ROME
National Catholic Reporter
by John L Allen Jr on May. 10, 2012 All Things Catholic
Right now, the “next pope” conversation isn’t creating much buzz. There’s no sign of a health crisis around Benedict XVI, and Catholic attention around the world is focused on more local matters: the LCWR crackdown in the States, the disciplining of liberal priests and calls for Cardinal Sean Brady to resign over the sex abuse crisis in Ireland, a political scandal involving Communion and Liberation in Italy, and so on.
Yet with an 85-year-old pope beginning to show his age, speculation about who might come next is always in the background, even if it’s on a low boil.
I just returned from a couple of weeks in Rome, and below I offer a sort of “poll average” of the current state of thinking about papal candidates among Vatican-watchers, by which I mean Vatican personnel, prelates from around the world, diplomats, journalists, academics, and so on. Such conventional wisdom is hardly infallible, so take this for what it’s worth – no more, really, than the kind of thing you’ll hear at many Roman dinner tables.
The eleven names below are organized into concentric circles of plausibility, from “front-runners” to “possibilities” to “long shots.” My experience is that pretty much everybody agrees on the top two names on this list, Cardinals Angelo Scola and Marc Ouellet, but after that things get murkier.
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