Francis could scarcely have given a clearer sign of his disapproval of the president’s plans for the mass deportation of America’s illegal immigrants. On January 19th he called them a “calamity”. The pope was, in any case, no great admirer of the United States, or of unbridled capitalism. As a Latin American—an Argentine—he had seen at close hand some of the less creditable aspects of American foreign policy.

More, perhaps, than any of his predecessors, he stressed that Catholic social teaching condemned not just Marxism, but also unchecked economic liberalism. His views became evident within a year of his election with the publication of his book, “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of the Gospel”), in which he inveighed against “an economy of exclusion and inequality”, adding: “Such an economy kills.” His ideas on climate change were at odds with those of Mr Trump and his movement. “We must commit ourselves to...the protection of nature, changing our personal and community habits,” he said last year. The reaction of conservative Americans to his strictures and exhortations ranged from dismay to outrage. It is deeply ironic that the last international figure he met before his death was J.D. Vance, the vice-president.

Where the late pontiff and Mr Trump did see eye-to-eye was on abortion and, to a more nuanced degree, on the need for an end to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. But their areas of accord seemed unlikely to avert a collision of values and wills. On the contrary, on December 20th Mr Trump named Brian Burch, a hardline critic of Francis, as his envoy to the Holy See. The pope appeared to respond with the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy, an outspoken champion of immigrants, as archbishop of Washington, DC. The stage had been set for a clash.

That will not happen now, unless, of course, the cardinals charged with electing Francis’s successor choose a man in the same mould. To an outsider that might seem inevitable. All but 27 of the 135 cardinals below the age of 80 who are entitled to vote in the next conclave were chosen by Francis. But papal elections, which Catholics believe are guided by the Almighty in the guise of the Holy Spirit, routinely produce surprises. Francis was chosen in 2013 by an electorate almost entirely composed of cardinals named by his two conservative predecessors, Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

There are several reasons why a liberal pontiff is not a foregone conclusion. One is circumstantial. Francis was plucked, in his own words after his election, from the “end of the earth” and had a penchant for appointing as cardinals prelates from parts of the world a lot more isolated than his native Argentina. Among those who will choose his successor is the apostolic prefect of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. The result is that many of the cardinal-electors do not know each other. They may therefore be more susceptible to the influence of a well-organised lobby. And there is no lobby in the higher reaches of the Catholic church better organised than the conservative American cardinals.

A further reason is that not all of Francis’s choices for the college of cardinals are progressives. In Africa particularly liberal Catholic bishops and archbishops are few and far between. In many cases the late pope had little choice but to appoint the most competent available traditionalist. However, that perhaps explains why Africa will be underrepresented in the forthcoming conclave. The continent’s Catholic population accounts for about a fifth of the global total. Yet Africans will cast only one-eighth of the votes.

A further consideration is the way in which popes are chosen. Before a conclave the cardinals hold several days of informal discussion. One reason for this is to give them time to get to know one another and to decide how many of them are papabili (popeable). That will be particularly important in this instance. But the other reason is to try to reach agreement on the main issue facing the church so it can be used as a criterion for selecting the next pope. It is often said in and around the Vatican that, had the cardinals agreed in 2005 that Catholicism’s biggest challenge was the spread of Islam, they would probably have opted for Francis Arinze, a Nigerian cardinal. Instead, they decided it was the secularisation of Europe, and thus handed the job to a German, Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI.

Francis was elected to shake up the Vatican administration and, in particular, to make it more responsive to the wider church. The intention was to bolster the authority and influence of assemblies of bishops meeting in the Vatican to discuss specific issues. The pontiff fulfilled the first of those missions in 2022 with the publication of a new Vatican constitution—the result of nine years of work by a committee of cardinals. But the second remains more of an aspiration than an achievement, largely because Francis was unwilling to yield when the assemblies, or synods, reached conclusions he did not share.

Reinforcing the powers of the synods could be seen as the question that most needs to be confronted. But there are several other possibilities. One is the concern over the creeping secularisation of not just western Europe and North America, but also of Catholic eastern Europe and Latin America. That is due, in part at least, to another still-pressing issue: the continuing, debilitating effect of repeated scandals over the sexual abuse of young people by clergy. Another is the rise of China, notwithstanding its current economic difficulties. That could argue for an Asian prelate. Whatever issue is chosen, it could even be that a particular conservative would be better suited to addressing it than any of the progressives—however papabile he may be.