Cardinals in: choosing the next pope

The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. For nearly 20 years, there's been a wave of disappearances in Mexico. But the discovery of a site strewn with shoes and bones is a shock even to a country accustomed to mysterious vanishings. And cinema operators would, in general, like to see more of the teenage visitors who have recently been drifting away. What they don't want to see is what's happening at showings of the new Minecraft movie: a bunch of kids absolutely going berserk. First up, though.

For the first time in 12 years, the Roman Catholic Church is without a leader following the death of Pope Francis. In Rome, bells tolled and mourners prayed. Within the Vatican itself, there will be sorrow mingled with anticipation.

John Hooper is our Italy and Vatican correspondent.

Roman Catholics from many parts of the world, particularly perhaps from Latin America, will be hastening to Rome with a view to attending the funeral. And the members of his College of Cardinals, his body of advisors, they too will be hastening to Rome. Those of them under the age of 80 have the task of selecting the new pope, and that could change the entire direction of the Catholic Church.

And in your experience, is the selection of a new pope always a sort of marking of a new era? Does it always seem like a turbulent time, or does this time in particular feel like it's an important time for the church?

I think that this is a very important moment for the wider world, I would say, because Pope Francis's voice has been one that has been stoutly opposed to some of the tenets of the right-wing populism that is in the ascendant in so many parts of the world at the moment, and not least in the United States. Francis's voice was a very effective counterweight to that kind of rampant conservatism, and it Remains to be seen whether the Pope who succeeds him is someone who is prepared to continue to act as a counterweight, or someone who has a more accommodating style.

[Speaker:JASON] Now, I know that the selection process is one with lots of pomp and circumstance and detail and roles for very many people, but briefly, how does it work? What will this conclave do? How does the next Pope get selected?

If they're going to stick to the rule book, the conclave, the assembly at which the next Pope is selected, will take place between 15 and 20 days after Francis's death. The two decisive figures in the interim are an official called the Camerlengo, who deals with the duties to be performed immediately after the death of the Pope. That at the moment is an Irish-American Cardinal, Kevin Farrell. The other figure who becomes increasingly prominent is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Giovanni Battista Re, who has been a senior official in the Vatican since the days of John Paul II. And he's the person who will preside over the conclave and over many of the meetings that take place beforehand, at which the cardinals get to know one another because some of them come from far-flung locations and discuss what is likely to be the most important issue facing the Roman Catholic Church over the years to come. And of course, who might be the cardinal best suited to be the pope who has to confront that issue.

What will these cardinals believe is the big issue facing the church?

One has to speculate because there are a number of different issues. One, for example, is the rise of China and whether the Vatican should take a confrontational or an accommodating stance towards this rising power. There is, in recent years, the issue of clerical sex abuse and whether that has been really tackled with sufficient rigor under the papacy of Francis. Then there is the issue of whether the Franciscan papacy did enough to implement something that Francis made prominent in the early stages of his papacy but really did not follow through on, which is devolving more of the power over the church to the bishops and archbishops in the field, so to speak, through assemblies at the Vatican. And so all of those issues could be regarded as being the decisive ones.

The issues that you mentioned there feel structural rather than ideological per se. The big question about who would succeed Francis is whether or not they would be as liberal, I suppose, as open-minded about things that the church before his papacy was quite stern on and he seemed open-minded about. What's your view on which way things might lean in that regard?

Well, that's going to be something that, if you like, underlies all of the discussions. As ever in the last century or so, the Roman Catholic Church is divided between progressives and conservatives. And One of the intriguing aspects of the next conclave is to what extent the conservatives can assert themselves in a conclave which has been almost exclusively handpicked by Pope Francis, a man who was quite clearly on the liberal wing of the church. But that said, the conservatives are well organized, and what we could see is a coming together of particularly the American conservative cardinals with some of those in the global south, and particularly Africa, who are conservative on a number of theological issues, and particularly on the issue of gay unions.

And with a historical mindset, John, do you think that what happens with successive papacies is one is a reaction to the last, that a particularly liberal pope would be likely to be followed by a particularly conservative one, keeping some kind of long-run balance?

That can certainly happen. If you look at the last two conclaves, the one following the death of John Paul II predictably produced a conservative pope in the form of Benedict XVI. By the end of his papacy, almost all of the cardinals had been picked either by him or by his conservative predecessor, Saint John Paul II. Yet it produced Francis, which is an apparent contradiction. The one thing that you can say with certainty about conclaves is that they are unpredictable.

John, thanks very much for your time.

My pleasure, Joss.

Last month, a grim discovery was made on a ranch about an hour outside Guadalajara in central Mexico.

We found 3 ovens, and in the middle one, when we dug down further, we found bullets, teeth, and fragments of burnt bodies.

As well as ovens and bone fragments, hundreds of pairs of shoes were found and other bits of clothing. They almost certainly belong to people who have disappeared without a trace.

Sarah Burke is The Economist's Mexico City bureau chief.

There has been an epidemic of disappearances in Mexico since 2006. That's when the then-government's war on drugs caused gangs to split and fight between themselves. And this latest horror has reignited fury at the situation. Protests like this one in Mexico City have continued since the remains on the ranch were discovered. And there's some hope that it could at last force change.

Now, Sarah, we spoke to you almost exactly a year ago about government attempts to basically even figure out the number of people who have disappeared. It seems as if the numbers aren't any less grim than they were then.

They're no less grim and no less controversial. What we do know is that numbers of disappearances rose sharply during the 6-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Now, he stepped down last year. Last year, an average of 37 people disappeared every day, and that's risen to 40 since October. Many of these are young men who are entangled with gangs, and it's about gangs taking out rivals, but many others are just simply unrelated people caught up in it. There are nearly 6,000 clandestine graves that have been discovered across Mexico. There's a register that says there's officially 124,000 people missing, but most people think that's far too low.

And so what do we know so far about the latest discovery at this ranch?

Well, it looks like it was used as a training camp by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which is Mexico's most brutal cartel and one of the two biggest, along with Sinaloa. And there's no real dispute about that. The authorities and people who discovered the site say that. Now, it's also clear that many of the victims were forcibly recruited recruited, often answering messages or TikTok advertisements for jobs as security guards, and they didn't know they were being taken into gangs. They may have failed training and have been killed for that reason. Now, more controversial is the cremation oven. So the Attorney General says there's no evidence that there was mass extermination carried out on the site, as many seem to think, but he did say that there's evidence that people were cremated and their remains then brought to the site. So investigations into that are still ongoing. But what we do know is that gangs get bodies in myriad ways— burning them, dissolving them in acid, or burying them in the desert— because it simply means it's much harder for the authorities to go after them.

So what are the authorities doing then?

So disappearances are given far too little attention given the scale of them. One disappearance in another country would cause absolute outrage, and here we're talking about thousands. And this suits politicians. They can point to falling murder rates because the murder rates as horrifically high as they are, are falling. But actually, when you add in disappearances, which are essentially murders without a body, the overall toll is climbing. And criminals like disappearing people because getting rid of bodies means they avoid investigation. Now, the previous president took a very hands-off strategy to security that really allowed gangs to flourish and do whatever they liked. He also refused to meet mothers of the disappeared people. And it's really these mothers who go out as volunteer groups and look for people and do forensic work. The state does not do much on this, and a sign of this is really that the latest discovery on the ranch was actually a place that had supposedly already been searched by the authorities. Claudia Sheinbaum, the president since October, has promised to improve security, and since this finding has also said she's going to do way more to tackle disappearances.

And should that claim be taken seriously? What, what is she doing?

She does appear to want to take a more serious approach, both on security generally and on disappearances, and it's not going to take much to improve on her predecessor's attitude. So she has said she'll do several things on disappearances in particular, such as creating a national database of unidentified bodies, scrapping a 72-hour wait time before the authorities will even register someone as missing, and she says she's going to strengthen the National Search Commission by giving them more technology such as drones. But realistically, a lot of these things are already happening or have been on paper to happen already, and there are still many, many issues that stand in the way of any real tackling of this problem.

Go on, what are they?

So to start with, you have funding issues and you have capacity issues. So Mexico has a huge shortage of forensic specialists. So you have all these bodies sitting there unidentified, but really no one to work on them. There's a lot of authorities that don't really care or don't have much interest, or sometimes even working in cahoots with the criminals. Now, that's especially the case in some local areas where even the authorities are involved in some points in disappearing people, or certainly in covering it up or turning a blind eye. There are certain suspicions that officials in Jalisco knew about the existence of this ranch. You're talking about an hour outside one of the biggest and most important cities in Mexico. We have had an arrest or two. There's the alleged leader of the training camp who's been arrested, but it's unclear. And many of the volunteer groups and families of the disappeared really think this isn't going to be properly investigated or resolved. There are many cases of disappeared people. When I walk around Mexico City, or you visit really any town in Mexico, you see posters of faces of the missing with a number to call, and often they say, this person was taken alive and we want them back alive. And these go mainly unnoticed by people who just walk past them. Families of those who think their relatives may have disappeared in this ranch in Jalisco worry that the same indifference is going to set in for their relatives too.

Sarah, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Hollywood's first hit of 2025 arrived this month in the form of a Minecraft movie.

This place makes no sense.

Don't I know it.

The film took more than $300 million at the box office on its opening weekend. This puts it on a similar trajectory as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which went on to make over $1 billion in 2023.

Tom Wainwright is The Economist's tech and media editor.

It comes at a difficult time for cinema operators whose takings last year were 30% below their level before the COVID-19 pandemic. You'd think then that The Minecraft Movie would be a welcome success for movie theaters, but not every cinema operator is happy. It seems that the Minecraft movie has a habit of sending audiences berserk. There's been footage circulating online of teenagers screaming and shouting during screenings, running around throwing their popcorn, throwing drinks, all this kind of thing. And it seems that there's a TikTok trend in which particular phrases in the movie, like "chicken jockey" or "water bucket," trigger audiences to do particular things. Whether that's throwing their drinks or throwing popcorn or whatever it might be. And actually, my own kids went to see this film, and they report that this is still happening. They said that people in the audience were shouting away through the film, running around, and they kind of enjoyed it. But I think for some cinemas, it's not been totally welcome. We've seen reports in the US and in the UK of cinemas banning children from evening screenings or banning underage people from attending without an adult. I think ushers are getting a bit sick of the mess and dealing with rowdy behavior and all this kind of thing. But actually, in some ways, the phenomenon is encouraging for cinemas, because crowds of teenagers in this age bracket of 11 to 16 or so are a fairly rare sight at cinemas these days. They very often don't go to watch films at movie theaters when they come out. They tend to wait around a couple of months to see them when they go on streaming instead. It's much cheaper, it's arguably more convenient, and so there's been a worry among theatre operators that this age bracket have missed out on the cinema-going bug. Cinemas have tried to reverse this by eventizing moviegoing, and they've done all kinds of things— laying on entertainment in the lobby or improving their catering— and it's not been all that successful. So phenomena like the Minecraft trend that we're seeing at the moment is encouraging for them because it seems that it's one way that this age bracket, this group of teenagers, are getting getting back into the habit of seeing films in big groups and going to see them at the cinema. Now the obvious question is, can this trick be repeated? Ideally maybe with a bit less mess and a bit less disruption. And it could be, because 3 years or so ago TikTok inspired a similar trend with one of the Minions movies. There was a hashtag #gentleminions which people placed on clips of themselves going to watch this film with friends, all dressed up in formal wear, in suits and ties and so on. Some of them were banned for being rowdy, but again, cinemas were pretty pleased to have this trend which was encouraging people to go and see the film in person rather than wait for it on streaming. If we're going to see more of this in future, I wonder if movies based on video games could be good candidates for more of this, because with games it means that there's already a big built-in fan base. Minecraft, for example, has more than 100 million players per month. And these players, these fans, often meet online on forums like Twitch and posting videos on YouTube, sharing memes, in-jokes, all the rest of it. And so it's an easier mechanism for them to meet up and to spread these kind of viral trends. And the good news is for cinema operators, we've got several more movies based on games in the works, and just in the next 12 months, we're likely to see new movies based on Mario, a sequel to the Mario movie, there's a Mortal Kombat movie in the works, so I would suggest to cinema ushers that they brace themselves for more of this kind of thing.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.