In Harris’s fiction, the man chosen to be Pope (who, spoilers ahead, turns out to be a woman) is a mysterious bishop from the Middle East. Apart from the lurid plot twist, the same can be said of Pizzaballa. Until last year, he wasn’t even a cardinal. And yet upon receiving his red hat he was suddenly catapulted into the ranks of the papabili.

A big part of the attraction is that he’s not a factional figure — being associated with neither the allies nor the enemies of the current Pope. Where Francis blunders into needless controversy, Pizzaballa is the diplomat he’s always had to be — both in his current position and, before that, as custodian of the Holy Places of Jerusalem (a job that requires the delicate handling of ancient sensitivities).

Other advantages are his relative youth (he’s 59) and health (apparently good). After 25 years of elderly, ailing Popes, that would make a change. He’d also be the first Italian Pope since the 1970s, but one who’s spent most of his career a long way from the politics of the Vatican.

There are things about him that will please reformists and traditionalists alike. He seems at home in the modern world, but is also appreciative of older forms of worship; he has, for instance, celebrated mass ad orientem (i.e. facing away from the congregation and turned towards Jerusalem and God). So there’s reason to hope that, as Pope, he’d end Francis’s obsessive clamp-down on the traditional Latin mass.

But what does Pizzaballa actually believe? Theologically, is he a liberal or a conservative? Politically, does he lean to the Left or the Right? The truth is that it’s remarkably hard to tell. Unlike many of his rivals, he’s not one to inflame the Church’s divisions.

By next Christmas, or the one after that, Pizzaballa could be Pope — and it’s only then that his brother bishops will discover the full measure of the man.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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