The Old Continent is vastly overrepresented in the college of cardinals that’s gathering to choose their next pontiff — despite the late Pope Francis’ efforts to diversify.

Of the 133 cardinals sequestered in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, 52 (about 40 percent) are based in Europe.

Their choice of successor will set the course for a church split between liberal and traditional forces, delivering a new religious leader for the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics around the globe. But the vast majority of them aren’t European.

Pope Francis, the first non-European pope in over a millennium, made some steps toward giving the Global South greater weight in the college of cardinals, appointing all but 25 of those eligible to pick his successor.

Nearly 90 percent of the cardinals from Africa, Asia and South America in the conclave are there thanks to Francis. By contrast, he handpicked 77 percent of the Europeans and just 70 percent of the North Americans.

The conclave would have looked even less European if it had taken place next year, as several European cardinals are about to age out of their voting rights. The cut-off age for electing a new pope is 80, and nine of Europe’s 52 voting cardinals are 79.

But while Francis’ appointments signaled a shift, they didn’t mark a revolution: The bulk of Francis-appointed cardinals in the conclave are still European. The single largest group of voting cardinals, 17 of them, are Italian; the U.S. is in second place, with 10 cardinals, according to figures of the College of Cardinals report.

Selecting a new pope is a highly politicized exercise, with state leaders subtly jostling for influence — to varying degrees of success.

But even if global representation is bigger than it used to be at conclaves, the group’s demographic is still out of step with the Catholic world beyond the Sistine Chapel.

Catholicism is the largest religion in the EU, with 44 percent of people self-identifying as Catholic in a 2023 Eurobarometer survey. Though virtually no one identified as Catholic in the Protestant Nordics or Orthodox Greece and Bulgaria, they represented up to 70 percent of respondents in Italy; 80 percent in Portugal, Croatia and Lithuania; and over 90 percent in Poland.

For now, Europe’s broad and historically rooted Catholic machine also dwarfs that of other continents, with far more priests than any other continent, according to a 2022 statistical update the Catholic Church published last year.

Zooming out to the world stage, however, Europe stands out as a continent on the wane.

In 2022, the number of Catholics increased in four out of five continents. “Only in Europe there is a decrease,” the church’s statistical update said.

Despite a remarkable uptick in the number of adult baptisms in Belgium and France, the countries have also registered major decreases in overall baptism numbers over the past decades. Countries like Belgium and Germany have also seen a significant number of requests to be removed from the baptism register.

During this conclave, Europe will have three times as many voting cardinals than Africa. But while one-fifth of the world’s Catholics were in Europe, Africa housed almost as many, and it had the largest growing Catholic population thanks to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Catholics represent just a tiny share of Asia’s population, but they make up 11 percent of the global Catholic population and the church also registered growing numbers there.

The Americas stand out as the most Catholic of all. The continents are home to about half of the world’s Catholic population, buoyed by Brazil. Yet, like Africa, South America’s cardinals are outnumbered three-to-one by Europe’s cardinals during this conclave.