Would you like to know how much Pope Leo XIV won by?

Or which cardinals supported him? Or who else got votes? Or how many? Or what coalitions formed? Or who played kingmaker?

Officially, you can’t, because it’s secret.

Cardinal-electors take an oath to maintain “absolute and perpetual secrecy” concerning “all matters directly or indirectly related” to the election of a pope, as required by Pope Benedict XVI’s February 2013 apostolic letter Normas Nonnullas, which tightened existing, already-tight secrecy rules.

The penalty for violating the oath is severe: “automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See,” the document states — meaning only the pope can lift it.

And yet …

After every conclave, reports appear in newspapers (including this one) and elsewhere purporting to describe candidates, vote tallies and coalitions — details which, if true, seem to have come from cardinal-electors.

Should the current standards of secrecy around papal conclaves continue? Or should it be tweaked or even done away with?

The Register contacted 170 bishops in the United States as well as Catholic historians, law professors, canon lawyers and commentators, with various points of view on Church matters.

All sources who responded — about 20 in all — said some level of secrecy is vital for the actual deliberations of a conclave, but they differed on how much and whether secrecy should be maintained forever.

The Case Against Secrecy

Some observers say the current conclave system takes secrecy too far.

Karen Park, professor of theology and religious studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, told the Register the “extraordinary secrecy” associated with modern conclaves “breeds intrigue and makes people want to influence things behind the scenes.”

She said it reminds her of Gnosticism, which offered secret spiritual knowledge not available to all and was declared a heresy by the early Church.

“I think it’s not generally a good thing to have esoteric secret rituals in Christianity,” Park said.

“St. Peter’s is open. You can go in there,” Park said. “It’s not a religion — or shouldn’t be a religion — of secret intrigue and things available only to an elite.”

She said she’d like to see an official summary of what went on each day of a conclave.

“I think there could be reports at the end of each day, some sort of debriefing, where if not every detail is given, then at least there would be some sort of transparency,” Park said.

“I think there could be a good ecclesial argument for more transparency. This affects everybody. And it seems that we the Church have a little bit more of a right to know than this,” Park said.

Frederic Baumgartner, professor emeritus of history at Virginia Tech, who spent three years sifting through letters, ambassadors’ reports, vote tallies and secondary sources while researching his 2003 book Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections, told the Register that strict secrecy associated with conclaves is a relatively recent development.

“It was not until 1903 that you had this very strict secrecy imposed on conclaves after the fact,” Baumgartner said, referring to the conclave in which the emperor of Austria vetoed a cardinal who was close to being elected pope, using a Polish cardinal to deliver the message.

His book describes the zigs and zags of dozens of papal conclaves of centuries past — available from detailed records left by ambassadors, bookies and cardinals themselves.

Baumgartner said he rues the loss to history from the current strict secrecy rules.

“Speaking as a historian, we’ve lost an enormous amount by this oath of secrecy. Whether the Church has gained anything from it, my take is that it’s really secrecy for secrecy’s sake,” Baumgartner said. “I can understand the cardinals’ idea that it strengthens the idea that the Holy Spirit is working in the conclave. It doesn’t explain why it has to be permanent.”

Jesuit Father Thomas Worcester, a professor of history at Fordham University, told the Register that secrecy during a conclave is essential and that there’s no reason anyone should know how individual cardinals voted or what they said.

But he said he’d like to see the Church make public the final vote total of the newly elected pope, rather than just saying that he got the required two-thirds majority.

Ambrogio Caiani, senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent in England, said the secrecy of conclaves in modern times has helped shorten their duration and has protected cardinal electors “from political interference from hostile powers like the Nazis, USSR and PRC,” but he, too, laments the loss of a reliable record of what happened.

“Perhaps for the sake of history each pope should commission an official history of their elections to be recorded by the Cardinal Camerlengo and Protodeacon with the assistance of the scrutineers,” Caiani told the Register by email. “To put it simply I approve entirely of secrecy during the conclave but perhaps the truth behind the voting could be released 20 to 30 years after the conclave?”

Bishops Say Secrecy Is Necessary

The Register interviewed and got written statements from 10 bishops in all, none of them cardinals. All supported keeping the current level of secrecy.

“One of the reasons why the conclave insists so much on secrecy, both before and after, is to protect the freedom of the cardinals,” Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski said by telephone, noting that in past centuries kings and emperors often tried to sway the conclave to pick a candidate who would further their interests. “The secrecy required of the cardinals when deliberating is a way of freeing them from the pressure of undue influences from outside the conclave or outside the Church.”

Bishop Michael Martin, who leads the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, told the Register that the secrecy of papal conclaves befits the solemnity of the occasion because “it allows for the intimacy of the Holy Spirit, that God is at work in some ways that we believe are very mysterious.”

“And to pick it apart like a puzzle, I’m just not sure that that gives due reverence to God’s work in the midst of the Church,” he said.

The nature of relationships, he said, is that some components are public, some are semi-public, and some are private — and a conclave, he said, deserves privacy.

“I do think that there’s some wisdom in keeping this process at a level that doesn’t require that that we know exactly how the sausage is made,” Bishop Martin said.

Las Vegas Archbishop George Leo Thomas noted that some cardinals come from countries whose governments are not friendly to the Holy See and that they might take action against a cardinal whose actions or votes they don’t like.

“I still feel that strict adherence to the canonical secrecy should be maintained before, during and after the election,” Archbishop Thomas said. “… I think that right now, at least, this process maximizes the Church’s independence.”

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said brainstorming is an important part of what cardinal-electors do in a conclave and that keeping what is said and done there secret forever helps foster candor.

“I think it better preserves the freedom to speak to each other frankly,” Archbishop Cordileone said. “People need to be able to throw out ideas without being co-opted by the media or by others with an agenda to push.”

Secrecy Fosters Unity?

Patrick Brennan, professor of law at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law, told the Register that cardinals aren’t accountable to human beings in a papal conclave, but each instead is supposed “to vote his conscience before God alone.”

“I think that to avoid any cardinals ever having to be called to account to any human, it has to be absolutely secret,” Brennan said by telephone.

Knowing the vote totals would weaken the new pope and thus weaken the Church, he said.

“The Church wants unity. And part of what contributes to unity is the appearance of unity,” Brennan said.

David Long, a canon law expert and dean of the School of Professional Studies at The Catholic University of America, told the Register that keeping confidential the names and vote tallies of also-rans is important for the stability of the Church, to prevent factions from latching onto also-rans.

“Most importantly, the secrecy attached to the conclave places the election in its proper perspective: It is as much a liturgical act as it is a juridical act, undertaken through the inspiration and reliance of the Holy Spirit,” Long, author of Newman, Canon Law, and Development: Quarrying Granite Rocks with Razors (May 2025), told the Register by email.

Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, said that while papal conclaves could be tweaked, the current system works well — even if secrecy runs against the grain of modern political thinking.

“It sounds really antiquated, and it is,” Faggioli said. “But as a good Catholic, there are some things that are very old, and the older they get, the truer they appear.”

It’s a delusion to think that making a process more open means increasing its integrity, Faggioli told the Register.

“I do understand that we live in the age of transparency, accountability, all of that. My short take is that on some issues, transparency and accountability make the process much more manipulable,” Faggioli said.

“When you start counting votes for this or for that, you are measuring how much political capital this person has, and that’s not good for the freedom of the pope, and for the Church also,” Faggioli said.

What About Cardinals Who Talk?

Sources on both sides of the secrecy divide said they find it off-putting or even scandalous that some unnamed cardinals apparently talk to reporters about the details of conclaves after they occur.

Park sees it as a good reason to increase transparency instead of shrouding the deliberations in secrecy.

“That’s not a good look, either: that in order to talk about this, the cardinals have to be dishonest and go against their oaths. I think that type of secrecy attracts a darkness. It’s just unseemly,” Park said. “There ought not to be so much to hide.”

George Weigel, a historian and author of Witness To Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, told the Register that the Vatican ought to take such leaks seriously and do something about them.

“The secrecy of papal elections — which has been repeatedly violated in recent days by cardinals with elastic notions of the meaning of the oath they took in the Sistine Chapel to preserve forever the confidentiality of the process — is intended to prevent external powers from influencing a grave decision that the Church alone has a right to make,” said Weigel, distinguished senior fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, by email.

“It should not only be retained but the sanctions against breaking that pledge of confidentiality should be strengthened,” Weigel said. “Certain eminent knuckles need to be rapped.”

Robert Royal, author, president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., and founder and editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, said the leaks are disheartening.

“Obviously they take the strictest oaths not to reveal what happens there. And yet we learn every time that some have violated it. And that’s terrible,” Royal told the Register by telephone.

“But that’s human nature,” he said. “I don’t think anything can be done. We’ve lived with it in the past, and we’ll live with it in the future.”

Official secrecy, at least, still helps differentiate a papal conclave from its secular analogues, he said.

“The benefit, it seems to me, is that it diminishes the view of the conclave as simply a political election,” said Royal, who is also a contributor to EWTN, which owns the Register. “There’s something deeper going on here, and because there’s a screen of anonymity, it puts them in a different space from politicking.”

Faggioli told the Register that though he regrets such leaks, the secrecy rules still work because the deliberations of the cardinal-electors remain secret during the all-important election of a new pope.

“It doesn’t violate the integrity of the process if someone somewhere says something a few days later,” Faggioli said. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s not interference.”

Long told the Register the importance of the conclave is the result, not how the cardinal-electors got to it.

“When the pope emerges on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, he is the pope for the entire Roman Catholic Church, regardless of the election results inside the Sistine Chapel,” Long said. “In my opinion, it is still best for the results to burn with the white smoke, for to have the tallies released reduces the election to a popularity contest instead of what it should be: a divinely guided choice for the Church’s best leader at the time.”