ON SUNDAY, March 13, we were enjoying a weekend in the spring sunshine of Rome, celebrating my wife’s birthday and our wedding anniversary. There was a charity marathon being run, so we had to walk most of the way from the Hotel De Russie to St Peter’s. Pope John Paul II would normally have been saying the 10.30 pontifical Mass, but he was in hospital. As we left the piazza, we looked up at the windows from which he gave his papal blessing. He was not there, but he was still alive and still conscious. He was strongly present in spirit.

After nearly 27 years, it is hard to imagine Rome without him, yet human nature always moves forward, and the instinct is a healthy one. The papacy now has to go through a process of election, which will take a couple of weeks, but the principle of these historic monarchies has to be the same: “The King is dead; long live the King”. Even as Rome prepares for the funeral, preparations are being made to elect a new Pope.

It is sometimes said that no one ever makes a correct forecast of the candidate who will emerge from the conclave as the new Pope. That is not completely true. There are two different situations. Sometimes there is an obvious continuity which the cardinals want to maintain, and an obvious successor to carry on the work. Because of the growing threat of war, that was true of the first conclave of my lifetime, which elected Pius XII to succeed Pius XI in 1939. I can remember the wired photograph in The Times of the rising puff of smoke. It was also true of the election of Pope Paul VI in 1963 to succeed John XXIII and complete the work of the Second Vatican Council.

In the three other papal elections of my lifetime, that of John XXIII in 1958, and of the successive Popes, John Paul I and II in 1978, the work of the previous Pope had largely been seen as complete, and the Church was ready to embark on a new agenda. (Naturally, in the case of the death of John Paul I, after only a month in office, the feeling was that the new agenda had not been started.)

It looks as if this will be an occasion of the second kind. It is just possible that the cardinals will elect an older man, as they did in the case of John XXIII, in order to give themselves time to reflect on the future needs of the Church. John Paul II was such a great figure that any successor might be submerged by the contrast, as in British politics Anthony Eden was submerged by comparison with Winston Churchill. In that case an old caretaker might be a shrewd choice, though old caretakers can spring surprises.

It is more likely, after such a long reign, that the cardinals will be looking for a new Pope for the new world. That does not mean a “liberal” Pope. Indeed the whole subject of “liberal” versus “conservative” has been discussed in a misleading way. In the conclave, it is usually a disadvantage to be labelled as the candidate of any particular ideological wing; the cardinals, like most other electors, hope to choose a new Pope who will keep the whole Church together, liberals and conservatives alike.

In any case, the new Pope will have to work out his response to the challenges which the Church faces. No one can know how he will analyse these challenges, or how he will respond to them. Liberal cardinals can make conservative popes, and vice versa.

I have been in this forecasting situation before. I look back on a leading article I wrote, “A Polish Pope”, published in The Times of October 17, 1978. I had certainly been taken by surprise. I commented that: “The choice the cardinals have made may prove the best thing that could have happened to the world, but it has the imaginative rashness one might expect from a college of students rather than the weighty caution that one associates with a College of Cardinals.

“They have elected a Pope to face the problems of communism . . . the cardinals may have done the wisest thing, but they are also taking the risk of unleashing human, political and religious forces they do not control. There are risks in the choice, greater perhaps than have been faced before; there will also be hopes in the choice for many millions of people.” That seems a fair assessment to have made.

The present College of Cardinals must look back on the election of Cardinal Wojtyla as one of the most successful decisions in the history of the papacy. I am not sure how many of the cardinals of that conclave will still be young enough to take part in this one. I hope that the new conclave may repeat the formula which inspired the last decision. Look for the big issue and appoint the person best qualified to handle it. In 1978 the big issue was communism, and the answer was a Pope who was Polish, the bravest and most Catholic of all the peoples enslaved by Soviet power.

Now there are two outstanding issues, the material poverty of the Third World, and the spiritual poverty of the First. Except for Poland and Malta, Europe is almost post-Christian, even Ireland is in decline. The United States is trying to prove that Jesus was wrong when he said that no one could worship both God and Mammon. Modern America is having a very good try.

In the later years of his reign, Pope John Paul II issued repeated warnings about the growing cult of death in the West, exemplified by attitudes towards abortion and euthanasia. In the United States, he would have added capital punishment. He thought it terrible that human life should be made a commodity of convenience, whether in the old or in the womb.

Meanwhile, people in Third World poverty are looking to the Church for a pastoral response which is not provided by the advanced capitalism of the West. To me, these two problems suggest the advantages of a Pope drawn from the nations of suffering because they know the real conditions of life, and suffering strengthens their faith. That worked well with the choice of Cardinal Wojtyla in 1978.

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