VATICAN: Cardinal Desmond Connell has said he doesn't expect that this week's conclave in the Vatican will be lengthy. Meanwhile, speculation in Rome last night suggested that the new Pope would most likely be Latin American.
It was being conceded on all sides that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dean of the College of Cardinals, stood little chance of gaining the necessary two-thirds majority support from among the 115 cardinal electors.
Over the weekend in Rome there was a growing belief that the new pope would come from the so-called "Iberian bloc", from Latin America, Spain or Portugal. Together, the countries involved have over half the world's Catholics and almost 50 cardinals.
Voting is scheduled to begin this afternoon in the Sistine Chapel, although the first ballot may be deferred until tomorrow morning. The conclave will start with Mass at 10am in St Peter's, with the cardinals being taken to the Sistine Chapel later.
Cardinal Connell (79) will be the only Irishman to take part in the conclave, although he likes to point out that Scotland's Cardinal Keith O'Brien was born in Antrim.
It is believed that in the first ballot he will vote for Cardinal Ratzinger. Cardinal Connell has been a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for 12 years and is close to Cardinal Ratzinger, both theologically and philosophically.
The question then is who is he likely to vote for in subsequent ballots. Someone Cardinal Connell is thought likely to support is Cardinal Cláudio Hummes (71), archbishop of São Paulo, who is a theological conservative but progressive on social issues.
Like Cardinal Connell, he too is a member of both the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation of Bishops.
It is sometimes forgotten that while Cardinal Connell is theologically conservative, he was outspoken as Archbishop of Dublin on social issues, particularly housing and asylum seekers.
Cardinal Hummes, a Franciscan, was being spoken of in Rome yesterday as the likeliest of all the non-European cardinals to be elected pope.
He is archbishop of São Paulo since 1998, the largest diocese in the southern hemisphere in the world's most populous Catholic country, Brazil.
He was elevated to the College of Cardinals in 2001, as was Cardinal Connell. In 2002, Cardinal Hummes was invited to give the 2002 Lenten lectures to the papal household, frequently seen as a chance for papabile cardinals to hint at what they think a pope should be. Cardinal Hummes talked about less Vatican control over dioceses and a more "collegial" approach to decision-making, something that has great appeal for the majority of the cardinal-electors, indeed all of those outside the Curia.
Another Latin American that Cardinal Connell might have been tempted to support is Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires. But his chances were effectively ended at the weekend when Marcelo Parrilli, a human rights lawyer in Argentina filed a criminal complaint against him on Friday, accusing him of involvement in the 1976 kidnapping of two Jesuit priests.
The case dates back to May 1976 during the Pinochet military dictatorship, when the priests Fr Orlando Yorio and Fr Francisco Jalics were kidnapped by the Argentine navy. They were found five months later, drugged, in a field outside Buenos Aires.
At the time, Cardinal Bergoglio was the Jesuits' superior in Argentina and had clashed with activist priests who wanted to challenge the dictatorship more forcefully, some even taking up arms.
He had asked the two priests to leave their pastoral work in some of Argentina's poorest neighbourhoods until the political situation changed, and when they refused, he removed them from the order. They were kidnapped soon afterwards.
Another contender Cardinal Connell may be tempted to support is Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras. However, at 62, he is probably too young for a conclave which seems likely to favour a shorter papacy than that of Pope John Paul II.
