Why Pope Leo?

The world's cardinals have elected South Americans twice in a row. 

They are clearly concerned about South America.

During the decade Pope Francis was in office (elected 2013), Argentina's Catholic population fell from 76% to 49%.  That clearly didn't work, so now they're trying a more conservative version of Pope Francis. That won't work either. 

Watch Peru's statistics over the next decade. If it drops - and the Catholic population percentage in South America will most definitely drop during Pope Leo's pontificate - then what happens? 

I've got nothing against Pope Leo. I'm sure he is a good man and will be as good a Pope as anyone can be. But this kind of thing has been tried before. During World War I, the French were certain that technology could not overcome the human spirit. Vital impetus, or "élan vital", a belief in the power of a strong, offensive spirit to overcome any obstacle, turned out to be much less effective than a wall of high-velocity lead spewed out by machine guns and the power of tons of explosive from long-range artillery shells. 

Similarly, a marvelous papal personality is not going to overcome technology. If anyone were going to succeed by force of personality, it would have been John Paul II (1978-2005). 

A 2012 document reported that for more than a quarter-century [Poland's] church attendance and declarations of religious faith have been stable, decreasing only minimally since 2005 when the grief related to the death of Pope John Paul II led to an increase in religious practice among Poles. In a 2012 study, 52% of Poles declared that they attend religious services at least once a week, 38% do so once or twice a month, and 11% do so never or almost never. Meanwhile, 94% of Poles consider themselves to be religious believers (9% of whom consider themselves "deeply religious"), while only 6% of Poles claim that they are non-believers.

But even during John Paul II's reign, the percentage of Catholics regularly attending Mass dropped consistently from year to year, until it fell off a cliff:

The new data, released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, show that in the 2021 census, 27.1 million people (71.3%) identified themselves as followers of the Roman Catholic church. That was down from 33.7 million (87.6%) at the last census a decade earlier.

The election of John Paul II solved several pressing European problems in the late 20th century. Among the most significant? He kept the Catholic population from melting away in Poland. The cardinals gambled that Pope Francis could solve similar problems in South America. That didn't work. So, they're trying again with a Peruvian candidate. Below is a graph of Catholic percentage in Peru's population:

Pope Leo XIV is supposed to solve the problem of  the disintegrating Catholic population in Peru and in South America as a whole. It can't work. Pope John Paul II got away with it due to a unique set of circumstances surrounding communism, trade unions and Catholic Faith. That's not going to repeat in Peru or any other South American country. 

Given his apparent good health, and the advances that will be made in medicine over the coming decades, Pope Leo XIV will probably have a fifteen to twenty-year pontificate. By the time the next papal conclave convenes, South America will no longer be majority Catholic. All eyes will be on Africa. The next Pope will be African, because it will be a hotspot by then, and the cardinals will have given up on South America, just like they have already given up on Europe and North America.