As a Catholic who believes that betting on popes is the highest form of 'tempting fate', I wouldn't have bet on it. However, if I had known that there was a American under consideration... I would have giving him a 10% just because of the politics of American Catholicism right now.
Bluntly put, there's been a show down between the International Catholic organization, the American Bishops, and the American conservative Catholics, and the American liberal Catholics. And it's a 4 way show down right now, make no mistake.
For the church itself, reinforcing and bringing back into the fold the Liberal Catholics is a priority, given how that is the wing that has shrunk over the past two decades, and the international catholic organization is more and more ideologically in line with this branch of American Catholicism. But it's also the wing of 'lapsed Catholics', so it's the most finicky branch and then one that pushes hardest on the pain points for everyone.
The American Bishops are a lot more conservative on the whole than the international bishops, and they open their mouths and say things about immigration and the like that sound a awful lot like the gospel of prosperity or the Evangelicals church. This is and has been a huge pain point, but the international church hasn't put it's foot down hard because I believe there is fear of causing a split akin to the creation of the Anglican church by Henry the VIII. (FYI, this is why the Trump Pope picture played ESPECIALLY bad to Catholics. It's real easy to read that as "American Bishops, I could be your pope")
The conservative and liberal branches I feel I don't need to explain for the most part, as that part of the American experience is on full display 24/7, for better or worse. But the important part of this is a paradoxical issue of growth: Conservative Catholicism has been steady in it's participation, but it's not growing and it tries to make demands Catholicism as if it owns it, rather than serving the community. The Liberal branch gets the serving part and tend to be very chill towards the larger organization, but the liberals are flaky, lapsed, and tend towards complete disengagement.
In this environment, Pope Leo is the 'Secure America' pope.
1) His ties to Francis makes him a hit internationally, and his views are more of the same.
2) Being an American, he can make a pretty good neutral argument to both the conservative and liberal congregations.
3) As a American, he can also reach around the American Bishops, which lessens the risk of a Anglican style split and forces them (somewhat) to play ball with the rest of the world.
4) There is also a increase in church participation in a pope's country when they are elected, which means that the range and ideology of both an individual parish and the local leadership tends to widen as more people get involved.
With these details in mind the Church electing a American Pope makes sense,
but it's also a sign of how much concern they have for American Catholicism at the moment.
My first impression was that the election of an American pope is an attempt to get Americans to feel more connected to the church. That it is was outreach — an attempt to counteract American isolationism.
I question whether you're overgeneralizing about international bishops. Are American bishops more conservative than African bishops, for example? That has not been my observation. Each region seems to have its own tendencies, as opposed to.conservative Americans being at odds with a homogeneous liberal/moderate "international bishopship."
But if you take a look at my point number 2 on American Bishops you may realize the issue is not that the international Bishops are American Liberal,
but that American Bishops are American Conservative.
The core issues come down to Tithes, immigration, and expansion of the international church community. None of these issues are 'Liberal', and when I mentioned the Liberal Catholics as causing pain points it's because the American Liberal wing 'IS' liberal and 'does not' mesh with northern/southern debates on what I would call 'secondary culture issues' in the eyes of the church.
The liberal Catholics just *happen* to line up better on what is *important to the international church* *better*. They donate more to charity causes, they are more welcoming of immigrants the church sponsors, they are more likely to take a international bishop seriously instead of demanding 'someone without a accent', and they don't object to their funds being sent overseas to help fund a new church elsewhere.
I live in Italy, and I can tell that here, in the last week, Prevost was considered among the 4-5 most probable. In the last two days he was considered the 2nd most likely. And, after the first day of ballota, some newpaper considered Prevost the favorite n.1. I did bet on Prevost (in a local website) one week ago. Probably there was some bias in the US.
The Polymarket user Domer (who also predicted Mike Johnson as the "goldilocks candidate" for Speaker of the House when he was sitting around 4%) made $100k on this, and wrote an interesting thread on how: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1920612517631479984
Arguably, for the first time, we have an American world leader who is more important and influential than the US President. Or at the very least more palatable. I think his ability to outshine trump might be the outside helping hand this country needs right now to get out of the quagmire.
What’s even better than Pierbattista Pizzaballa was that his odds nearly overlapped with those for Matteo Zuppi. The Economist labeled the lines in the graph itself rather than creating a legend, so it appeared that one of the candidates was “Pizzaballa Zuppi”. I wondered if bettors were thinking that the conclave’s votes for pope would get mixed up with their lunch orders for an Italianized version of matzoh ball soup.
So far, the best thing about this is that it pushed Trump off the headlines. Trump’s gotta be wetting himself over this one, especially after his totally weird behavior prior to the announcement.
Evidently Prevost is considered a very persuasive and effective administrator, not authoritarian, and more likely to take a path similar to Pope Francis.
J D Vance, or whatever identity he’s currently choosing, ain’t no theologian.
Given the irritation expressed in On the Edge about people declaring predictions wrong, I'd expect a better analysis here.
The election of Robert Prevost should not be viewed as a 1.15% probability event (using Polymarket's April 8 prices). There was a 90.7% chance that someone with a higher Polymarket probability than Prevost would be elected, so it was a 9.3% event that someone with Prevost's chances or worse would have been elected. Having a 9.3% event occur is not strong evidence that the ex ante predictions were incorrect.
We can refine it further. Polymarket predicted two roughly equally likely outcomes--one of the two favorites would get the triregnum (45.2%) or one of the seven prominent challengers would take the crossed keys (42.7%). That leaves 12.2% for the field.
Given that 12.2% event, Prevost was more likely than expected--there was only a 28.5% chance that a more likely pope would have been elected, and a 60% chance that a less likely selection would have occurred. The expected probability of the winner was 0.9%, Prevost was 1.2%.
Given events, it's entirely plausible that the Polymarket estimates were correct.
The big assumption you are making here is that Prevost was actually a long shot when he may have been well known to the cardinal and should have been more like a 20-25% shot going in.
I'm not arguing the Polymarket prices were correct, I have no idea. I'm arguing that the election of Robert Prevost is not strong evidence they were incorrect.
It's fair to criticize a prediction using ex ante evidence, but the column does not point to any other than one Axios article with some weak evidence that by itself wouldn't have swayed a rational bettor much.
But criticizing predictions for assigning a low probability to the ex post outcome is unjustified. If there were two 49% candidates, and a 1% candidate won, that's reason to question the reliability of the odds. 1% events happen, but predictions are wrong too, and as a Bayesian you might calculate a significant ex post likelihood of a bad prediction.
But properly interpreted, the papal election outcome was more like a 10% prediction, which is very weak evidence to question the quality of the prediction. And if you do use it, you should at least mention that Polymarket gave a 10% probability to the next Pope being one with less than a 1-in-50 ex ante chance.
I can’t put my finger on why, but I suspect if you were to take your logic of converting his 1.5% chance to the 9.3% and asserting that the 9.3% is more meaningful and useful, and then apply that heuristic across the whole range of possible distributions of probabilities, it would cease to be meaningful across large swatches of that distribution.
Well take it to the extreme of a Powerball winner. When Edwin Castro won $2.04 billion, no one said, "That's a 1 in 292 million event, Powerball must be rigged." We knew ahead of time that any perfect Powerball ticket would be a 1 in 292 million event.
At the other extreme, suppose there are a few favorites with aggregate 99% chance of winning, and a single 1% longshot outsider. If the outsider wins that's some evidence that the ex ante odds were incorrect. It's true that 1% events can happen, but it's probably more frequent than predictions are wrong, so as a Bayesian we'll assign significant posterior probability to the prediction being wrong.
In this case, Polymarket predicted roughly a 10% chance of an outsider with less than a 2% chance winning. A 10% chance coming up isn't much evidence that the ex ante probabilities were wrong. Given that the 10% event occured, Robert Prevost was not an unlikely winner--in fact he was more likely than what we would expect on average.
IIRC, the conventional wisdom was that, after an old Pope (Ratzinger was 78 when elected) who had just renounced, the Council would want to pick someone relatively young. Bergoglio was 76.
Interesting. This new pope is only 69 so he might serve for 20 years, outliving most current cardinals. Few have attended more than one Conclave, for age reasons.
Reportedly there is a strong norm against campaigning popes, so even though its uninvited I feel like news coverage might actually sandbag a cardinal's chances of becoming pope. If so, this would be a marked contrast with political primaries where buzz and momentum are both sought out and rewarded by voters - much easier to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that way.
I think the Catholic hierarchy used the tools at its disposal to counter balance the impact of the Trump administration; a polyglot priest of the world but born American and decidedly compassion-leaning to balance the ugly American whose unbridled self-interest is appalling everyone with even a speck of care for others.
It is brilliant move worthy of the most convoluted of thinkers. While Leo may be Augustinian, this was definitely a Jesuitical move. A blessing for us all.
Any early odds on Pope Leo for Democratic candidate for President in 2028? 2032? This would fall under Elon Musk's theory that the most absurd outcome is often the most likely.
After so much crazy noise about Trump becoming Pope (even though he isn't even a Catholic), I find funny that the Pope is eligible to become President of the United States.
Does the pope lose his US citizenship? I'd imagine that if an American citizen becomes the head of state of another country, he or she would lose their US citizenship. But I don't know. Just curious.
It doesn’t need to have been the last fourteen years, just fourteen years at some point in their lifetime. For example, Hoover had lived in London in 1917, twelve years before his presidency, and Eisenhower lived in Europe from 1942 to 1948.
His name was coming up a lot in Catholic media. The Pillar had a whole podcast episode about his possible chances, did a profile on him, etc. One of their editors called him as one of their two most likely “gut check” candidates to be pope. Multiple other Catholic outlets covered him pretty heavily as well, off the top of my head CruxNow. In the Catholic world, he was considered one of the frontrunners in the week leading up to the conclave.
I think the “problem” is mainly that the only people who clearly named him as a strong possibility were people who cover the Church as their full-time job (like, not “religion and culture” correspondents — full time Catholic journalists, and not full time Catholic commentators — full time Catholic *journalists,* who actually do investigative reporting), and not only do people in the betting markets not read those people, they often *don’t even know who those people are.*
So they were reading and re-circulating the takes from “experts” who were either Catholic opinion columnists or non-specialized journalists. Garbage in, garbage out.
Sky News leaked a “Vatican insider source” on the morning of the final day of the conclave as identifying Cardinal Prevost as a leading contender. In 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio was similarly leaked by La Stampa’s Vatican Insider source as in the final three. In both cases, the betting markets barely registered the information. In both cases, the markets were wrong and the leaks were right. https://leightonvaughanwilliams.substack.com/p/heavenly-odds-the-2025-papal-conclave?r=nhask
But surely not expand it to the wildly leftist New York Times!! What a thought, yuck.
I have gone so far as to keep my Election Year subscription to the WaPo,that was so leftist, because I'm interested in how much they are changing, with their near collapse and Bezos' --- curation, let's say. So far they've gone into mainly lifestyle stuff, and Dear Abby writers: I think they now have six agony aunt columns. But I live in hope they'll go back to news reporting.
As a Catholic who believes that betting on popes is the highest form of 'tempting fate', I wouldn't have bet on it. However, if I had known that there was a American under consideration... I would have giving him a 10% just because of the politics of American Catholicism right now.
Bluntly put, there's been a show down between the International Catholic organization, the American Bishops, and the American conservative Catholics, and the American liberal Catholics. And it's a 4 way show down right now, make no mistake.
For the church itself, reinforcing and bringing back into the fold the Liberal Catholics is a priority, given how that is the wing that has shrunk over the past two decades, and the international catholic organization is more and more ideologically in line with this branch of American Catholicism. But it's also the wing of 'lapsed Catholics', so it's the most finicky branch and then one that pushes hardest on the pain points for everyone.
The American Bishops are a lot more conservative on the whole than the international bishops, and they open their mouths and say things about immigration and the like that sound a awful lot like the gospel of prosperity or the Evangelicals church. This is and has been a huge pain point, but the international church hasn't put it's foot down hard because I believe there is fear of causing a split akin to the creation of the Anglican church by Henry the VIII. (FYI, this is why the Trump Pope picture played ESPECIALLY bad to Catholics. It's real easy to read that as "American Bishops, I could be your pope")
The conservative and liberal branches I feel I don't need to explain for the most part, as that part of the American experience is on full display 24/7, for better or worse. But the important part of this is a paradoxical issue of growth: Conservative Catholicism has been steady in it's participation, but it's not growing and it tries to make demands Catholicism as if it owns it, rather than serving the community. The Liberal branch gets the serving part and tend to be very chill towards the larger organization, but the liberals are flaky, lapsed, and tend towards complete disengagement.
In this environment, Pope Leo is the 'Secure America' pope.
1) His ties to Francis makes him a hit internationally, and his views are more of the same.
2) Being an American, he can make a pretty good neutral argument to both the conservative and liberal congregations.
3) As a American, he can also reach around the American Bishops, which lessens the risk of a Anglican style split and forces them (somewhat) to play ball with the rest of the world.
4) There is also a increase in church participation in a pope's country when they are elected, which means that the range and ideology of both an individual parish and the local leadership tends to widen as more people get involved.
With these details in mind the Church electing a American Pope makes sense,
but it's also a sign of how much concern they have for American Catholicism at the moment.
My first impression was that the election of an American pope is an attempt to get Americans to feel more connected to the church. That it is was outreach — an attempt to counteract American isolationism.
I question whether you're overgeneralizing about international bishops. Are American bishops more conservative than African bishops, for example? That has not been my observation. Each region seems to have its own tendencies, as opposed to.conservative Americans being at odds with a homogeneous liberal/moderate "international bishopship."
They are not liberal,
But if you take a look at my point number 2 on American Bishops you may realize the issue is not that the international Bishops are American Liberal,
but that American Bishops are American Conservative.
The core issues come down to Tithes, immigration, and expansion of the international church community. None of these issues are 'Liberal', and when I mentioned the Liberal Catholics as causing pain points it's because the American Liberal wing 'IS' liberal and 'does not' mesh with northern/southern debates on what I would call 'secondary culture issues' in the eyes of the church.
The liberal Catholics just *happen* to line up better on what is *important to the international church* *better*. They donate more to charity causes, they are more welcoming of immigrants the church sponsors, they are more likely to take a international bishop seriously instead of demanding 'someone without a accent', and they don't object to their funds being sent overseas to help fund a new church elsewhere.
I live in Italy, and I can tell that here, in the last week, Prevost was considered among the 4-5 most probable. In the last two days he was considered the 2nd most likely. And, after the first day of ballota, some newpaper considered Prevost the favorite n.1. I did bet on Prevost (in a local website) one week ago. Probably there was some bias in the US.
Who else was "likely". We don't get any of the rumors or news like that.
The Polymarket user Domer (who also predicted Mike Johnson as the "goldilocks candidate" for Speaker of the House when he was sitting around 4%) made $100k on this, and wrote an interesting thread on how: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1920612517631479984
Arguably, for the first time, we have an American world leader who is more important and influential than the US President. Or at the very least more palatable. I think his ability to outshine trump might be the outside helping hand this country needs right now to get out of the quagmire.
What’s even better than Pierbattista Pizzaballa was that his odds nearly overlapped with those for Matteo Zuppi. The Economist labeled the lines in the graph itself rather than creating a legend, so it appeared that one of the candidates was “Pizzaballa Zuppi”. I wondered if bettors were thinking that the conclave’s votes for pope would get mixed up with their lunch orders for an Italianized version of matzoh ball soup.
So far, the best thing about this is that it pushed Trump off the headlines. Trump’s gotta be wetting himself over this one, especially after his totally weird behavior prior to the announcement.
Evidently Prevost is considered a very persuasive and effective administrator, not authoritarian, and more likely to take a path similar to Pope Francis.
J D Vance, or whatever identity he’s currently choosing, ain’t no theologian.
I’m not quite sure he’s actually human.
And the new Pope is a jazz musician. Think 🤔 the sax 🎷. Our first Jazz Pope !
An American-born jazz musician with a math degree. So, your typical papal profile?
I am jewish and was skeptical of this whole miracle thing but now I am convinced.
The Polymarket odds on Manischewitz getting into the transubstantiation supplies market in the next 5 years just ticked up
Given the irritation expressed in On the Edge about people declaring predictions wrong, I'd expect a better analysis here.
The election of Robert Prevost should not be viewed as a 1.15% probability event (using Polymarket's April 8 prices). There was a 90.7% chance that someone with a higher Polymarket probability than Prevost would be elected, so it was a 9.3% event that someone with Prevost's chances or worse would have been elected. Having a 9.3% event occur is not strong evidence that the ex ante predictions were incorrect.
We can refine it further. Polymarket predicted two roughly equally likely outcomes--one of the two favorites would get the triregnum (45.2%) or one of the seven prominent challengers would take the crossed keys (42.7%). That leaves 12.2% for the field.
Given that 12.2% event, Prevost was more likely than expected--there was only a 28.5% chance that a more likely pope would have been elected, and a 60% chance that a less likely selection would have occurred. The expected probability of the winner was 0.9%, Prevost was 1.2%.
Given events, it's entirely plausible that the Polymarket estimates were correct.
The big assumption you are making here is that Prevost was actually a long shot when he may have been well known to the cardinal and should have been more like a 20-25% shot going in.
I'm not arguing the Polymarket prices were correct, I have no idea. I'm arguing that the election of Robert Prevost is not strong evidence they were incorrect.
It's fair to criticize a prediction using ex ante evidence, but the column does not point to any other than one Axios article with some weak evidence that by itself wouldn't have swayed a rational bettor much.
But criticizing predictions for assigning a low probability to the ex post outcome is unjustified. If there were two 49% candidates, and a 1% candidate won, that's reason to question the reliability of the odds. 1% events happen, but predictions are wrong too, and as a Bayesian you might calculate a significant ex post likelihood of a bad prediction.
But properly interpreted, the papal election outcome was more like a 10% prediction, which is very weak evidence to question the quality of the prediction. And if you do use it, you should at least mention that Polymarket gave a 10% probability to the next Pope being one with less than a 1-in-50 ex ante chance.
I can’t put my finger on why, but I suspect if you were to take your logic of converting his 1.5% chance to the 9.3% and asserting that the 9.3% is more meaningful and useful, and then apply that heuristic across the whole range of possible distributions of probabilities, it would cease to be meaningful across large swatches of that distribution.
Well take it to the extreme of a Powerball winner. When Edwin Castro won $2.04 billion, no one said, "That's a 1 in 292 million event, Powerball must be rigged." We knew ahead of time that any perfect Powerball ticket would be a 1 in 292 million event.
At the other extreme, suppose there are a few favorites with aggregate 99% chance of winning, and a single 1% longshot outsider. If the outsider wins that's some evidence that the ex ante odds were incorrect. It's true that 1% events can happen, but it's probably more frequent than predictions are wrong, so as a Bayesian we'll assign significant posterior probability to the prediction being wrong.
In this case, Polymarket predicted roughly a 10% chance of an outsider with less than a 2% chance winning. A 10% chance coming up isn't much evidence that the ex ante probabilities were wrong. Given that the 10% event occured, Robert Prevost was not an unlikely winner--in fact he was more likely than what we would expect on average.
That’s a fantastic example and I see your point, thanks.
This is tangentially related, but I was surprised to hear that Pope Francis (Jorge Bergoglio) was only given a ~2% chance of winning the conclave in 2013. After the prior conclave, a cardinal released his account of the events and said Bergoglio was consistently in 2nd place throughout voting, so he was clearly already highly thought of by his fellow cardinals. https://www.deseret.com/2005/9/23/19913709/cardinal-breaks-vow-of-secrecy-releasing-diary-that-reveals-details-of-papal-conclave/
IIRC, the conventional wisdom was that, after an old Pope (Ratzinger was 78 when elected) who had just renounced, the Council would want to pick someone relatively young. Bergoglio was 76.
Interesting. This new pope is only 69 so he might serve for 20 years, outliving most current cardinals. Few have attended more than one Conclave, for age reasons.
Hey Nate, great post, there were 252 Cardinals yesterday in the college of cardinals. It is 251 today because the new Pope is no longer in the college. (If you look at the wikipedia page on the college you can see him being removed in this revision: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_current_cardinals&diff=1289443040&oldid=1289442884)
Reportedly there is a strong norm against campaigning popes, so even though its uninvited I feel like news coverage might actually sandbag a cardinal's chances of becoming pope. If so, this would be a marked contrast with political primaries where buzz and momentum are both sought out and rewarded by voters - much easier to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that way.
I think the Catholic hierarchy used the tools at its disposal to counter balance the impact of the Trump administration; a polyglot priest of the world but born American and decidedly compassion-leaning to balance the ugly American whose unbridled self-interest is appalling everyone with even a speck of care for others.
It is brilliant move worthy of the most convoluted of thinkers. While Leo may be Augustinian, this was definitely a Jesuitical move. A blessing for us all.
Any early odds on Pope Leo for Democratic candidate for President in 2028? 2032? This would fall under Elon Musk's theory that the most absurd outcome is often the most likely.
After so much crazy noise about Trump becoming Pope (even though he isn't even a Catholic), I find funny that the Pope is eligible to become President of the United States.
Does the pope lose his US citizenship? I'd imagine that if an American citizen becomes the head of state of another country, he or she would lose their US citizenship. But I don't know. Just curious.
Has he been a US resident for the last 14 years?
It doesn’t need to have been the last fourteen years, just fourteen years at some point in their lifetime. For example, Hoover had lived in London in 1917, twelve years before his presidency, and Eisenhower lived in Europe from 1942 to 1948.
His name was coming up a lot in Catholic media. The Pillar had a whole podcast episode about his possible chances, did a profile on him, etc. One of their editors called him as one of their two most likely “gut check” candidates to be pope. Multiple other Catholic outlets covered him pretty heavily as well, off the top of my head CruxNow. In the Catholic world, he was considered one of the frontrunners in the week leading up to the conclave.
I think the “problem” is mainly that the only people who clearly named him as a strong possibility were people who cover the Church as their full-time job (like, not “religion and culture” correspondents — full time Catholic journalists, and not full time Catholic commentators — full time Catholic *journalists,* who actually do investigative reporting), and not only do people in the betting markets not read those people, they often *don’t even know who those people are.*
So they were reading and re-circulating the takes from “experts” who were either Catholic opinion columnists or non-specialized journalists. Garbage in, garbage out.
Sky News leaked a “Vatican insider source” on the morning of the final day of the conclave as identifying Cardinal Prevost as a leading contender. In 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio was similarly leaked by La Stampa’s Vatican Insider source as in the final three. In both cases, the betting markets barely registered the information. In both cases, the markets were wrong and the leaks were right. https://leightonvaughanwilliams.substack.com/p/heavenly-odds-the-2025-papal-conclave?r=nhask
I believe that Ross Douthat of the NYT floated his name as a possible choice in a group chat. Maybe you need to expand your reading/listening list.
But surely not expand it to the wildly leftist New York Times!! What a thought, yuck.
I have gone so far as to keep my Election Year subscription to the WaPo,that was so leftist, because I'm interested in how much they are changing, with their near collapse and Bezos' --- curation, let's say. So far they've gone into mainly lifestyle stuff, and Dear Abby writers: I think they now have six agony aunt columns. But I live in hope they'll go back to news reporting.