The Pope Matt Baker Couldn't See: How Six Secret Elections Became a Faulty Forecast

Matt Baker studied six papal conclaves, identified the patterns supposedly governing the Catholic Church's most secretive election, and used them to predict its next leader.

Six days after he published his analysis, the cardinals elected someone outside his five leading candidates.

On May 8, 2025, Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV. He was 69, American-born, a veteran missionary in Peru, and the former head of the Vatican office responsible for overseeing the selection of bishops. He possessed precisely the combination of pastoral and administrative experience Baker's historical framework should have encouraged him to investigate.

Missing the winner is not, by itself, a scandal. Conclaves are notoriously difficult to predict. Baker openly acknowledged that unexpected candidates sometimes emerge.

The more serious problem is how he reached his prediction.

His video, Every Papal Conclave Since 1958 and My Prediction for the Next Pope, presents a persuasive historical narrative built around ideological compromise, alternating leadership styles, and resistance to excessively young or controversial candidates.

It is entertaining history. As a predictive method, however, it rests on assumptions that are inadequately tested, voting histories that are frequently unverifiable, and categories too flexible to explain why one candidate wins while another loses.

The result is an impressive-looking model that largely explains the past after the outcomes are known.

Six Elections Are Not a Law of History

Baker's central observation is that ideological extremes rarely win papal elections.

His historical tour begins in 1958, when liberal Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro and conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri supposedly struggled to attract enough support. Angelo Roncalli emerged as the compromise candidate and became John XXIII.

In 1963, Giovanni Battista Montini became Paul VI. In August 1978, Albino Luciani became John Paul I. Two months later, Karol Wojtyła became John Paul II.

In 2005, Joseph Ratzinger became Benedict XVI. In 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Francis.

Baker treats these six outcomes as evidence of recurring electoral behavior. Particularly important is his assertion that:

“the candidates on the two extremes rarely get chosen.”

There is a reasonable historical observation here. A candidate requiring a two-thirds majority must attract support beyond a narrow faction.

But this is where Baker's explanation becomes dangerously circular.

If a moderate wins, the result demonstrates the cardinals' preference for compromise. If a conservative wins, the candidate can be described as sufficiently acceptable to moderates. If a progressive wins, the election can be attributed to dissatisfaction with the previous pope.

The winning candidate becomes evidence for whichever explanation best accommodates him.

Consider John XXIII.

Roncalli entered the 1958 election with a reputation for moderation and the expectation that his advanced age would produce a short transitional papacy.

He subsequently initiated the Second Vatican Council, transforming the direction of modern Catholicism.

The Vatican's own biography describes how observers underestimated the significance of his election, expecting a transitional leader rather than a pope who would initiate a new era for the Church.

This creates an obvious problem for retrospective ideological classification.

Was Roncalli a moderate because cardinals considered him one in 1958? Or a liberal because of what he accomplished afterward?

Those are different questions. An electoral prediction requires knowing what electors believed before voting, not how historians classify the eventual winner decades later.

Baker moves between these perspectives without establishing a consistent method.

Six elections are already a small sample. Classifying their participants through flexible judgments makes the apparent pattern weaker still.

The Secret Ballots Are Not a Public Dataset

The most consequential weakness concerns the evidence beneath Baker's descriptions of electoral competition.

He repeatedly reconstructs how support supposedly shifted between candidates.

Siri received the most votes in the opening round of the August 1978 conclave. Bergoglio finished second in 2005. Specific factions reached deadlocks, forcing compromises.

Some of these accounts have historical support.

But the Church does not publish ordinary conclave voting returns.

Under Universi Dominici Gregis, the rules governing modern papal elections, ballots and electors' voting notes are burned. A formal record of the results is sealed, and access requires papal permission.

The constitution also imposes strict secrecy concerning the election and its proceedings.

Consequently, much of what outsiders believe about conclave voting comes from leaks, private recollections, historical reconstruction, and anonymous testimony.

Those sources are not necessarily worthless. They are not equivalent to certified election returns.

Consider 1978.

A September 1978 Washington Post report described an account by the priest and Vatican commentator Francis X. Murphy. According to Murphy, Siri received 25 votes on the opening ballot, Luciani 23, and Sergio Pignedoli 18.

Murphy also claimed that Cardinal Giovanni Benelli helped engineer Luciani's victory by presenting him differently to conservative and more progressive electors.

The newspaper included a crucial qualification: Murphy provided no sources for his voting account.

That distinction matters.

The reported figures may be accurate. They may also be incomplete or mistaken. Without independent confirmation, they cannot establish the behavior of an entire electorate with the certainty Baker's narrative sometimes implies.

The 2005 conclave offers stronger but still imperfect evidence.

Four months after Benedict XVI's election, the Italian journal Limes published voting figures attributed to an anonymous cardinal's diary. According to that account, Bergoglio finished second on all four ballots.

Catholic News Service subsequently described both the leaked diary and the efforts of journalists to reconstruct the secret vote. The figures have historical value, but they remain unofficial.

The responsible analytical approach is to separate three things: documented election outcomes, reported internal voting patterns, and interpretations of why candidates gained or lost support.

Baker's account often moves from the second category to the third as though the explanation were established.

It is not enough to know that a candidate lost.

One must establish why.

And in an institution deliberately designed to keep its electoral negotiations secret, that is frequently the most difficult fact to prove.

The Alternating-Pope Theory Explains Too Much

Baker's second major theory is that cardinals favor leaders whose strengths contrast with those of their predecessors.

A diplomatic pope is followed by a pastoral one. A pastoral pope creates demand for someone skilled in administration or international affairs.

Baker applies this reasoning to Francis.

Because Francis was strongly pastoral, he considers Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle too similar to the previous pope.

He therefore favors Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, or Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.

“new popes are usually chosen in order to contrast with the previous one.”

There is a plausible institutional argument beneath this claim. Leadership transitions often create pressure to correct perceived weaknesses.

But the Church is not choosing between two factory settings.

A pope can be a pastor, administrator, diplomat, theologian, and institutional reformer simultaneously. These are overlapping capabilities, not mutually exclusive identities.

The 2025 election exposed the inadequacy of Baker's distinction.

Prevost had spent years serving Catholic communities in Peru. He had also led the international Augustinian order and, from 2023, headed the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican institution involved in selecting bishops.

His career combined local ministry, international religious leadership, and central Church administration.

Francis had personally brought Prevost into that senior Vatican role. In February 2025, Francis elevated him to the Order of Cardinal Bishops.

This was hardly an obscure priest unexpectedly discovered in a remote parish.

Prevost occupied a position from which he interacted with bishops and Church leadership across the world.

The eventual winner did not require the cardinals to choose between pastoral continuity and administrative competence.

He offered both.

Baker's framework treated that combination as two competing electoral preferences when the decisive candidate embodied them together.

The Missing Variable: Francis Had Already Shaped the Electorate

The most important omission concerns the actual men voting in 2025.

Of the 133 cardinals who participated, 108 had been appointed by Francis.

That is approximately 81% of the electorate.

The figure does not establish that these cardinals constituted a unified political bloc. Popes appoint people with varied theological views, national backgrounds, and institutional priorities.

But it does establish that Francis had exercised extraordinary influence over the composition of the body choosing his successor.

That should have been central to any serious forecast.

It was also possible to investigate before the election.

On May 6, 2025, National Catholic Reporter published an examination of the electors' public positions.

Its researchers found that at least 100 had expressed support for synodality, an important priority of Francis involving broader participation, consultation, and shared responsibility within Church governance.

The research also identified disagreements and substantial uncertainty concerning other issues, including women's leadership and blessings for same-sex couples.

This was much more useful evidence than assuming the electorate would demand a leader substantially different from Francis.

It did not prove that Francis's preferred direction would prevail. It established a concrete reason to investigate the possibility of continuity.

And after the election, that possibility gained additional support.

In November 2025, National Catholic Reporter published an investigation based on interviews with 20 cardinal electors and influential non-electors.

The reporting described a substantial preference for preserving Francis's pastoral direction while improving institutional governance.

Prevost's combination of missionary experience and administrative competence suited that objective.

Cardinal Mario Grech offered an especially revealing explanation in an interview with Times of Malta.

“In the end we decided we wanted a shepherd.”

Grech described a Church divided between competing outlooks and a desire for someone capable of bringing those groups together.

That is not simply the alternating-papacy theory in another form.

It is an account of electors seeking continuity in some areas, improvement in others, and a leader able to hold competing constituencies together.

Baker's historical argument would have been stronger had he started with that possibility rather than assuming Francis's pastoral approach had made another pastor less attractive.

The Candidates Were Familiar. The Explanation Was New.

Baker did not invent his five leading candidates.

Parolin, Tagle, Zuppi, Pizzaballa, and Erdő were all recognizable contenders before the election.

In fact, all five appeared among the seven leading names in BetMGM's published odds on April 30, 2025, two days before Baker released his video.

Parolin and Tagle led that list. Zuppi ranked third, while Pizzaballa and Erdő also appeared prominently.

This is revealing.

Baker's historical method did not uncover a neglected candidate whom other observers had overlooked.

It supplied an elaborate explanation for a shortlist already widely circulating.

That does not make the analysis worthless. Selecting familiar candidates can be entirely reasonable when they possess genuine advantages.

But it raises a testable question: What additional predictive information did Baker's six-conclave framework contribute?

The video never establishes that its historical rules outperform conventional candidate assessments.

There is no demonstrated success rate.

There is no comparison against predictions made without those rules.

There is no systematic examination of unsuccessful candidates to determine whether the supposed patterns distinguished likely winners from likely losers.

Instead, historical anecdotes become reasons to favor candidates who were already considered plausible.

And Baker's own examples complicate his conclusions.

He argues that obvious favorites tend to lose, while acknowledging that Montini was the clear choice in 1963 and Ratzinger the leading candidate in 2005.

He argues that unsuccessful contenders rarely return to win, while making Bergoglio's unsuccessful 2005 candidacy an important part of his explanation for 2013.

Exceptions do not automatically destroy historical tendencies.

But a predictive rule needs defined conditions under which it is expected to work.

Otherwise, any result can be accommodated afterward.

The Man His Model Failed to Examine

Prevost was not inevitable.

His American nationality was widely considered a potential obstacle, given the United States' enormous influence in international affairs.

He was also relatively new to the College of Cardinals, having received his red hat in September 2023.

Those were legitimate reasons for uncertainty.

Yet his other qualifications deserved attention.

He had spent substantial portions of his career outside the United States, acquired Peruvian citizenship, led an international religious order, and occupied a major Vatican appointment.

He was neither an ideological celebrity nor an elderly transitional figure.

He represented an alternative to the assumption that electors had to choose between a Francis-like pastor and a Vatican diplomat.

Contemporary reporting after the election supports the importance of those distinctions.

The Washington Post reported that Prevost had attracted support from cardinals seeking continuity with Francis, particularly among international electors familiar with his work.

The report also cited an unnamed Vatican official who said Prevost had performed better than many outsiders expected from the initial ballot. The precise voting details remain unverified because of conclave secrecy.

The subsequent election was remarkably swift.

The conclave began on May 7 and elected Prevost on its fourth ballot on May 8.

With 133 electors participating, at least 89 votes were required for victory.

An early consensus formed around someone Baker did not include among his five leading possibilities.

That omission is more informative than the mere failure of his final prediction.

His method concentrated attention on prominent ideological figures and recognizable diplomats while failing to adequately evaluate a candidate who combined pastoral experience, organizational leadership, and personal connections across the Church.

The outcome demonstrated the value of examining candidates' actual institutional relationships rather than reducing their prospects to ideological position and preferred leadership style.

Leo XIV Rejected the Simplest Explanation

Two days after his election, Leo XIV addressed the College of Cardinals.

His remarks provided unusually direct evidence of the direction he intended to take.

He explicitly affirmed the Church's continuing commitment to the path established after Vatican II and identified priorities expressed in Francis's Evangelii Gaudium.

These included missionary renewal, synodality, care for marginalized people, and engagement with the contemporary world.

Leo also explained his chosen name.

He invoked Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social consequences of industrialization, and connected that tradition to the challenges of artificial intelligence, human dignity, justice, and labor.

Here was a newly elected pope drawing directly on Francis's legacy while establishing his own emphasis on emerging social and technological challenges.

His program was not a simple reversal of his predecessor.

Nor was it merely a repetition.

The distinction matters because Baker's analysis treats the papacy as though the electorate were repeatedly correcting the excesses of the previous administration.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it preserves an existing direction while changing the person responsible for carrying it forward.

And sometimes it chooses a leader whose abilities combine the supposedly competing qualities of earlier candidates.

These are different institutional decisions.

A model that reduces them to alternating personalities risks missing the actual work of succession.

The Verdict: A Good Story Is Not a Reliable Prediction

Baker deserves credit for making complicated Church history accessible.

His account identifies genuine historical questions: Why do frontrunners lose? How do ideological divisions shape voting? Why does age matter? How do cardinals balance institutional continuity against the need for change?

These are legitimate questions.

But asking them is not the same as proving the answers.

His six-election framework suffers from three substantial weaknesses.

It draws general rules from a small set of outcomes. It relies on historical voting accounts whose completeness and reliability vary. And it interprets past elections through flexible categories that become difficult to falsify.

Then it applies those rules to a substantially different electorate without giving sufficient attention to the cardinals' documented positions, relationships, and institutional experience.

That is the central failure.

Baker correctly understood that compromise can determine a conclave. He did not adequately investigate what compromise meant to the particular cardinals voting in May 2025.

They elected a pope whose international pastoral experience and administrative background offered a combination his analysis should have recognized as consequential.

And they did so quickly.

I am not interested in punishing a historian because a prediction failed. Predictions fail regularly, even when their underlying reasoning is sound.

The question is whether the failure exposes a weakness in the reasoning.

Here, it does.

Baker took six complicated, partly secret elections and turned them into a remarkably tidy account of how the Catholic Church chooses its leaders.

The history was more uncertain than he made it appear. The electorate was more complicated than his categories allowed. The future was less obedient than his framework required.

The problem was never that the next pope was impossible to predict. It was that Baker's explanation made the previous six look easier to predict than they actually were.

That is how a convincing historical narrative becomes a poor forecasting tool.

And when Robert Prevost appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, the distinction became impossible to ignore.

References

1. Original work — Matt Baker, UsefulCharts.
Every Papal Conclave Since 1958 and My Prediction for the Next Pope. May 2, 2025.
The original video establishes Baker's historical framework, candidate classifications, qualifications, and prediction. It is the primary subject of this critique.

2. The Holy See — Biography of Pope Leo XIV.
Official Vatican biography.
Documents Prevost's career in Peru, leadership of the Augustinian order, senior Vatican appointments, elevation to cardinal, and election.

3. The Holy See — Universi Dominici Gregis.
Apostolic constitution governing papal elections. February 22, 1996, subsequently amended.
Establishes the secrecy requirements, procedures for counting ballots, destruction of voting materials, and restrictions on access to official voting records.

4. Catholic News Service — Election 2013: Book Looks Behind the Scenes of Conclave.
Read the April 15, 2019 report.
Explains how journalists reconstructed earlier conclaves using leaked records and testimony, clarifying why reported vote counts require careful attribution.

5. National Catholic Reporter — How Pope Francis Holds Powerful Sway Over the 2025 Conclave.
Read the May 6, 2025 investigation.
Documents research into the cardinals' positions before the election, including their support for synodality and differences over other Church priorities.

6. National Catholic Reporter — Inside the Conclave: How an American Missionary Became Pope Leo XIV.
Read the November 5, 2025 investigation.
Reconstructs the election through interviews with cardinals and examines why Prevost's pastoral and administrative experience attracted support. The reconstruction remains subject to conclave secrecy.

7. Times of Malta — How Cardinals Decided the Next Pope.
Read the May 26, 2025 interview with Cardinal Mario Grech.
Provides direct testimony about the leadership qualities electors sought, particularly pastoral responsibility, reconciliation, and the ability to bridge divisions.

8. The Holy See — Address of Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals.
Read the official May 10, 2025 address.
Establishes Leo's publicly declared commitment to important elements of Francis's legacy and his reasons for adopting the name Leo XIV.

9. The Vatican — Biography of John XXIII.
Read the official historical biography.
Records how Roncalli's election was initially regarded as transitional, illustrating the difficulty of predicting a pope's eventual program from his pre-election reputation.

10. BetMGM — Next Pope Odds.
Read the April 30, 2025 candidate rankings.
Provides a dated commercial snapshot showing that Baker's five selected candidates were already prominent before his analysis appeared. Betting odds are evidence of prevailing expectations, not reliable measurements of actual electoral support.