Wanted: A holy man.
Job description: Leading the 1.4 billion-strong Catholic Church.
Location: Vatican City.
There aren’t any official candidates for the papacy, but some cardinals are considered “papabile,” or possessing the characteristics vital to change into pope. After St. John Paul II broke the centurieslong Italian hold on the papacy in 1978, the sphere of contenders has broadened considerably.
When the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to decide on a successor to Pope Francis, the primary pontiff from Latin America, they will probably be looking above all for a holy man who can guide the Catholic Church. Beyond that, they are going to weigh his administrative and pastoral experience and consider what the church needs today.
Here is a number of possible contenders, in no particular order. The list will probably be updated as cardinals proceed their closed-door, preconclave discussions.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin
Date of Birth: Jan. 17, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Position: Vatican secretary of state under Francis
Experience: Veteran Vatican diplomat
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 70-year-old veteran diplomat was Francis’ secretary of state, essentially the Holy See’s prime minister.
Though associated closely with Francis’ pontificate, Parolin is far more demure in personality and diplomatic in his approach to leading than the Argentine Jesuit he served and he knows where the Catholic Church might need a course correction.
Parolin oversaw the Holy See’s controversial take care of China over bishop nominations and was involved — but not charged — within the Vatican’s botched investment in a London real estate enterprise that led to a 2021 trial of one other cardinal and nine others. A former ambassador to Venezuela, Parolin knows the Latin American church well and played a key role within the 2014 U.S.-Cuba detente, which the Vatican helped facilitate.
If he were elected, he would return an Italian to the papacy after three successive outsiders: St. John Paul II (Poland), Pope Benedict XVI (Germany) and Francis (Argentina).
But Parolin has little or no pastoral experience: He entered the seminary at age 14, 4 years after his father was killed in a automotive accident. After his 1980 ordination, he spent two years as a parish priest near his hometown in northern Italy, but then went to Rome to review and entered the Vatican diplomatic service, where he has remained ever since. He has served at Vatican embassies in Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela.
He is widely respected for his diplomatic finesse on among the thorniest dossiers facing the Catholic Church. He has long been involved within the China file, and he played a hands-on role within the Holy See’s diplomatic rapprochement with Vietnam that resulted in an agreement to determine a resident Vatican representative within the country.
Parolin was also the Vatican’s point-person in its frustrated efforts to finish the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has tried to make the church’s voice heard because the Trump administration began working to finish Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Let’s hope we are able to arrive at a peace that, with the intention to be solid, lasting, should be a just peace, must involve all of the actors who’re at stake and consider the principles of international law and the UN declarations,” he said.
Parolin might find the geopolitical reality ushered in by the Trump administration somewhat unreceptive to the Holy See’s soft power.
— By Nicole Winfield in Vatican City
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle
Date of Birth: June 21, 1957
Nationality: Filipino
Position: Pro-Prefect, Dicastery for Evangelization under Francis
Experience: Former archbishop of Manila, Philippines
Made a cardinal by: Benedict
Tagle, 67, is on many bookmakers’ lists to be the primary Asian pope, a selection that may acknowledge a component of the world where the church is growing.
Francis brought the favored archbishop of Manila to Rome to move the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, which serves the needs of the Catholic Church in much of Asia and Africa. His role took on greater weight when Francis reformed the Vatican bureaucracy. Tagle often cites his Chinese heritage — his maternal grandmother was a part of a Chinese family that moved to the Philippines.
Though he has pastoral, Vatican and management experience — he headed the Vatican’s Caritas Internationalis federation of charity groups before coming to Rome permanently — Tagle could be on the young side to be elected pope, with cardinals perhaps preferring an older candidate whose papacy could be more limited.
Tagle is generally known as an excellent communicator and teacher — key attributes for a pope.
“The pope could have to do a variety of teaching, we’ll need to face the cameras on a regular basis so if there will probably be a communicator pope, that’s very desirable,” said Leo Ocampo, a theology professor on the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
That said, Tagle’s tenure at Caritas was not without controversy and a few have questioned his management skills.
In 2022 , Francis ousted the Caritas management, including demoting Tagle. The Holy See said an out of doors investigation had found “real deficiencies” in management that had affected staff morale on the Caritas secretariat in Rome.
— By Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, and Nicole Winfield in Vatican City
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu
Date of Birth: Jan. 24, 1960
Nationality: Congolese
Position: Archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo
Experience: President of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 65-year-old Ambongo is one in all Africa’s most outspoken Catholic leaders, heading the archdiocese that has the biggest variety of Catholics on the continent that seen as the long run of the church.
He has been archbishop of Congo’s capital since 2018 and a cardinal since in 2019. Francis also appointed him to a gaggle of advisers that was helping reorganize the Vatican bureaucracy.
In Congo and across Africa, Ambongo has been deeply committed to the Catholic orthodoxy and is seen as conservative.
In 2024, he signed an announcement on behalf of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar refusing to follow Francis’ declaration allowing priests to supply blessings to same-sex couples in what amounted to continent-wide dissent from a papal teaching. The rebuke crystalized each the African church’s line on LGBTQ+ outreach and Ambongo’s stature throughout the African hierarchy.
He has received praise from some in Congo for promoting interfaith tolerance, especially on a continent where religious divisions between Christians and Muslims are common.
“He is for the openness of the church to different cultures,” said Monsignor Donatien Nshole, secretary-general of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo, who has long worked with Ambongo.
An outspoken government critic, the cardinal can be known for his unwavering advocacy for social justice.
In a rustic with high poverty and hunger levels despite being wealthy in minerals, and where fighting by rebel groups has killed hundreds and displaced tens of millions in one in all the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, he steadily criticizes each government corruption and inaction, in addition to the exploitation of the country’s natural resources by foreign powers.
“Congo is the plate from which everyone eats, aside from our people,” he said last yr during a speech on the Pontifical Antonianum University.
Ambongo’s criticism of authorities has drawn each public admiration and legal scrutiny. Last yr, prosecutors ordered a judicial investigation of him after accusing him of “seditious behavior” over his criticism of the federal government’s handling of the conflict in eastern Congo.
— By Mark Banchereau in Dakar, Senegal
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi
Date of Birth: Oct. 11, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Current position: Archbishop of Bologna, Italy, president of the Italian bishops conference
Previous position: Auxiliary bishop of Rome
Made a cardinal by: Francis
Zuppi, 69, got here up as a street priest within the image of Francis, who promoted him quickly: first to archbishop of the rich archdiocese of Bologna in northern Italy in 2015, before bestowing the title of cardinal in 2019.
He is closely closely affiliated with the Sant’Egidio Community, a Rome-based Catholic charity that was influential under Francis, particularly in interfaith dialogue. Zuppi was a part of Sant’Egidio’s team that helped negotiate the top of Mozambique’s civil war within the Nineteen Nineties and was named Francis’ peace envoy for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
He traveled to Kyiv and Moscow after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appealed to the Holy See for assist in winning the discharge of 19,000 Ukrainian children taken from their families and delivered to Russia throughout the war. The mission also took him to China and the United States.
After making him a cardinal, Francis made clear he wanted him accountable for Italy’s bishops, an indication of his admiration for the prelate who, like Francis, is generally known as a “street priest” — someone who prioritizes ministering to poor and homeless people and refugees.
Zuppi could be a candidate in Francis’ tradition of ministering to those on the margins, although his relative youth would count against him for cardinals in search of a brief papacy.
In an indication of his progressive leanings, Zuppi wrote the introduction to the Italian edition of “Building a Bridge,” by the Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit, concerning the church’s need to enhance its outreach to the LGBTQ+ community.
Zuppi wrote that constructing bridges with the community was a “difficult process, still unfolding.” He recognized that “doing nothing, alternatively, risks causing a fantastic deal of suffering, makes people feel lonely, and infrequently results in the adoption of positions which are each contrasting and extreme.”
Zuppi’s family also has strong institutional ties: His father worked for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, and his mother was the niece of Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, dean of the College of Cardinals within the Sixties and Seventies.
— By Colleen Barry in Vatican City
Cardinal Péter Erdő
Date of Birth: June 25, 1952
Nationality: Hungarian
Position: Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary
Past experience: Twice elected head of the umbrella group of European bishops conferences
Made a cardinal by: John Paul
Known by his peers as a serious theologian, scholar and educator, Erdő, 72, is a number one contender amongst conservatives. He has served because the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest since 2002 and was made a cardinal by John Paul the next yr. He has participated in two conclaves, in 2005 and 2013, for the number of Benedict and Francis.
Holding doctorates in theology and canon law, Erdő, speaks six languages, is a proponent of doctrinal orthodoxy, and champions the church’s positions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Erdő opposes same-sex unions, and has also resisted suggestions that Catholics who remarry after divorce have the opportunity to receive communion. He stated in 2015 that divorced Catholics should only be permitted communion if they continue to be sexually abstinent of their latest marriage.
An advocate for traditional family structures, he helped organize Francis’ 2014 and 2015 Vatican meetings on the family.
From 2006 to 2016, Erdő served as president of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, helping to foster collaboration amongst Catholic bishops across Europe and to deal with contemporary issues facing the church on the continent.
While careful to avoid participating in Hungary’s often tumultuous political life, Erdő has maintained a detailed relationship with the country’s rightist populist government, which provides generous subsidies to Christian churches.
He has been reluctant to take positions on several of the federal government’s policies that divided society in Hungary resembling public campaigns that villainized migrants and refugees and laws that eroded the rights of LGBTQ+ communities.
When tons of of hundreds of asylum-seekers entered Europe in 2015 fleeing war and deprivation within the Middle East and Africa, Erdő emphasized that the church had a Christian duty to supply humanitarian assistance to those in need, but stopped in need of the full-throated advocacy for migrants that was one in all Francis’ top priorities.
