The death of the first bishop of Rome to rise from Latin America, Pope Francis, brings into sharp relief the possibility that the next pontiff selected at the imminent conclave could hail from the continent essential to the church’s future — Africa. 

There has not been a pope from Africa in some 1,500 years. The first of three African popes, Victor I, ordained that Easter always falls on a Sunday. The holiday had previously been celebrated on the 14th of Nissan, the date the Jewish calendar assigns to the night before Passover.  

The hopes of Catholic traditionalists who felt betrayed by Francis’s rhetoric of reform appear to be migrating to the person of Robert Cardinal Sarah, a Guinean prelate and unabashed conservative. At a prayer breakfast at Washington, D.C., in 2016, he decried “the legalization of same-sex marriage” and the “obligation to accept contraception within health care programs.”

Cardinal Sarah, who has also called fundamentalist Islam an “apocalyptic beast,” is not the only African papabile, or potential pope. Fridolin Ambongo Cardinal Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa, is another contender. Cardinals Sarah and Besungu both opposed Francis’s guidelines on blessing same-sex couples. The 266th pope called that a “special case” because of widespread hostility to homosexuality in Africa. 

Another papabile is Peter Kodwo Appiah Cardinal Turkson of Ghana. In 2013 he told the BBC: “I’m not sure whether anyone does aspire to become a pope,” though he serves as the chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences at Rome and was elevated to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope Benedict.       

Francis urged his church to “go to the peripheries,” in recognition that the future of the faith rests not in its historic European heartland but in Africa and Asia. Some 18 percent of Africa’s population is Catholic — more than 250 million people — and the continent is overrepresented in its contribution to seminarians. 

That shift, though, could pull the church in an ideologically conservative direction that could double as a repudiation of Francis’s ethos. A pontiff with a more traditionalist bent than Francis could find new allies in America, where Vice President Vance, who spent some of Holy Week at Rome, differed with the previous pope in respect of, among issues, migrant policy.     

The next pope will be selected by the College of Cardinals, a body that features 13 African cardinals who are eligible to vote for the next vicar of Christ. Overall, 80 percent of the 135 cardinals eligible to vote were appointed by Francis, with the remainder owing their red robes to his predecessors, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. Under Francis’s pontificate, the percentage of princes of the church who hail from Africa rose.

Christianity has been in Africa from the beginning — tradition maintains that Mark the Evangelist was the first bishop of Alexandria. One of the greatest of the church fathers, St. Augustine, was of Berber extraction and lived in Roman North Africa, dying as the Vandals encircled his home city of Hippo.  

The Catholic church, though,  could just now be hitting its stride on the continent. The National Catholic Register reports that in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, 94 percent of Catholics attend Mass weekly. That number is about 5 percent in France and Germany, though there are signs of resurgence in the country, France, known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” 

Catholicism’s strength in Africa has led some Vatican watchers to forecast a new center of gravity for the global faith. One, Scott Smith, reflected last year on X: “It’s the Congo, not the Rhine, which from now on will flow into the Tiber.” The reference to the Rhine is a pointed one — the German Catholic Church is often seen as at the van of the faith’s progressive edge.  

Some Catholics see a pivot from the Old World as overdue. A priest in the Ivory Coast, Charles Yapi, tells Reuters that “to have a Black pope would revive the Christian faith in Africa and change people’s views of Africa, by showing that an African can hold this office.” A cardinal from the Ivory Coast, Ignace Cardinal Bessi Dogbo, was just elevated to the College of Cardinals in December by Francis. 

Ignace Cardinal Dogbo, on the occasion of his elevation, reflected: “Having cardinals from every part of the world truly translates the universality of the Church.”

An Academy Award-nominated movie, “Conclave,” released in October, contemplates the possibility of an African pope in the person of a Nigerian, Joshua Cardinal Adeyemi, played as a social conservative by Lucian Msamat. His bid for the throne of St. Peter, though, is thwarted by the disclosure of an illicit sexual relationship with a nun that led to the birth of a son.

By law the papal conclave must begin no earlier than 16 days after the passing of a pope and no later than 21 days. A two-thirds vote is required to send white smoke up from the Sistine Chapel to signal that a pope has been chosen.

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Correction: Guinean is the nationality of Cardinal Sarah. An earlier version misstated the country.