Commentary: How Catholics and Latter-day Saints see God’s hand when picking popes and prophets

Russian scholar Alexander Zinoviev coined the word “Kremlinology,” a term that came to mean intense scrutiny of the personalities and factions in high Soviet leadership, an attempt to predict policies and deduce why any given decision might have happened.

The death of a pope sparks a sort of Vaticanology, a breathless scramble to catalog and rank what journalists have come to call the “papabile,” an Italian expression for potential popes in waiting. Most are cardinals, the few hundred highest leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. A conclave of all cardinals below age 80 elect the new pope, and questions abound. Might the cardinals want a prelate from the Global South? An elderly caretaker or a young reformer? What about the influence of the Curia, the Vatican’s powerful bureaucracy?

On April 21, the day Pope Francis died, some Italian Vaticanologists launched an online game called “Fantapapa,” or “Fantasy Pope,” in which players select and rank cardinals they believe are most likely to be elected pope. The Catholic News Agency reported that around $25 million was wagered on the outcome of the 2025 conclave to replace Francis.

Invariably, most of these predictions turn out to be wrong. Vaticanologists ranked neither Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis, nor Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, in the top tier of papabile when the conclave began to vote.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are familiar with what we might call TempleSquareology, a similar bustling of rumor and speculation surrounding that faith’s leadership. The church president and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles immediately beneath him serve for life. Upon an apostle‘s death, the church president selects a replacement. When the president dies, the longest-serving apostle succeeds him.

This system fosters a great deal of conjecture about the health of these authorities, about factions within the quorum, and about the various factors that might influence a president’s choice of new apostles. Latter-day Saints have designed makeshift mortality tables to project the likelihood that any given apostle might become church president, and whenever there is a vacancy in the Quorum of the Twelve, new stories, podcasts and blogs speculate about which qualifications might lead a man to be selected and which names seem the most probable.

In both churches, all of these offices are restricted to men. But there are other similarities having to do with how each faith understands the work of God in the world.

Finding God’s will

There’s a cliche that runs something like this: The Catholic Church teaches that the pope is infallible, but no Catholics actually believe he is. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that its president is not infallible, but every faithful Latter-day Saint believes he is.

As with most cliches, there are errors and a fair amount of truth in the two statements. The most interesting part is that they get to the balance of authority between a single charismatic figure — which each church sustains — and a system of councils, which each church also sustains.

In short, Catholics believe that the pope can, in certain circumstances, speak for God. But they also believe that God’s will manifests itself through the messy processes of councils, deliberation and voting.

Latter-day Saints believe that God will, in certain circumstances, speak through their church president. But they also believe that God’s will can be made manifest through the less-dramatic processes of consideration and deliberation that result in the calling of new apostles.

Vaticanology


Let’s stipulate that there can be something morbid and rather inhumane at work when these “ologies” kick into a frenzy of forecasting that surrounds the potential and actual deaths of leaders. And especially when betting enters the picture. The gamification of the questions of succession obscures the humanity involved.

Conclaves are ready made for Vaticanology. The election process lends itself to betting, calculation and strategizing, which can generate adrenaline rushes familiar to anyone who likes blackjack or poker. This is what political journalists derisively call “horse race” coverage — a fixation on who’s winning or losing that ignores the consequences of elections and the policies, rather than personalities, of candidates.

We also all saw the flip side of this sort of participation on television last week. The cardinals huddled in the Sistine Chapel. At the same time, crowds of the faithful gathered outside, praying and cheering. A conclave fosters what Catholics call synodality — a vision of a collaborative church; a church in which the laity are active, not passive, and exerting influence of their own in collaboration with the clergy.

Francis believed that the papacy suffered from a hangover inflicted by the Middle Ages, a time when the pope was essentially a monarch who could command armies and was honored like a king.

He tried to reinvigorate a parallel, more synodal, source of authority in the church — its long tradition of councils, which Catholic canon law states are equally as capable as the pope of promulgating true doctrine and channeling the will of the Holy Spirit. He also tried to bring laity more into church leadership, involving them in liturgy.

The conclave itself is a council. The laity gather around it. And Leo XIV’s first Mass indicates synodality’s influence — two women read scripture as part of the ceremony, something unthinkable a generation or two ago.

TempleSquareology

The Latter-day Saint system of selecting new leaders bears the virtues of simplicity and clarity. But it has also fostered centralization in administration and culture.

In the scripture he produced and canonized, founder Joseph Smith defined his own office as that of a “president.” Colloquially, he and his followers used the term “prophet” as well, and since the mid-20th century, “prophet” has become the de facto title of the faith’s leader.

That word has also come to signify a charismatic, romantic, individualist form of leadership that characterizes TempleSquareology. Observers consistently try to deduce the preferences, style and beliefs of this single figure. And the structure of prophetic succession has accelerated that process.

And yet, Joseph Smith also created high councils and quorums, and sought to devolve administrative authority from himself to such organizations — even to the point of establishing his own leadership in a “presidency” of three men. Throughout much of his later career, the late apostle M. Russell Ballard stressed councils, giving a number of speeches encouraging Latter-day Saints to recognize their promise and even publishing a book on the subject. He sounds rather, well, synodal.

“Great spiritual power and inspired direction,” Ballard argued, “…come from properly conducted family, ward and stake councils.”

In both faiths, then, centralized leadership exists in tandem and sometimes tension with a wider vision of leadership, and more: a broader vision of how God speaks to humanity. Conclaves and General Conferences might point us less to a fixation on personalities and more to the possibilities of community, organization and power.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2024’s “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian,” 2023’s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012’s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”