WHEN the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on Monday to elect the new leader of the world’s billion Roman Catholics the adulation for the late Pope will still ring in their ears.

John Paul II is seen as a charismatic Pope who inherited a Church in decline and left it a global power, yet out of step with the modern world. Who is the man to close that gap? The clamour to have John Paul made an instant saint may favour Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, Dean of the College of Cardinals and the late Pope’s ideological enforcer.

He is backed by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Vicar of Rome, who talks of the need for a purist pope to take the love of Christ to the world. But liberal-minded cardinals believe that Cardinal Ratzinger is backward-looking and divisive.

They will rally around the retired Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, 78, or his successor, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, 71. The diminutive and rotund Cardinal Tettamanzi has a handicap — lack of English or Spanish — but he has the backing of the wily Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, 71, head of the Congregation of Bishops and master of the Vatican bureaucracy. The deadlock, the theory runs, will produce a compromise choice, from Italy or the Third World.

Yesterday Vatican insiders said speculation was pointless. The question is: who is best equipped to deal with the agenda facing the Church — Islam, poverty, terrorism, bioethical dilemmas, sexuality, the need for democracy in the Church and Western secularism?

“There is a huge gap between the adulation of John Paul II and the mass disobedience of Catholics on issues from contraception to sex before marriage,” Marco Politi, the veteran Vatican watcher, said. “He had extraordinary rapport with the young, yet they did not share his views.”

Even as the Pope lay dying, some cardinals questioned whether the Vatican ban on condoms should be lifted where Aids was “the greater evil”, or whether the rules on celibacy should be revised to halt the decline in priestly vocations.

For Cardinal Ratzinger, the answer is to hold the line. He sees himself as the man to clean up the “dirt” that has infected the Church, a reference to paedophilia scandals.

This week he published a book, Values in a Time of Upheaval, calling on Europe to return to its Christian roots and condemning gay marriage, divorce and human cloning. “In the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems to have become empty inside,” he wrote.

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor — a standard- bearer for the progressives — points out that despite the threat from evangelical sects, “the Church is flourishing in some parts of the world — Asia, Africa, Latin America. His (John Paul’s) legacy will bear fruit for years. The Church has to find new ways of touching people where they itch.”

For some cardinals, the man to scratch that itch could be Latin American or African. “John Paul II ended the East-West conflict. Now we need a pope to tackle the North-South div- ide and the challenges posed by Muslim immigration in Europe,” a Vatican source said.

Cardinal Ratzinger argues that “multiculturalism is often a renunciation of what is one’s own”. Bringing Turkey into the EU would put European culture at risk, he writes.

But Cardinal Angelo Scola, 63, the Patriarch of Venice, insists that “integration with the Muslim world must and will take place in Europe”. Cardinal Scola, who also emphasises the need for a dialogue with science on bioethics, recently founded a journal, Oasis, devoted to understanding and friendship with the Muslim world.

A similar line is taken by Cardinal Francis Arinze, 72, the leading contender to be a black pope, who grew up with Muslims in his native Nigeria. He argues that “Christians can learn from sincere Muslims. They pray five times a day . . . whereas many Christians are ashamed to make the sign of the Cross in a restaurant or pull out a rosary on a train.”

The Arcbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, 60, is another conciliator, observing that “for a true dialogue with Muslims one must share their innermost convictions”.

If the job is to tackle Islam and poverty while galvanising the Christian West the conclave could turn to a cardinal from Asia: the Archbishop of Bombay, Cardinal Ivan Dias (a linguist and diplomat), 69, or the Archbishop of Jakarta, Julius Darmaatmadja, 70. More likely is a pope from Latin America, where more than half the world’s Catholics live: Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, 62 (a pilot and musician), has criticised globalisation, as has the Archbishop of São Paolo, Claudio Hummes, 70. A Franciscan of German origin, he criticises globalisation and urges solidarity with workers to close the gap between rich and poor.

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