Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle shares more than just a warm smile and infectious laugh with Pope Francis.
Like the late Argentinian pontiff, Tagle hails from outside Europe’s traditional Catholic power base, bringing a fresh perspective to the Vatican. As cardinals convene on Wednesday for the secret conclave to elect the next pope, some believe Tagle’s similarities to Francis could position him as a frontrunner.
According to the bookmakers, Tagle is currently the second favourite to be the next pope, at odds of 5-2, just behind Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.
Tagle, who looks younger than his 67 years and likes to be called by his diminutive nickname “Chito”, has headed the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, effectively the Church’s missionary arm, for the past five years. That position gave him enormous influence over national churches in developing countries.
While 67 is a sunset age in many organisations, it is considered young in the Vatican because few cardinals want a very long pontificate.
Choosing Tagle could signal a clear intention to continue the progressive path of Francis, embracing a more open and modern Church. His potential election would indicate a rejection of candidates who might reverse some of Francis’s reforms, reassuring the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics of the Church’s continued trajectory.
It would also mean his fellow cardinals had shrugged off question marks over his management abilities.
“He would represent a continuity of what Pope Francis has been doing,” said Rev Emmanuel Alfonso, a former student of Tagle’s who has known him for decades. “He’s really like Pope Francis in terms of his love for the poor, his approachability and so on.”
Tagle, the former archbishop of Manila, would be the first pope from what is now considered Asia, although in the early Church some popes hailed from what is now called the Middle East, technically part of Asia.
As archbishop of Manila, and before as bishop of the Philippine city of Imus, Tagle gained pastoral experience in running dioceses in Asia’s largest Catholic country. By bringing him to the Vatican in 2020, Francis gave him one more notch in experiences seen as helpful to papal candidates. Tagle’s move to Rome brought criticism from the then Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who oversaw a bloody “war on drugs” that killed thousands of Filipinos during his 2016-2022 administration.
Duterte said Tagle had been removed from Manila for meddling in national politics.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines denied those accusations forcefully. Bishop Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan, a conference official made a cardinal in 2024, called Duterte’s claim “unbelievably ludicrous”.
Many cardinals already know Tagle personally, and many may see an attraction in having a pope from Asia, viewed by Church leaders as an important region of growth for the faith. Young people feel comfortable with him. When Tagle hosted Francis for a visit to the Philippines in 2014, the visit drew the largest crowds in the history of papal travel, including a mass that attracted up to 7 million people.
Tagle, who speaks Italian, English, and Spanish as well as his native Tagalog, now has five years of experience of the Vatican’s arcane bureaucracy, although some cardinals may think even that is not enough to run the global Church.
