning in Rome 133 cardinals celebrated Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, where they prayed for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in selecting the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, a successor to Pope Francis.  They then entered the Sistine Chapel, and the doors were closed and locked.  They will have a series of votes until the new pope receives two-thirds of the vote.

As I have argued previously, the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by revealing the one true church for all believers.  This shows that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  There has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  This confirms Locke's argument that since "every church is orthodox to itself," government must practice religious toleration, so that every church is a voluntary association that cannot rightly employ force in compelling belief in its orthodoxy.

Isn't it obvious that the voting of the papal conclave will be decided not by the Holy Spirit but by Church politics?  On the one side are the liberals (or progressives) who want to continue the left-wing Catholicism of Francis.  On the other side are the conservatives (or traditionalists) who want to revive the traditionalism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  In the middle are the centrists (or moderates), who will probably decide the election.  

This confirms Locke's claim that not just "every church is orthodox to itself," but even "every man is orthodox to himself," so that even within the Catholic Church, the conservative Catholics think themselves more orthodox than the liberal Catholics.  Religious pluralism is manifest within every church.

You can see this illustrated in a essay posted yesterday at the First Things website by Father Raymond de Souza.  He asks: "Does a conclave elect the man the Holy Spirit desires to lead the Church?"  His answer: "History teaches that sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't."  He agrees with what then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) said in 1997 when asked 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.  There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked.

But notice that our recognition of the "many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked" is simply a matter of our human judgment.

De Souza says: "The Holy Spirit does not get a vote in the conclave.  The cardinals elect the pope, and no one else.  The more apt question then is whether this particular conclave is likely to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit, knowing of course that even Balaam's ass can speak should God so will it (Num. 22:21-35)."  He then compares the conclaves of 1978 and 2025.

In 1978, there were actually two conclaves.  The first one selected Pope John Paul I.  The second Pope John Paul II.  De Souza explains:

It is evident now that the second John Paul was God's choice, but that the cardinals could not initially see their way to electing a fifty-eight-year-old non-Italian, so they first got it not exactly wrong, but not exactly right either, electing Cardinal Albino Luciani.  Then the Holy Spirit did cast his vote, and Blessed John Paul I was dead thirty-three days later.

But how does de Souza know that the Holy Spirit cast his vote by killing John Paul I so that John Paul II could be chosen?  De Souza thinks he knows that because he is a conservative Catholic who believes that Pope John Paul II became the great advocate of conservative Catholic orthodoxy, and therefore he believes that the Holy Spirit correctly identified John Paul II as orthodox.

In the rest of his essay, de Souza says that the conclave of 2025 will not be as good an instrument of the Holy Spirit as the twin conclaves of 1978 because so many of the cardinals in 2025 are liberals appointed by the liberal Pope Francis.

Nevertheless, de Souza says he will be confident that the Holy Spirit has guided this 2025 conclave in choosing the right man if they select de Souza's favorite conservative Catholic candidate--Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Recently, in an interview with the London Times, another conservative Catholic--German Cardinal Gerhard Muller--said that if the cardinals choose a liberal pope like Francis rather than a conservative orthodox pope, the Catholic Church is likely to split into two.  He explained that Catholics are not obligated to follow a pope who is not orthodox:  "No Catholic is obliged to obey doctrine that is wrong.  Catholicism is not about blindly obeying the Pope without respecting holy scriptures, tradition, and the doctrine of the Church."

These conservative Catholics know what kind of man the Holy Spirit wants to defend Catholic orthodoxy because "everyman is orthodox to himself."

If Cardinal Muller is right, and the selection of a liberal pope creates a schism in the Catholic Church, this will just add one more to the long list of hundreds of schisms in Christianity over the past two thousand years.

That's what I mean by the failure of the Holy Spirit to overcome the natural human propensity to religious pluralism.

In John 17, in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest, Jesus prayed to God that all believers would be as one, that they would come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of Revelation by showing their agreement about that Revelation.  But when the Holy Spirit fails to convey God's Revelation of the true Apostolic Successor to Christ as the head of the True Church, that creates doubt about the truth of Revelation.