Welcome back to Seamus Bopery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And the conclave to elect a new pope to succeed

Pope Francis begins tomorrow. Now, if recent history is any guide, we're probably going to have a new

pope later this week. But the whole process of choosing a Pope in a papal conclave is famously mysterious.

Only a tiny handful of people in history have ever participated in the election of a Pope.

And the whole process

is shrouded in secrecy. Hollywood depictions like the young pope or more recently conclave,

paint the papacy and papal conclaves in a cynical light that it's all about power-hungry men

engaged in corrupt political schemes as they desperately vie for the papacy. But the truth is something far stranger,

that the men who become Pope seem, by all appearances, to quite seriously not want to be Pope.

So today, I want to take an honest look at what we can really expect the conclave to be like,

and also how wrong some of our preconceptions about this might really be. I think you're going to be surprised. But before we get there, I want to thank all of you who support this show over at shamblessjo.com. I hope you're enjoying an ad-free version of this video. And I know that I'm enjoying answering all of your questions in our two weekly live streams. Your direct support of this channel means a lot to me

and to those of us here are Catholic answers, and it really does keep the show going. So if you

haven't joined yet, please visit Shadelessjo.com and join for as little as $5 a month. Okay,

so we know the basic details. There's a schedule of praying together and of voting, and once a single candidate

has two-thirds of the votes of his brother cardinals, so that's going to be 90 votes total in

this case, that man is elected pope. But even the name conclave refers to the fact that the whole

process is under lock and key, with no communication to the outside world.

The cardinals themselves are forbidden from discussing the specifics of the conclave for the rest

of their lives upon pain of excommunication.

Like anything secret, particularly concerning one of the most influential roles on the planet,

some people are going to look at the process with a hint of suspicion.

This has given rise to

...