How to Become the Pope

Are you drifting between careers, unsure of your next move? Perhaps you should become the pope. Leader of the Holy Roman Catholic Church is a prestigious position that offers excellent perks, including international travel, job security, frequent media appearances, and elaborate hats. You can name your own hours, hire your friends for any position you’d like, and supervise a small-but-wealthy city state. If you’re into job titles, how does “Successor of the Prince of the Apostles” grab you? That’s one of eight titles you’ll inherit, all of which are more impressive on LinkedIn than “assistant district manager.” If the papacy sounds like a career opportunity you’d like to explore, here’s how to land the job.

How much does the pope make?

Let’s start with the money. According to salary comparison site Comparably.com, the average Pope in the United States earns $46,077 per year, but this is inaccurate. The position of pope offers no salary. The idea is that you’re living as Christ lived, off the kindness of others. But over a few thousand years, those “others” have been very generous—the Vatican City State and the Catholic Church are worth an estimated $30 billion, and it’s essentially at your disposal. As the absolute monarch of a small nation, you can have anything you’d ever want or need just by asking for it. So the pay is low, but benefits are good.

How is the pope selected?

When it is time for a new pope to be chosen, the Church doesn’t post on indeed.com. Instead, up to 120 cardinals (bishops and Vatican officials) gather in Rome to hash out who gets the job. It’s not exactly an open process—cardinal electors take a vow of absolute secrecy before locking themselves in the Sistine Chapel to hold papal elections. Presumably, the cardinals discuss who would be the best choice to meet the needs of the church. There’s probably politicking. Alliances and voting blocs are formed, and relationships are tested. I imagine it’s like Survivor. Someone probably says, “I came here to be pope; I didn’t come here to make friends.”

The actual election goes like this: Each cardinal writes the name of their choice on a piece of paper, and they proceed, one-by-one, to solemnly drop their vote in a chalice set before Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment. Dramatic much? Anyway, the votes are counted, and if no one receives a two-thirds majority, the votes are burned in a special furnace along with chemicals that produce black smoke. That way everyone outside the chapel knows that the cardinals are still jawing.

There are four rounds of voting per day, and the process goes on until some lucky fellow gets the nod. If there are 34 elections and no clear winner, the cardinals can choose any method of selection they want. Back in the 1270s, Pope Gregory X decreed that the longer the conclave lasted, the less food would be given to the cardinals, but that rule was sadly rescinded. Once the (fully fed) cardinals have agreed on a person, be it by a two-thirds vote or arm wrestling tournament, mazel tov! You got a new pope! The ballots are burned with chemicals that produce white smoke. The newborn pope chooses his pope name, is dressed in fancy clothes, and gets paraded out to the balcony of Saint Peter’s to be introduced to his adoring fans. The senior cardinal deacon declares “Habemus Papam!” which translates roughly to “This motherfucker here is the new boss!”

Getting your name on the papers

To become pope, you must be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and you must be a man (we don’t want no women mucking around with our Universal Church after all). That’s really it. You don’t need a degree from community college or any specific certification or training. You can come from any background and be from any part of the world. You don’t have to be a cardinal or even a priest. All you have to do is get your name on those papers—but that’s the tricky part.

As you might expect from the upper echelon of a world religion, the job of pope tends to go to an insider. Since 1379, every pope has been selected from among the college of cardinals casting the votes. So if you haven’t spent your life moving up the ranks of the Catholic Church to get into the special pope-picking room, you’re going to have to get creative.

Underhanded influence on cardinal electors

In the modern era, new popes are chosen either when the old pope dies, or when the current pope resigns because of a complicated internal church scandal. Wait, maybe it was for “health reasons.” Either way, there is generally a 15- to 20-day period between the end of the last pope’s reign and the papal conclave. This popeless-period is your best opportunity to influence the vote.

John Paul II declared that the cardinals lodge in St. Martha’s House, a building next to the Sistine Chapel, during the election process, so you know exactly where the voters will be spending their off-time, praying or golfing or whatever. If you were to befriend the staff at St. Martha’s House, maybe you could convince them to talk about you in a way the cardinals would overhear. The average salary in Vatican City is shockingly low, around $36,574 a year, so greasing some palms wouldn’t hurt. Perhaps two valets could say, “You know who would make a great pope? Steve Johnson! He’s this writer from Los Angeles. Really Jesus-like,” while Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re is walking to the Holy Roman Cafeteria.

Another potential avenue is engineering a spiritual vision. Using high-tech spy gear—holograms, hidden speakers, mind-control rays—a potential dark-horse pope candidate could engineer a shared a spiritual manifestation for all the cardinals. These are, ostensibly, religious men, so they would presumably take it seriously if they were visited by a chorus of angels singing your name. And when they told the other cardinals, and they had the same vision? How could they not elect you? Also: Cardinals are usually old, and it’s easy to trick old people.

Rousing the rabble: a path to the papacy

Modern papal succession is relatively stable, but this hasn’t always been the case. In 1268, the papal conclave lasted for almost three years, and it only ended when a local mob locked the cardinals up and fed them nothing but bread and water while demanding they pick up a pope or suffer great violence and death.

In the 14th century, Roman peasants again broke into the conclave to ensure that the cardinals not choose a French pope (racists). They told the cardinals, “Give us a Roman pope or your heads will be as red as your hats,” which is baller. The cardinals chose an Italian as a compromise, but Pope Urban VI immediately began castigating the cardinals and forbade them from accepting payoffs from kings and pocketing the money from the collection plate. As you’d expect, he was was deposed (don’t mess with people’s livelihoods, right?) and another pope was elected. But Urban VI still called himself pope, so for awhile there were two popes (or a pope and an anti-pope, if you prefer). Then, in 1409, the French and Roman cardinals elected another pope to clean up the mess. Neither of the two existing popes stepped down, so there were three popes. Engineering an angry mob to influence the outcome of a democratic election seems impossible in modern times (who would be that much of an asshole, right?), but it could triple your chances of becoming pope.

Heavy is the head that wears the gigantic pope hat

When you become pope, you will immediately become among the most famous people in the world, but it’s a strange kind of fame. You get driven around in really amazing custom cars, fly around in a private jet, throngs of people come out just to hear you talk about how awesome God is, and you even command a small army of 110 soldiers. But you don’t get invited to Oscar after-parties, and you can’t parlay the papacy into all the sex you want either. At least, not out in the open. You have to at least appear “holy” to keep the gig.

The modern job of pope offers neither the carefree life of a hedonistic rock star pope like John XII (955–964), who gave land to his mistress, murdered his enemies, and was killed by a man who caught him in bed with his wife. But you aren’t living a quiet life of spiritual contemplation and teaching either. You’re in charge of an entire city state, so there’s a lot of administration, paperwork, and tough decisions, like cutting the pay of everyone who works for you when tourist revenue goes down. There’s also vicious office politics. We’ll likely never know all the details—the Church is hush-hush—but the scandal around the resignation of Benedict XVI gave a glimpse of the viper’s next of cliques competing within the Church, with everything from graft around the annual nativity scene in St Peter’s Square to the dispersal of funds in the Vatican Bank used to gain influence and power. It’s like high school with vestments. So do you really want the job? Is Applebee’s that bad of a place to work?