Who expected Pope Francis's pontificate to last until 2025 when it began in 2013?

Born in 1936, ordained a priest in 1969, installed as archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and elevated to the College of Cardinals three years later, when the Conclave was summoned by the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was on few of any lists of "papabile" when the proceeding commenced.

His election was an even bigger surprise for a Catholic Church unused to papal resignations much less a pope from far away South America. Pope Francis was an older man with one lung and neither he nor his fellow cardinals thought in 2013 of the first ever Jesuit pope as naming two-thirds of the cardinals voting in the next Conclave. Such is the working of the Holy Spirit, Catholics very much believe, that surprises should never really surprise.

So who knows what to expect? Or when? Expectations are foolish. But "hopes" are not heresy, and I am hoping for a younger man from among the cardinals.

My very simple reason is that the older the cardinal the less likely he is to be well versed in the speed of events and communication in this decade. The successor to Saint Peter will be arriving in his office aware of the unrelenting, indeed ferocious, speed of the world’s crises. But only a handful of the older men will genuinely understand and be prepared for how very different 2025 is from 2013. How the world has accelerated in those years.

America has seen its last Boomer elected president, I suspect, and much as we like to hang around and offer our opinions, there are jobs which cry out for either energy at a level that is extraordinary in an older man —President Trump has that— or for a generational shift in leadership. It is hard to imagine the cardinals electing anyone with the zeal for the job that would-be presidents must possess when they declare their candidacies, so the temptation must be strong among the 133 voting cardinals present for the conclave to compromise on a new pontiff who won’t be in the job for more than a decade.

They will take their missions very seriously, but there is a very great diversity of "mission ambitions" among the 133. There is no easy correlation to American politics or politics of any sort. The Roman Catholic Church is 2,000 years old, after all, and it is presumptuous for even scholars of church history to make predictions about what lays ahead of the new pontiff.

It is very easy to guess, however, that whatever lies ahead will come at the new pope all at once and perhaps far faster than any of his predecessors save Pius XII on whom fell the awful obligations and choices of a pope surrounded by a world run in large part by Hitler and Mussolini for the critical first six years of his reign. Pius XII’s record in those years of total war is often debated and will never be resolved, but no one could have foreseen when he was elevated in March of 1939 that his Vatican would be ringed by monsters of the sort before then unimaginable.

They are very imaginable now, with genocides and massacres marking the years since the Holocaust with a regularity that silences even the most optimistic of forecasters of the future. A pope must prepare to confront evil in its many disguises and to stand with victims of evil even as he avoids making bad situations worse. Caution in a pontiff when it comes to breaking news would be very welcome. Caution, and extraordinary care when the world is watching complex conflicts evolve.

The judgment necessary to hold up the Church’s mission of teaching the divinity and message of Christ has never been more urgently needed. Pause and say a prayer for the 133.