Betting on a papal conclave felt mildly degenerate

Josh is a five-foot-tall aspiring priest with a prosthetic leg who wears half a dozen assorted crucifixes and medals, causing him to jangle as he lopes around on crutches. He also carries so many holy cards in his pocket that you’d think he was worried about being spontaneously challenged to the Catholic equivalent of a Yu-Gi-Oh duel.

But most importantly for my purposes, Josh will talk to you about Church politics until you’re ready to jam an aspergillum through your eardrum.

When I first approached him, purely out of curiosity, he sent me an article from the National Catholic Reporter suggesting that the odds-on favorite, Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, was a paper tiger. The Chinese government had just openly flouted a compromise he’d negotiated on the appointment of bishops in the People’s Republic. Parolin entered the conclave as a lifelong Vatican diplomat whose biggest diplomatic achievement had just blown up in his face. With precisely zero pastoral experience, he didn’t have much else to offer.

And yet, the betting odds reflected none of this. Parolin remained the clear frontrunner, holding steady at around 25 percent on the gambling site Kalshi.

I began to suspect that the bookmakers had no idea what they were doing.

To test my theory, I looked back at the last few conclaves and found that in two out of three, the cardinals picked a candidate who wasn’t on any of the bookies’ radars. And there was no obvious successor like Josef Ratzinger this time around.

Ok, so what about the other frontrunners? The liberal Filipino Cardinal Luis Tagle was in second at around 20 percent but he sang a karaoke version of “Imagine” one time and has a habit of bursting into tears during interviews. Josh suggested to me that plenty of cardinals were annoyed with Francis’s loosey-goosey tendencies, and Tagle seemed like more of the same.

“Look for compromise candidates,” Josh suggested. “I’m hearing Aviline, Mamberti and Arborelius.” I didn’t know any of these people from Pope Lando, but I quickly learned that they were paying out at 50 – or even 100-to-one. Further discussions with Josh led to more funny names like “Ambongo” and “Prevost.” My own research turned up a few more: “Erdo,” “Eijk,” “Turkson.”

At this point, my plan had taken shape.

Josh showed no interest in gambling on the conclave, so I approached another friend. We’ll call him Tommy. We each agreed to put up $100 and take our wives to a nice steak dinner if we won.

While there’s no canon against betting on conclaves, the Catholic Catechism says that “wagers are not in themselves contrary to justice,” but “become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his needs and those of others.” Betting on a papal conclave already felt mildly degenerate. The least I could do was avoid outright sin.

At the same time, it felt good to have skin in the game. Gambling is addictive in part because it militates against a materialistic worldview. There seems to be special providence in the fall of dice or the cast of the lot – as was the case when Matthias was chosen to replace Judas. You feel intuitively that all existence can’t possibly be pure chance like the turn of a card is purported to be. If the cosmos doesn’t run on meaningless determinism, then maybe blackjack doesn’t either.

The prayers and rituals this mindset elicits tend to be highly superstitious, but as a priest in a Graham Greene novel says, “I’m not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world’s not everything… It could be the beginning of wisdom.” I didn’t pray to win. I prayed for a holy pope. But somehow, my wagers made me more eager to pray.

The pitch I sent Tommy on Wednesday morning was as follows:

“We bet ‘no’ on the two top candidates (Parolin and Tagle). Their candidacies are dead. The markets just haven’t caught up. We put longshot ‘yes’ bets on Erdo, Aveline, Turkson, Mamberti, Arborelius, Eijk, Ambongo and Prevost. They’re all trading for between seven and one cents, so if any of them win, we’re golden.”

I later proposed two tweaks. First, reduce our “no” bets from $50 to $25 and add wagers against the third- and fourth-place cardinals (Francis-style liberal Matteo Zuppi and the hilariously named but probably too young Pierbattista Pizzaballa). That way, even if a frontrunner won, we’d get modest payoffs from three of the four “no” bets and walk away with just over three-eights of our original stake.

Second, drop Eijk and Prevost from our list of “yes” bets and increase the wagers to $16.66 apiece.

I then allowed myself one last vacillation: “Let’s add Prevost back in.” At the time, he paid out a dollar for every two cents wagered. We placed our bets.

When the white smoke billowed at around 1:00 p.m. Thursday, likely signaling that a candidate had won on the fourth ballot, I was certain I’d miscalculated. Surely Parolin’s support wouldn’t have collapsed that quickly. The markets seemed to agree, with the diplomat’s odds of victory surging to around 65 percent.

Then came the announcement. I failed to extract Prevost’s name from the stream of Latin, but once the talking heads on EWTN translated it into English (you know, the language Jesus spoke), I immediately texted Tommy “WE’RE RICH.” I couldn’t have been the only one: Polymarket found a man who netted a cool $63,000 on the Chicago-bred cardinal.

As for me and Tommy: $846.98. A return of around 330 percent on our original wager. Enough for a very nice steak dinner for four. Just not on a Friday. Whatever he ends up doing for the Church, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV has already done great things for my bank account. I wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful.