Taking place in the coming days are two elections of great relevance to the Philippine nation: Filipinos will be voting for local and national government leaders, and cardinals will be voting for the next pope. The proximity is an accident, of course: Pope Francis was a beloved leader, and, inevitable as it was, no faithful wanted to see him leave this world and set a conclave in motion.
In their nature and conduct, the two elections have intriguing contrasts. One has millions of voters trooping to precincts across the archipelago, they who have witnessed the nationwide carnival that is the Philippine election campaign season; the other has a mere 133 cardinals holding a secret gathering, with much praying and whispering in secluded chambers.
Yet, both, at their essence, are processes of persons getting to know other persons, and deciding on who is most fit to serve particular roles in society. The cardinals in the past days have not been remiss in reminding their flock that the conclave is the work of the Holy Spirit, that it is much different from the electoral affairs of our temporal institutions, and yet, even the would-be Pope Benedict XVI once admitted that it is an imperfect process with human agency. (As relayed by Rappler’s religion reporter Paterno Esmaquel II, in ‘The Holy Spirit in the conclave and its politics’.) In other words, even this most sacred of elections is also a human activity, not immune to politics, even if the kind of politics I expect cardinals to conduct is among the most benevolent possible from men, charitably speaking.
The election of the pope, according to the recent conclave chatter, is said to be an unpredictable process, where the lists of papabile are just as likely to be spot-on as they can be utterly misguiding in the end for those trying to predict who would be the next pope. The Vatican watchers say that most of the cardinals do not know each other well, and that the trajectory of the voting only starts to take shape when they meet in the short time leading to the conclave proper.
I cannot help but wonder then how these cardinals’ information-gathering and decision-making thought processes look like during these days. As the princes of the church meet their peers, do they approach them with an analytical, purpose-driven mind, or do they first see in the other, simply, a human being, as they are supposed to do, according to what they preach? When, deep in the privacy of their thoughts, they weigh their options for their conclave vote, how much of the realpolitik needs of the 21st-century church do they consider, and how much is left to Holy Spirit-inspired vibe checks?
The Jesuit scholastic Kevin Stephon Centeno writes in a reflection on the late pope (‘Pope Francis: Returning to the tradition of Jesus Christ’):
At times, labels can help us understand a person and his characteristics. Categorizing someone as this or that is very human since we are always in need of words that define and that can serve as a reference point in encountering someone different from us.
However, we need to be cautious with absolutizing labels.
Labels can dehumanize and erase the complexity of the person. While we cannot totally do away with labels, we should still, citing Timothy Radcliffe, OP in one of his synod meditations, “be formed for deeply personal encounters with each other, in which we transcend easy labels.” Deep personal encounters allow us to lovingly meet the person who goes beyond simplistic labels.
Here is a beautiful reminder that people are not just datasets to be processed and reduced for feeding into decision-making engines. Not always, at least.
I have been reconsidering my own process of deciding on who to vote for in government elections, since my thinking about governance and democracy and politics have also been shifting. (Towards refinement, rather than degradation, I hope.) A question that keeps coming up is how to be more rational in the face of both an abundance of irrelevant information (a.k.a. noise, of most political chatter) and the lack or inaccessibility of enough relevant data on candidates (a.k.a. signals, especially at the local level). How can I reasonably get to know so many candidates with only so much time? I usually fall far short of the data-driven, rational ideal, and end up voting for some (or many?) candidates whom I have chosen based on mental shortcuts.
Maybe it is no fault of my own. The writer and cultural critic L.M. Sacasas writes:
The deluge of information through which we all slog everyday is not hospitable to the ideals of objectivity and impartiality, which to some degree were artifacts of print and mass media ecosystems. The present condition of information super-abundance and troves of easily searchable memory databases makes it trivially easy to either expose actual instances of bias, self-interest, inconsistency, and outright hypocrisy or to generate (unwittingly for yourself or intentionally for others) the appearance of such. In the age of the Database, no one controls the Narrative. And while narratives proliferate and consolidate along a predictable array of partisan and factional lines, the notion that the competing claims could be adjudicated objectively or impartially is defeated by exhaustion.
And, confronted by exhaustion, we fall back to shortcuts.
Perhaps that is fine. We exercise reason until we reach its limit, at which point we leave the rest to faith—faith in a higher being who, despite the shortcomings of humanity, guides all nations towards a majestic destiny.