Holy Smokes: Inside the Vatican’s Global Cardinals Game Where the Planet Bets on Red Robe Roulette
Cardinals Game: A Feathered Spectacle in Which the Planet Gambles on Red Robes and Higher Stakes
By Our Man in the Eternal City, nursing an espresso and existential dread
Rome, Thursday – While half the world was doom-scrolling through inflation charts and the other half was busy re-branding war as “special military operations,” roughly 120 elderly men in scarlet silk locked themselves inside the Sistine Chapel to decide who will inherit the keys to an institution older than most nation-states. The rest of us call it a papal conclave; Vatican media prefers “cardinals game,” because nothing says transcendent humility like branding your succession crisis like a mid-season baseball match.
For the uninitiated: the game is simple. Seventy-five percent of voting cardinals must agree on one man to become God’s middle-manager on Earth. Ballots are burned after each round; black smoke means “no consensus,” white smoke means “habemus papam,” and greyish smoke means the Romans have once again set fire to a recycling bin for dramatic effect. The entire exercise is streamed live, because nothing says timeless mystery like a 4K drone shot sponsored by a telecom conglomerate.
Global bookmakers—those impartial apostles of late-stage capitalism—opened odds on candidates faster than you can say “miserando atque eligendo.” Tagle at 3-1, Parolin at 4-1, an unnamed African cardinal at 9-1, and, for the truly devout, Bono at 500-1. The last time God’s personnel decision moved currency markets this much, Martin Luther was still a monk with anger-management issues.
Yet the true international significance lies not in who wins, but in the spectacle itself: a medieval ritual performed on smartphones, dissected by pundits in five languages, and meme-ified within seconds. One viral TikTok superimposed the smokestack with a vape cloud; another replaced the “Habemus Papam” announcement with the opening riff of “Seven Nation Army.” Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a product manager just added “white-smoke filter” to the next app update.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical dominoes wobble. Brazil’s president prayed publicly for “a pope from the Global South,” which is ecclesiastical speak for “someone who won’t lecture us about the rainforest we’re actively chainsawing.” Moscow reminded the faithful that the Russian Orthodox Church is “monitoring developments,” code for “we’ve got our own patriarch and he’s gym-buffed.” Beijing issued a terse statement that the Vatican should “respect China’s religious autonomy,” otherwise known as the divine right to pre-approve every bishop.
Back in Rome, locals hawk “conclave panini”—mortadella and smoked mozzarella on red-and-white bread—while Nigerian seminarians debate whether the next pope will finally allow married priests or merely upgrade the Vatican Wi-Fi. A French TV crew interviews nuns about gender equity, subtitled into Korean for a Seoul audience that stayed awake purely to watch Catholic bingo. The world is watching, mostly because Netflix hasn’t released a new season of anything decent this week.
And there it is, the cosmic punchline: humanity’s oldest bureaucracy choosing a CEO via campfire smoke, while orbiting satellites record the carbon footprint for posterity. We can land a rover on Mars, but we still need a two-thirds majority and a chimney to hire an octogenarian in ruby slippers. If that isn’t a metaphor for our species, I don’t know what is—except perhaps the fact that I’m filing this dispatch on a laptop made of rare earth minerals mined by children so that grown-ups can argue over who gets to interpret the Sermon on the Mount.
When the white smoke finally billowed at 7:31 p.m. local time, the crowd in St. Peter’s Square erupted like a football final—except the winning team’s trophy is a fisherman’s ring and a bulletproof Popemobile. The new pontiff took the name Leo XIV, because history adores sequels even more than Marvel. Within minutes, his Wikipedia page was updated, his Twitter handle reserved, and conspiracy theorists declared him a crisis actor planted by the Jesuits. Somewhere, Galileo chuckled in geocentric hell.
Conclusion: The cardinals game is over for now, but the broadcast never ends. Tomorrow we’ll return to proxy wars, algorithmic doom, and climate deadlines, comforted by the knowledge that somewhere in the Vatican basement, technicians are already refilling the ballot stove. Because if there’s one lesson the Church teaches better than any catechism, it’s that humanity loves a sequel—even when the plot is on fire.
