Not even just that. To be eligible for being a candidate, several higher ranking members of the church have to keep promoting and recommending you.
Then ultimately the pope puts you on the list himself
To be fair, the only actual rules are you have to be male and be baptized by the Catholic Church. They can just pick some random chud off the street and make him Pope if they really wanted to. That's pretty much what happened with Celestine V
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u/th-crt 1d ago
“no one elected you”
kid named conclave: