Originally posted on 27 April 2025. Also posted on my Substack.

Since cardinals and conclaves are in the news at the moment….

How do you become a cardinal?

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, in principle, you don’t need to be a priest.

Back in history, so-called ‘lay cardinals’ were sometimes appointed. In spite of the name, however, lay cardinals were required to be members of the clergy, even if they were not ordained to the priesthood. The last lay cardinal was an ecclesiastical judge, Teodolfo Mertel, who took up office in 1858 and never rose above the level of deacon.

Since 1917, there has been a legal bar to non-priests being appointed as cardinals, although in the 1960s Pope Paul VI reportedly considered making an exception for the former Princeton theologian Jacques Maritain. There have been more recent suggestions from the liberal wing of the church that women could be appointed as cardinals, side-stepping the ban on women in the priesthood.

If you think you have what it takes, bear in mind that there is a high standard to meet. In 1586, Pope Sixtus V described the cardinals as “the brightest lights of the Church, the foundations of the temple of God, and the pillars of the Christian commonwealth”. To this day, the Code of Canon Law requires candidates to be “especially outstanding in doctrine, morals, piety, and prudence in action” (Canon 351). The previous Code, which was repealed in 1983, excluded illegitimate sons and men who had children (Canon 232.2).

It doesn’t do any harm to be Italian. The College of Cardinals has traditionally been dominated by Italians, and the first conclave in which the Italians were in the minority took place as recently as 1958. At present, 51 cardinals out of 252 are Italians, although this reduces to 17 out of 135 if we count only cardinals with voting rights. Either way, the Italians form the largest contingent of any country.

Why would I want the job?

It’s a prestigious role. You outrank everyone in the Catholic Church except the Pope. In secular life, you can lay claim to the traditional prerogative of cardinals to receive the same honours as royal princes (the term ‘Prince of the Church’ is still occasionally used to describe cardinals, although it originally had a wider meaning).

You are allowed to wear distinctive scarlet-coloured garments. Indeed, the ‘red hat’ is synonymous with the office of cardinal. This dress code dates from the 13th century. It looks nice, but it has a rather sinister significance. As Henrique Henriques wrote in his Summa Theologiae Moralis (1596):

Certain insignia of this rank were instituted by Pope Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons in the year 1243: that Cardinals might ride on horseback and make use of a red and purple galero or hat, as if they are ready to defend the faith with their blood and at the risk of their lives. They swear to defend the faith in this way when they are appointed….

In the former (1917) Code of Canon Law, there was a whole list of legal privileges conferred on cardinals (Canon 239.1). These included the right to be given the same honours as the local bishop wherever they travelled, various rights to carry out consecrations and blessings, and the right to celebrate Mass at sea. This list has now gone, although the current Code does provide that cardinals are exempt from the jurisdiction of their local bishop if they live outside Rome and outside their own diocese (Canon 357).

What are cardinals for?

The Code of Canon Law mentions two functions of cardinals (Canon 349). First, they “constitute a special college which provides for the election of the Roman Pontiff”. Second, they “assist the Roman Pontiff either collegially… or individually”. National churches in the Catholic world tend to be headed by a cardinal, while cardinals who are posted to Rome act as the equivalent of government ministers. Pope Sixtus V declared that, while the pope represents St Peter, the cardinals represent the other apostles. They are “like his eyes and ears and the most noble parts of the sacred head, and his foremost limbs, put in place by the Holy Spirit”.

The notional role of cardinals is much more mundane. They are, in theory, clergy of the diocese of Rome. To this day, each of them is appointed to serve a particular parish church in the city – or, in a few cases, to one of the ‘suburbicarian’ dioceses adjoining Rome. These appointments are purely nominal. The cardinals lost their final powers of governance over ‘their’ churches in Rome in 1969, and today they have no more than an honorary role. Indeed, since 1965 a small number of senior clerics of the Eastern Catholic Churches have been appointed as members of the College of Cardinals without being given even nominal appointments in Rome (the Patriarch of Antioch, Cardinal Ignace Gabriel I Tappouni, actually lost his titular Roman church when this reform was introduced).

The cardinals are divided into three subcategories: cardinal bishops, cardinal priests and cardinal deacons. These subcategories correspond with the titular positions that they are assigned in the diocese of Rome or the suburbicarian dioceses. For example, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, is a cardinal priest by virtue of being the nominal priest of the church of Saint Alphonus of Liguori on the Esquiline Hill.

In spite of the nomenclature, cardinal priests and cardinal deacons are almost always bishops. Since 1962, all new cardinals have been legally obliged to be consecrated as bishops if they do not have that status already (this rule applied to 12 serving cardinals when it was introduced). The requirement is occasionally relaxed for priests who are made cardinals for essentially honorary reasons – this happened, for example, with the eminent theologians Yves Congar (in 1994) and Avery Dulles (in 2001).

The College of Cardinals is led by a Dean, who is assigned the suburbicarian diocese of Ostia. The Dean used to be appointed by seniority from along the cardinal bishops, but today he is elected by the cardinal bishops, subject to the approval of the Pope. There is also a Sub-Dean. Neither has any executive authority.

The senior cardinal deacon has the job of announcing “Habemus Papam” to the world when the new pope is elected.

Limitations

Pope John VIII compared the cardinals to the 70 elders who assisted Moses in the Old Testament, and the number of cardinals was limited to 70 as late as 1917.

In 1971, cardinals over the age of 80 lost their rights to participate in conclaves. This restriction, which affected 25 cardinals at that time, caused some bad feeling.

In 1975, Paul VI decreed that the number of cardinals under 80 could not exceed 120, but this limit has repeatedly been ignored by popes when creating new cardinals. At present, there are 252 cardinals, 135 of whom are under 80.

History

Cardo is the Latin for ‘hinge’, and this has inspired a folk etymology to the effect that the original cardinals were ‘hingemen’ who acted as doorkeepers at Mass during the times of persecution under the Roman Empire.

The term ‘cardinal’ (cardinalis) was applied from the 400s onwards to members of the Roman clergy, as well as to clerics elsewhere in the Catholic world. The first non-Roman churchman to be assigned a titular church in Rome was Dietrich of Trier in 975, although he does not seem to have been regarded as a cardinal. The College of Cardinals started to meet as a single unit from the 1100s.

The style of address for a cardinal has been ‘your Eminence’ since 1630. Strictly speaking, cardinals are referred to as ‘John Cardinal Smith’ rather than ‘Cardinal John Smith’, although the latter form is in wide use.

Conclaves

Since 1159, the cardinals alone have had the right to elect the pope: as the nominal senior clergy of Rome, it lies with them to choose the Bishop of Rome. The new pontiff is invariably drawn from their ranks.

Papal elections were not always the monopoly of the cardinals. The common people of Rome were originally participants in the process. This was something of an embarrassment for later ecclesiastical writers, as we can see from this historical overview of papal elections written in 1905 (from José Calasanz Vives y Tutó, Compendium iuris canonici):

In the first ages of the Church, the Clergy and the people of Rome (some say the people were not involved) came together to elect the Pontiff, but, as is clear from history, the right always belonged to the Clergy. Subsequently, i.e. from the year 467, secular powers dared to interfere in the matter, to the extent that, for the sake of peace, a confirmation of the election was expected from the [Holy Roman] Emperor. The Church tolerated this for a certain time in order to prevent greater evils; at length, she recovered her liberty. At any event, from the year 1059 Nicholas II gave the power principally to the Cardinal Bishops, and Alexander III then gave it to all the Cardinals.The practice of the Pontiff being elected by the Cardinals is entirely fitting because:1. No-one can better judge the qualities of the man who is elected than the counsellors and assistants of the Roman Pontiff….2. In this way, schisms more rarely occur….During vacancies of the Apostolic See, it was the custom for several centuries for the monarchs of Austria, France and Spain to declare to the Cardinals assembled in Conclave that it would be unacceptable to them if a certain Cardinal were elected Pontiff…. This veto was commonly called the exclusiva, although in truth it did not exclude the person concerned. Indeed, the person excluded was often elected. It is therefore a very serious error to defend the exclusiva as if it were a right, or even a mere privilege. It was usurpatory in nature, and was never directly or indirectly approved by the Church.

The exclusiva was last used by Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria in 1903. While the veto carried no force in the eyes of church law, the emperor’s act is credited with dashing the prospects of Leo XIII’s most obvious successor, Cardinal Rampolla: he may have been too pro-French for Austrian tastes. Leo’s actual successor, Pius X, strictly forbade the use of the exclusiva and introduced a requirement for the cardinals to swear an oath prior to voting that they would not attempt to use it on behalf of their monarchs.

How a new pope is chosen

Until 1996, there were three ways by which the cardinals could choose a new pope: by acclamation, by scrutiny or by compromise.

Acclamation involved the cardinals as a body spontaneously hailing the successful candidate as being chosen by the Holy Spirit. It was very rarely used, the last known case being Innocent XI in 1676, but it sometimes comes up in fiction (as in Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman and Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons).

Scrutiny is the regular process of election. It continues until a candidate has obtained a two-thirds majority – a rule that dates from 1179. John Paul II ordered that a simple majority would suffice after 34 ballots had been carried out, but this would have allowed a majority faction to sit tight and install their candidate by default after the requisite number of ballots had been completed, so the older rule was restored by Benedict XVI. The ballot papers contain the formula “Eligo in summum pontificem” (“I elect as supreme pontiff”). This is now the only permitted method of selecting a pope.

Compromise was an elaborate procedure for use when a conclave was deadlocked. A process of this kind last seems to have been used in the fourteenth century.

At the start of the conclave, the participants are sworn to strict secrecy. In practice, conclaves leak like sieves. Various (inconsistent) accounts of voting figures for past conclaves can be found on Wikipedia.

It is well known that any male Catholic can be elected as pope, but the last non-cardinal to be elected was Urban VI in 1378. There have been rumours of non-cardinals receiving a small number of votes in recent conclaves: in 1958, Archbishop Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI) may have received a few votes, as allegedly did Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (the well-known ultra-traditionalist leader) in 1978. The election of an obscure layman to the papacy forms the plot of Frederick Rolfe’s bizarre novel Hadrian the Seventh.

Trivia

• The longest conclave in history ran from 1268 to 1271. The shortest, in 1503, lasted only 10 hours.

• Some liberal Catholics have suggested that the cardinals’ monopoly on electing popes should be ended and that other bishops, or representatives of priests and laypeople, should be included in the process. These calls go back at least to 1876 and an organisation called the Società cattolica italiana per la rivendicazione dei diritti spettanti al popolo cristiano ed in specie al popolo romano. This initiative was immediately condemned by the Vatican. The idea of reintroducing mass participation in papal elections was historically met with strong disapproval, particularly after the Reformation. St Robert Bellarmine, the leading theologian of the papacy, summed up why allowing democracy in the church was a bad idea (De Clericis, 1.7):

First, the common people are inexperienced, and they cannot, even if they greatly desire to, judge whether someone is suitable for priestly office or not…. For how, I ask, would businessmen, farmers, stonemasons and other tradesmen judge whether a person has the learning and prudence necessary in a bishop? Second, if the people had the right of election, the inevitable result would be that the rulers chosen for them would always be those whom the worse and more stupid of them wanted. For the majority would prevail, and more people in every state are bad than good, more stupid than wise…. Finally, popular election is obnoxious because it involves disturbances and subversion.

• It is sometimes said that at the conclaves of 1958 and/or 1963 the deeply conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri was initially elected, only to be immediately pressured into resigning. Siri was a hardline anticommunist, and it was reportedly feared that his election would lead to persecutions of Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. There is some evidence to support this theory, and the FBI apparently accepted it. In 1958, the rituals signalling that a pope had been elected were set in motion part-way through the conclave; then they suddenly stopped and the cardinals went quiet again. Siri himself refused to confirm or deny the rumours when interviewed by a journalist, although he did comment darkly that he could have written whole books about what had happened at conclaves. Nevertheless, we can safely dismiss the conspiracy theory that Siri secretly remained pope (as ‘Gregory XVII’) and founded his own papal line of succession that continues to this day.

• What if all the cardinals suddenly died? In previous ages, this might have resulted from a plague or war. In our own times, it might result from a terrorist attack. A number of theologians have discussed this question. The solutions offered mostly consist of variations on two themes: a new pope could be elected either by a council of all the world’s bishops or by the remaining clergy of the diocese of Rome (since the cardinals are the principal clergy of Rome).

• Popes used to go through a coronation ceremony after being elected. This last happened in 1963 with Paul VI. As the pope received the distinctive papal triple crown, he would be told:

Receive the tiara adorned with three crowns, and know that you are the father of princes and kings, the guide [rector] of the world, and the vicar on earth of our saviour Jesus Christ, to whom is honour and glory throughout all ages.