From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the Wall Street Journal opinion page. I'm Jerry Baker,

editor at large of the journal. Thanks very much for listening. Please do sign up and subscribe.

If you're not already subscribing at Apple Podcasts or wherever else

you do your listening. This week, we're taking a little bit of a break from the hurly-burly

of American politics and what's happening in the US economy. We're going to look at the big event

in the world that is happening in Rome, or to be precise, in Vatican City, in Europe.

That of course is the election of the next Pope, the successor to Pope Francis,

who died last month, and the 266th successor to St. Peter, who died 2,000 years ago. As we know,

the conclave, which opens on Wednesday, we're recording this on Tuesday around lunchtime,

but the successor to St. Peter will be elected by the conclave that starts meeting on Wednesday, May the 7th. As you know,

many of those of you have seen this before, and I speak as a Catholic myself, so those of us

Catholics who are watching, we'll be watching with great interest. The conclave opens.

The cardinals process to the Sistine Chapel, where they pray, they

meet. The cry of extra omnis goes out from the attendants. The doors are locked and inside the

conclave, at least for the first morning, and for each session, the cardinals meet in secret

and begin voting. We've no idea how long this process will take. 2013 when Pope Francis was elected, there were five ballots, which were held over two days. Of course, again, as you'll all know, whenever a candidate has reached two-thirds majority, has achieved a two-thirds majority of the voting cardinals, that Cardinal has declared. It doesn't have to be a Cardinal, I should say. Technically, of course, as we know, the only qualification to be elected is to be a baptised Catholic and be male. But we can pretty well assume that it's going to be one of those 133 voting cardinals. When one has a two-thirds majority, we get the famous white smoke from the temporary chimney of the Sistine Chapel. A few moments later, the new Pope comes out to the announcement of Habamus Papam on the balcony overlooking

St. Peter's Square. chimney of the Sistine Chapel. A few moments later, the new Pope comes out to the announcement of Habamus Papam on the balcony overlooking some Peter Square, and we learn the identity of the man for the first time in a little bit of Latin, and then we're introduced to him. So all that will happen at some point in the next few days. We don't know how long, we don't know how long this conclave will be, but we'll be watching it very closely.

What we're going to talk about today, we're not going to try to identify who will be the next Pope. That, frankly, is a game that's played all around the world around about now. And having watched quite a few conclaves, I can say with some confidence that the speculations are almost always wrong. So while there are many candidates, and you can read

about them in the Wall Street Journal, you can read about them everywhere else and see the discussion

about them elsewhere, we're not going to talk about the candidates who might win, who might lose,

because frankly, we don't know. And secondly, there are actually more interesting things to talk

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