Father knows best: Papal picks from a real Catholic priest

Tomorrow, 133 prelates will enter the Sistine Chapel to begin the secretive process of choosing the next pope. But who will they ultimately choose? To shed some light on the subject, Kalshi’s Terry Oldreal sat down with a Catholic priest who has met several of the top contenders to get his unique take on trading the papal conclave.

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This is an opinion, not financial advice. The views expressed are those of the author, who uses a pseudonym and cannot trade on the platform.

Kalshi: Roughly, how long have you been a priest?Priest: Getting close to 20 years.

Kalshi: How many popes have you gone through in that time?Priest: Benedict resigned, but this is the first time, as a priest, that I’ve had a pope who was actively “pope-ing” die.

Kalshi: So you have seen the conclave process before?Priest: Yeah, I remember keeping an eye on it last time. When Pope Francis stepped out onto the balcony. I was like, “Who’s this guy?”

Kalshi: He was a real long shot.Priest: I did not have any money on Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 2013, unfortunately.

Kalshi: Did you have money on anybody? Any friendly bets?Priest: I did lose a friendly bet with a brother priest that Francis, an older one-lunged Jesuit, would be dead within a year. I figured he was too liberal, and I thought the Italians would poison him within six months.

Kalshi: Well, he really proved you wrong. He had a good run.Priest: Swiss Guard, man. Hats off to the Swiss Guard.

Kalshi: Okay, so I guess, I don’t know how familiar you are with papal betting, but it does go back quite a bit.Priest: It is not common knowledge among priests. We did not receive any training on the pros or cons of papal betting during our multi-year formation to become Catholic priests. Somehow it slipped through the cracks.

Kalshi: That’s too bad.Priest: I agree. I think with the good work you and your company are doing, hopefully you’ll get yourselves on seminary curriculums in the next handful of years.

Kalshi: Now, it’s my understanding that back in the day, you could be excommunicated for this type of speculation. But the Vatican changed its stance. So to be clear, will anyone be excommunicated for legally trading on this papal election in the U.S.?Priest: As far as I know, no. I'm no canon law expert. But no one threatened me with excommunication for doing this interview.

Kalshi: Is there anything sinful about trading on who the next pope will be, as far as the church is concerned?Priest: Do I think it’s a sin? No. This sounds very human to me. Frankly, this sounds very much like everything the Church is about.But there definitely could be some traditionalist Catholics who I’m sure would want to confess this after clicking a few links.

Kalshi: You’ve got the whole canon law thing. Shouldn’t there just be a yes or no answer here, Padre?Priest: Wouldn’t that be nice, Terry? Wouldn’t that be nice?Everybody thinks the Catholics are hidebound and all toe the same line. But once you scratch the surface, you find a lot of nuance and diversity even within Holy Mother Church.

Kalshi: Sounds like some liberal BS to me.Priest: I know it does, which is why you want to get your trading in now, before they change it.

But look, everything that I understand is that it's a sin to lose your house or your rent money or to turn your wife and your kids out on the street.Is it a sin to have a little bit of side pot or a little bit of a side hustle where you're playing some of the odds? No.This has been long tolerated in Catholic countries, in the Catholic Church. So make sure that you are, quote, unquote, doing it in moderation and call it good.

Kalshi: Same sense that alcohol is not a sin unless you are abusing it.Priest: There you go.It’s funny, but the next pope may come from the Philippines, and Filipinos, generally speaking, love to gamble. This is one of the most Catholic countries in the world, and just like you go to parish fairs in the United States, in the Midwest, and you have bingo, or lottery, or raffles, the Filipinos have cockfights.

Kalshi: For real?Priest: There's the parish festival and all the like, churchy things, and then they have cockfights, which is a huge amount of gambling.Priests raise cocks, priests back the rooster fighting. All of it.Tagle (a current contender for the papacy from the Philippines) might be too liberal to get elected the next pope. But if he does, the next pope will be from one of the most gambling obsessed countries on the planet.

Kalshi: Speaking of Tagle, what can you tell us about the major contenders? Did you know anything about these guys before Francis died, or are they all new to you, too?Priest: I've shared a meal with Cardinal Sarah and with Cardinal Tagle.I've shaken hands with Cardinal Parolin.So those guys are probably the ones that I was most familiar with. And Sarah has been papabile for 20 years.

Kalshi: What does that mean?Priest: Papabile is the Italian term. It means pope-able. A potential Pope.

Kalshi: I see. So he's been waiting in the wings, so to speak. What about the current frontrunner, Parolin?Priest: So Cardinal Parolin is the Vatican Secretary of State. He's the 70-year-old Italian insider.Cardinal Sarah from Guinea is almost 80 and probably considered to be too old.Cardinal Tagle is the 67-year-old Filipino.So I vaguely know these guys, and have known their names.Then there’s the greatest name of papal contender ever, [screamed in an exaggerated Italian accent] Pizzaballa! He's new to me.

I'm not sure about Kalshi odds, but I definitely have seen at least a little bit of American chatter around Cardinal O'Malley out of Boston.

Kalshi: It’s a sprawling organization, so I imagine it's hard to keep track.Priest: One of the things that is going to make this a really interesting conclave is that most of these cardinals are fairly new to the game. I think 108 of these guys were named by Francis.Additionally, Francis passed over a lot of traditional picks and bestowed cardinal hats on unexpected people.

An American example would be that Francis passed over then-Archbishop Chaput in Philadelphia and gave the cardinal hat to another priest, because he wanted someone that was more matching his view of the church in the world. When was the last time that an Archbishop of Philadelphia didn't get named a cardinal? Long-ass time ago.And Francis did this all throughout the world, passing over the most well-connected and polished prelates in order to give the cardinal hat to unexpected people. We have cardinals from unexpected places like Ghana and Papua New Guinea.So that means that we have the potential for a more wild card papal election than we've had for quite some time.

Kalshi: Is the amount of cardinals set?Priest: The number of papal electors is set by papal decree. And so that set point right now is about 135. So the way that you lose the ability to elect a pope is, you know, you're stripped of clergy status, which is pretty unlikely, or you age out—you’re 80—or you die.So, Francis has, not unfairly, stacked the deck.

Kalshi: To be clear, this wasn’t the equivalent of someone expanding the Supreme Court or anything like that. He wasn’t stacking the deck, in that sense, right? He just did it by attrition.Priest: Yes, exactly. Stacked it by attrition, by going with unexpected candidates that matched his views. In the Catholic world, the pope, just like bishops, has large amounts of freedom. The pope can do what the hell the pope wants to do.

Kalshi: You've mentioned age. How big of a factor do you think age will be?Priest: Oh, it's huge. It's absolutely huge.What makes it really interesting is that lifespans have increased within the lifespans of these guys. We're dealing with a huge extension of the human lifespan in the last handful of generations. And the guys electing the new pope are in their 60s and 70s.Back in the 1970s, John Paul II was elected in his 50s. If you would have interviewed those cardinal electors after the last pope had only lasted a month, and asked them “Do you think that this guy is going to reign for almost 30 years?” the answer would have been “No!”So are the cardinals going to elect a 57-year-old? The answer is no.

Kalshi: Basically, you think it'll skew older because they don't want somebody in there for 40 years?Priest: Bingo. Like they want someone to go in there and to engage their agenda, whatever their agenda is, with fresh ideas and a fresh approach. But whether they are pro-Francis or anti-Francis, or whatever, they want them to die in 10 to 12 years.

Kalshi: Why? If they're carrying out the agenda that they think is best, why would they not want a longer reign? You think of the Supreme Court. Bush picked John Roberts knowing he'd be in there for 20, 30, 40 years.Why would these guys not want their own guy in there for as long as possible?Priest: Cause they want to be the next guy. [laughs maniacally]That’s terrible. Your priest should not say that. I'm sorry. But I'm not sorry, yeah,

Kalshi: That’s an honest answer? That’s not a joke?Priest: Yeah, it’s an honest answer. I'm never going to be in that room, so I can say that about the church that I've given my life to, yeah.

Kalshi: I hadn't even thought about that.Priest: Also, it’s because guys get stale. Power corrupts, and you get stale.

Kalshi: What do you think in terms of liberal versus conservative? I recently heard the expression that they "always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope.” Is that the vibe this time around?Priest: I mean, I have to imagine that they're going to go more conservative. But maybe my view is biased.The seat of opposition to the papacy of Pope Francis was the United States of America. The most anti-Francis Catholic country in the world was the United States of America.So maybe that means I don't have a clue what the actual stage looks like for the electors that are coming from the rest of the world.We just had the Cardinal Archbishop of New York state that it's time to swing the pendulum. And he was an ideological leader in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for an extended period of time.So from where we sit in the United States, everybody figures that it's got to be more conservative. But is that how it looks if you're an elector coming from the Global South? I have no idea, and I will be fascinated as much as everybody else.

Kalshi: Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the guys with the current highest odds seem to be at least moderate to liberal rather than conservative. Is that fair to say?Priest: You guys got Parolin who, I think, is considered kind of a moderate, compared to Francis.I don’t really know where Pizzaballa sits.The African Cardinals definitely trend more conservative.

Kalshi: You don’t have to trade on the winner. You could also fade the losers. You think there might be an opportunity to trade against some of the more conservative candidates thinking their odds might be a little too high?Priest: Absolutely. I mean, everybody that’s getting their papal information from American secular media, especially conservative American secular media—they're going to be pushing the conservatives so that way they can set themselves up to complain about the Catholic Church when they don’t elect someone from Africa.I have to imagine that there’s going to be a large amount of emotional investing coming from conservative American Catholics and Catholic adjacents who think that the Catholic Church has to correct.

Kalshi: So they might trade with their hearts, rather than their heads.Priest: Absolutely.

Kalshi: There are a lot of Italian names on the list, obviously. But there hasn’t been an Italian since before John Paul II, right?Priest: Okay, here’s what we haven’t talked about yet.What's the burning issue for the cardinals?People forget that the burning issue in 2013 was that Benedict couldn’t handle the bureaucracy and the administration. So it was scandal after scandal after scandal coming out of the Vatican. And the Italian media is merciless in exposing the scandals.So they went to Francis because they thought that this guy had some reformer cred and the ability to march to the beat of his own drum and not get sucked into the way that the Vatican has operated forever.So this time, what's the thing that the cardinals are trying to manage for most of all?If it's administration and reform, then they choose somebody based on that.If it’s, you know, the emergence of China on the world scene, maybe they go for an Asian, right?If it’s, you know, violence in the Middle East and relations with Islam, maybe they go for Pizzaballa, who’s an Italian, but has been a diplomat for 30 years in Jerusalem.But if these guys want someone that’s bringing in a fresh approach, they are not picking a curial cardinal that's been in Rome for 20 years. They are picking someone that's coming from Buenos Aires or Manila or Jerusalem—they are choosing an outsider.We’ve got 135 electors. 108 of them have been chosen by Francis. What are the themes that these guys are going to coalesce around? They're going to pick based on that.

Priest: Now, a thing that I didn’t mention is abuse scandals. There hasn’t been the same reckoning in some places that we’ve seen in the US, Europe and parts of South America.

Kalshi: You’re saying that some places where they haven't had a reckoning yet, they may not want to pick it because it could blow up in their face?Priest: Yes. Like, so like an Asian or African country where it hasn’t come to the forefront—but it’s probably simmering—if they pick somebody from there, and then it blows up, then it's, you know, just another, yet another scandal, rather than someone having to manage it who wasn’t directly involved.There could be skeletons in a closet; mismanagement or poor oversight.Beyond that, do you want someone in a position of power and authority—like the most important power and authority—to guide through a crisis moment, who hasn’t actually had to manage this crisis before?I mean, it’s a good question. Look at what happened in Chile.Francis demanded the resignation of every single bishop in that country because they mishandled the event so poorly. He was incredibly heavy-handed—and presumably had every reason to be, because it sounds like those bishops absolutely failed in their responsibility of caring for the flock.But again, and this is the American perspective. We think that there is abuse everywhere that will have to be dealt with because this is a societal problem, not just a church problem.

Kalshi: Once the voting starts, how many rounds do you think it'll take?Priest: I mean, we haven’t had a papal conclave go more than five days in over 150 years.

The first day, there’s one round, and then the next day, there are four rounds, and most days there’s four sessions of voting. Do the math for five days and keep it under. I have to imagine that we’re dealing with 15-ish rounds.

But again, a lot of these cardinals don’t know each other, and they don’t know this process. So this is the first time that they’re sitting in the Sistine doing this stuff. Is it possible that a clear favorite doesn’t emerge and it takes them longer? Yes, it is.

Kalshi: Here’s a good one: what will be the next pope’s name? Any guesses there, if you had to pick?Priest: You know that movie The Conclave? The fictional pope chooses the name “Innocent.”

Kalshi: Picking a name based on a movie isn’t a good idea. It’s like after Home Alone came out, when a bunch of people in Germany started naming their kids “Kevin.” And now there are German guys named Kevin who are treated like the lowest of the low.Priest: Because of Home Alone?

Kalshi: Yeah. It's called Kevinismus.Priest: What about “Pius the 13th?” What—what about “Peter the Second?”

Kalshi: Oh, that’s a bold choice. I’ll see if they can add “Peter,” if anyone’s got the stones to trade on that.Priest: I think that there’s superstition around that one.

Kalshi: How about the birth continent?Priest: I mean, let’s go South America.

Kalshi: South America. Okay. Any thoughts on which country?Priest: Nope. I think I’ve run my mouth sufficiently for the day.

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