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Donnerstag, 14. März 2013
Omnia instaurare in Christo
Mittwoch, 13. März 2013
Bold prediction and updated probabilities
My current prediction for the conclave: an early run-off between Scherer and Scola, both get burned in the process and Cardinals realize they both don't have much charism. After that, strong candidates with deep faith suddenly emerge: Bagnasco, O'Malley and Burke. One of those three, most likely O'Malley (10% currently) is elected the 265th successor to St. Peter.
Dienstag, 12. März 2013
TOP 20 Papal Candidates
(Source: centurioweblog.blogspot.ch , 11.3.2013, 23:00) | ||
Cardinal | Country | Probability |
Angelo Scola | Italy | 19.75% |
Odilo Scherer | Brazil | 11.11% |
Peter Turkson | Ghana | 9.88% |
Marc Ouellet | Canada | 4.44% |
Gianfranco Ravasi | Italy | 3.17% |
Seán Patrick O'Malley | United States | 3.17% |
Raymond Leo Burke | United States | 2.78% |
Luis Antonio Tagle | Philippines | 2.22% |
Timothy M. Dolan | United States | 2.22% |
Angelo Bagnasco | Italy | 1.78% |
Leonardo Sandri | Argentina | 1.78% |
Mauro Piacenza | Italy | 1.11% |
Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga | Honduras | 1.11% |
Philippe Barbarin | France | 1.11% |
Thomas Christopher Collins | Canada | 1.11% |
Wilfrid Napier | South Africa | 1.11% |
Jorge Bergoglio | Argentina | 0.89% |
Antonio Cañizares Llovera | Spain | 0.67% |
Béchara Boutros Raï | Lebanon | 0.67% |
Agostino Vallini | Italy | 0.67% |
Tonights update of my top 20 Papal probabilities. Amazing: Card. Raymond Leo Burke has shot up (from practically nowhere) to place number 7. Also Sean O Malley OFM Cap has risen in rank order to number 6, whereas Odilo Scherer has replaced Turkson as No.2 (despite his Sacrilege in the Laetare Mass yesterday in Rome - Cathcon has reported). The mathematical algorithm for calculating probabilities is unchanged, I simply updated the odds sourced from paddypower.com @ 11 pm CET.
Happy conclusion: The US-American Cardinals are now definitely in the Game and will play an important part in the conclave. Globalisation in the Church does not jump in leaps and bounds but moves rather from Italy to Poland to Germany to US?
Montag, 11. März 2013
Sonntag, 10. März 2013
What does the 2005 conclave tell us?
voting patterns of the 2005 conclave
sources: wikipedia.it, and M. Politi "Benedikt, Krise eines Pontifikats", Rotbuch Verlag Berlin 2012.
As we put our minds to the upcoming conclave in terms of "game theory" it is important to recall the two most recent instances in 2005 and 1978. Lets start with the 2005 conclave.
Martini SJ (+) was an early candidate of the progressives in the first ballot, however already by the 2nd vote the progressives lost confidence and did not vote for Martini, switching to Bergoglio SJ as a more likely anti-Ratzinger, more moderately progressive candidate. However in the end the neoconservatives won out and Ratzinger was elected with 84 votes, 7 votes more than the 2/3 majority needed.
Of course, according to "universi dominici gregis", an absolute majority after 34 ballots would have been sufficient as well, however only after 4 ballots the decision was reached. No one did want to go to 34 ballots. This rule has been abolished by Benedikt XVI. and now the 2/3 majority rule is again the key point to keep in mind. This means that this time, if there is a block of 40 Cardinal-Electors, they can block the majority candidate.
This time the conservative candidate is most likely to be Card. Scola and the progressive candidate Card. Scherer. If Scherer can have a block of 40 votes, he can block Scola, and a compromise candidate would have to emerge. Who would that compromise candidate be?
Card. Scola still the front-runner
TOP 20 Papal Probabilities | ||
(Source: centurioweblog.blogspot.com, 10.3.2013, 23:00) |
||
Cardinal | Country | Probability (%) |
Angelo Scola | Italy | 23.19% |
Peter Turkson | Ghana | 11.59% |
Odilo Scherer | Brazil | 6.62% |
Marc Ouellet | Canada | 4.64% |
Gianfranco Ravasi | Italy | 3.86% |
Leonardo Sandri | Argentina | 2.32% |
Angelo Bagnasco | Italy | 2.32% |
Luis Antonio Tagle | Philippines | 2.32% |
Timothy M. Dolan | United States | 2.32% |
Philippe Barbarin | France | 1.41% |
Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga | Honduras | 1.41% |
Wilfrid Napier | South Africa | 1.41% |
Seán Patrick O'Malley | United States | 1.41% |
Mauro Piacenza | Italy | 1.16% |
Jorge Bergoglio | Argentina | 0.93% |
Béchara Boutros Raï | Lebanon | 0.70% |
Antonio Cañizares Llovera | Spain | 0.70% |
George Pell | Australia | 0.58% |
Cláudio Hummes | Brazil | 0.58% |
João Braz de Aviz | Brazil | 0.58% |
Update to method:
Updated with paddypower.com odds (10.3.,23:00), took out failed curial administrators such as card. bertone and card.levada set to 0%, also all cardinals from de,at,ch, and cee (poland, slovenia, croatia, hungary, czech rep.) set to 0% because after woytila/ratzinger there will be no more german or cee pope for a while.
Probability of tradition-friendly Pope calculated
METHOD: I did the following. I took the odds for each Cardinal being elected pope from paddypower.com (March 9,18:30 CET), cleaned out those who are not Cardinal-Electors (quite surprising how many had to be cleaned out). For those Cardinals where paddypower did not give a probability I assumed 1/115. Then I set the probabilities for all German speaking Cardinal-Electors to 0%, and gave an age bonus to all Cardinal-Electors below 80 doubling the probability of the youngest (53 years of age, Cardinal Cleemis, India) and then a sliding scale to no increase in probability for the oldest (Card. Severino Poletto). All those probabilities where then re-normalized to a total of 100%.
Method: I used the list of Cardinal-Electors who have celebrated a Traditional Latin Mass (source: Catholic Church Conservation Blog) as an indication of Tradition-Friendliness and applied that to the probabilities derived as described before.
RESULTS:
TOP 20 Papal Probabilities (source: centurioweblog.blogspot.com, 9.3.2013) | ||
Cardinal | Country | Probability |
Angelo Scola | Italy | 20.17% |
Peter Turkson | Ghana | 10.09% |
Tarcisio Bertone | Italy | 8.07% |
Odilo Scherer | Brazil | 5.04% |
Marc Ouellet | Canada | 4.03% |
Gianfranco Ravasi | Italy | 3.36% |
Péter Erdő | Hungary | 2.24% |
Luis Antonio Tagle | Philippines | 2.02% |
Timothy M. Dolan | United States | 2.02% |
Leonardo Sandri | Argentina | 2.02% |
Angelo Bagnasco | Italy | 2.02% |
Philippe Barbarin | France | 1.22% |
Seán Patrick O'Malley | United States | 1.22% |
Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga | Honduras | 1.22% |
Wilfrid Napier | South Africa | 1.22% |
Mauro Piacenza | Italy | 1.01% |
Jorge Bergoglio | Argentina | 0.81% |
Antonio Cañizares Llovera | Spain | 0.61% |
Béchara Boutros Raï | Lebanon | 0.61% |
Malcolm Ranjith | Sri Lanka | 0.50% |
Probability of Tradition-Friendly Pope (=30.9 %) | ||
Row Labels | Sum of P norm | |
no | 69.1% | |
yes | 30.9% | |
Grand Total | 100.0% | |
Donnerstag, 7. März 2013
Pope, CEO
Management tips for the Catholic church
THE Roman Catholic church is the world’s oldest multinational. It is also, by many measures, its most successful, with 1.2 billion customers, 1m employees, tens of millions of volunteers, a global distribution network, a universally recognised logo, unrivalled lobbying clout and, auguring well for the future, a successful emerging-markets operation.
But as the cardinals gather in Rome to elect a new boss the church is in turmoil. The pope has no shortage of crisis-management tools at his disposal, including the doctrine of papal infallibility. But Benedict XVI spent his papacy either provoking unnecessary crises (such as welcoming back Bishop Richard Williamson, a Holocaust downplayer) or struggling with the sex scandals that are racking the church. This is partly because he was the wrong man for the job: a scholar where an administrator was required and an old man—78 when he was appointed, 85 today—where youthful vigour was needed. It is also because the problems tearing the church apart require sweeping structural reform of the sort that only a great leader can deliver.
To be fair, Benedict has laid the foundations for just such a reform. His decision to retire establishes the revolutionary principle that being pope is a job, rather like being the boss of a company, that demands that you have all your wits about you. It also gives the cardinals more freedom to choose the next pope: they can elect a younger man knowing that a limited term is an option or an older one knowing that he will not feel obliged to die in office. Benedict has characteristically fumbled a good idea by insisting that he will continue to live in the Vatican and share his private secretary, Georg Gänswein, with his successor. But his decision is pregnant with possibilities. The next pope needs to be equally radical in reconsidering everything from the church’s core mission to its customer base.
His most pressing task will be to deal with the sex scandals. This is partly a theological issue: the church would attract a very different workforce if it did not insist that all priests be male and celibate. But since the faith is growing fastest in areas of the world that are staunchly traditionalist, the next pope will probably not allow female or married priests. Still, he could learn from the private sector about how to manage the workforce he has.
First, you need to punish errant employees rather than protecting them or shuffling them about. The best companies are quick to “proactively outplace” wrongdoers. Second, you need to treat your reputation as your most precious asset by drawing up clear rules on ethical behaviour, insisting staff adhere to them and conducting aggressive public-relations campaigns. Companies that have been caught lapsing, such as Tyco International, devote a lot of effort to telling their customers and employees what they are doing to fix their problems. Third, you have to keep looking ahead. Companies hold meetings of senior leaders to review their strategies every year, rather than every century or so.
The church’s core competence lies in providing spiritual goods. Yet it devotes a lot of its energy to running an earthly operation. Some of this makes sense—schools and hospitals help fulfil Jesus’s mandate while promoting customer stickiness. But what about running an in-house bank (complete with the world’s only ATM machine with instructions in Latin)? Or managing property portfolios? Big companies like IBM and Ford have got out of non-core businesses and contracted out as much as possible to specialist companies. The church should do likewise.
Its fastest growing markets are in the emerging world. The number of Catholics in sub-Saharan Africa has increased from 1m in 1910 to 171m today, or from 1% of the total to 16%. The number in the Asia-Pacific region has risen from 14m in 1910 to 131m today, or from 5% of the total to 12%. By contrast Europe’s share of the Catholic faithful has plummeted from 65% in 1910 to 24% today. But the church remains Europe-focused. Its concession to globalisation has been to broaden the recruitment funnel for the papacy from Italy, which had an unbroken run for 456 years, to Mittel-europa. Seventy-five of the church’s 140 or so cardinals live in Rome. The Pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, is 15 miles from the Vatican.
Look south, Your Holiness
The case for appointing a non-European pope is strong. But the church needs to go much further. Cisco created a second headquarters in Bangalore—Cisco East—that spearheads much of the company’s emerging-markets strategy. The least the church could do is to move the pope’s summer residence to Latin America. Many global companies establish centres of excellence across the world. The church should likewise move some of the Vatican’s departments, such as the ones that oversee missionaries or development, to developing countries. This would not only allow the church to plug into new ideas from Latin America and Africa; it would also help to discipline the introverted, back-biting, scandal-plagued and generally dysfunctional culture of the Curia.
The church cannot take its success in the global South for granted. It is under pressure from lean start-ups with more vigorous marketing. Its market share in Latin America has declined from 90% in 1910 to 72% today, thanks to the growth of Pentecostalism. The Latin American church is responding by borrowing Pentecostal techniques such as holding “liberation masses” in soccer stadiums and allowing priests to speak in tongues. But Benedict refused to meet Marcelo Rossi, a charismatic priest who has sold more than 12m CDs, during his visit to Brazil. Jeff Immelt, the boss of General Electric, says his firm needs to disrupt itself with new ideas from the emerging world if it is not to be disrupted by emerging-world rivals. The next pope, likewise, needs to understand that he is not just the bishop of Rome.
Source: Economist Print Edition, 9th March 2013