Could an Asian become pope? The Cardinal Tagle buzz of 2013

The long-shot candidate

As the Catholic Church prepared to elect a successor to the resigning Pope Benedict XVI, one name electrified the Philippines: Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the 55-year-old Archbishop of Manila — a singing, TV-preaching, Facebook-using prelate whose humility and charisma made him the face of the "Asian pope" speculation.

The buzz had real substance. Tagle was Asia's most prominent Catholic leader, and a natural communicator: a storyteller and baritone who hosted a Sunday gospel show on TV and had gathered more than 120,000 Facebook followers. He spoke Italian, French, English, Tagalog, and Latin. He rode buses and jeepneys instead of owning a car, ate with workers, and had lived for two decades in a seminary room with no television or air-conditioning.

"He's an effective communicator and missionary at a time when Catholicism's highest internal priority is a new evangelization," wrote Rome-based analyst John Allen. Vatican analyst John Thavis noted that the election of a Polish pope in 1978 showed the "unthinkable" could happen once the cardinals were sealed in the conclave — and said Vatican officials had whispered to him, "Tagle, he's the man."

The case against

The case against Tagle was mostly arithmetic and age. His chances were considered remote: if the electors looked beyond Europe, Latin America and Africa — with faster-growing Catholic flocks — seemed more logical. And at 55, he was the second-youngest cardinal, meaning a reign of decades. "I think many of the cardinals will say, 'It's too much, too soon,'" said his theology professor, the Rev. Catalino Arevalo.

Tagle himself demurred: "Only a speculation."

His path

The younger of two children of a pious Catholic couple who worked in a bank, Tagle had dreamed of becoming a doctor before a Jesuit friend redirected him to the priesthood. He graduated summa cum laude from Ateneo de Manila, was ordained in 1982, and became bishop in 2001 at a cathedral a block from his family's home in Imus, south of Manila. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger appointed him to the Vatican's International Theological Commission, where his research impressed; Benedict XVI named him Archbishop of Manila in October 2011 and elevated him to cardinal just a year later. "It's unnerving," Tagle admitted in a tearful homily in Imus.

He also carried a political legacy: his predecessor as the Philippines' beloved cardinal, Jaime Sin — who died in 2005 — had helped rally the people-power revolts that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

What actually happened

The conclave of March 12–13, 2013 did not elect Tagle. It elected Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina — Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope and the first Jesuit pontiff.

But the Tagle buzz was never really about winning. It was the first widely visible signal of Catholicism's demographic shift: the Church's center of gravity moving south and east, to the dynamic, "relatively angst-free form of Catholicism percolating in the Southern Hemisphere," as Allen put it. The Philippines — Asia's largest Catholic nation, where waiters at a Manila restaurant still displayed the unwashed cutlery from John Paul II's 1995 visit — had begun imagining itself as the Church's future.

Archive summary, March 2013 (with the conclave outcome added), based on the Associated Press's "papabili" profile.