Summary
Title: Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election
Author: John L. Allen, Jr.
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0385504535
Pro:
• Provides information on many current cardinals who are prime candidates for the next pope
• Explains a lot of background information for people unfamiliar with the Catholic hierarchy
Con:
• Index is spotty in its coverage
• List of best candidates for next pope is strongly influenced by Allen’s biases
Description:
• Explains the nature and job of the papacy
• Describes the issues that will be considered when the next pope is chosen
• Describes the factions involved in the next election and what their perspectives are
Book Review
Most people don’t have much of a sense of how a new pope might be chosen. They may have some idea about cardinals meeting in a locked room, but that’s probably the extent of it. When the next conclave is held, however, it will bring down on the Vatican an unprecedented flurry of media attention. If people want to have a better idea of what will be going on, they ought to start reading up on it now — and they can’t do much better than John L. Allen, Jr.’s Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election.
Now in a revised and updated edition, Allen’s Conclave is a handy guide that should provide the average person with just about everything they might want to know about how popes are chosen generally, what it is exactly that popes do, and which people are at the top of the list of candidates for the next pope. This wasn’t meant as a handicapping guide for wagers, but he knows that it will be used that way and makes allowances for that as well.
Allen begins by explaining just what it is that popes do with their time, discussing their priestly, political, religious, and social duties. This helps the reader understand just how difficult it can be to decide who bests qualifies for pope because there is so much more at stake than the few political or religious issues that most in the media tend to focus on.
Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election
The next stop for Allen is a run-down of the various “voting issues” that will be foremost in the minds of the cardinals meeting in the conclave. The cardinals will have to consider issues like collegiality, ecumenism and dialog with other religions, global poverty and social justice, bioethics and sexuality, and the role of laity in the church. People in the West may imagine that things such as whether women can be priests or whether the use of contraceptives is licit are the most important issues facing the church, but Catholic leaders are likely to place far more emphasis on future confrontations with Islam, possible unification with other Christian churches, and the grinding poverty in the Third World where most of the planet’s Catholics actually live.
