What The New Job Specs Are

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The Coming Catholic Church's Gibson uses a novel analogy to explain another attribute the Cardinals may seek. "Just as Bill Clinton was considered the first African-American President," he suggests, "John Paul could have been considered the first Third World Pope." With his wholehearted visits to Brazilian favelas and his efforts on behalf of debt forgiveness, says Gibson, the late Pontiff's evident Europeanness did not prevent him from becoming "a hero in the southern hemisphere."

With the proportion of global south Catholics at two-thirds and climbing (even as Latin American practitioners engage in near hand-to-hand combat with encroaching Pentecostal Protestantism), preventing deadly poverty is as much a matter of church survival as it is a spiritual commitment to the beatitude "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Moreover, unlike some of the late Pope's doctrinal stances (or his no-condoms position on aids prevention in some of the same locales), economic justice is win-win, a cause to which theological absolutists in Rome or Lagos and cafeteria Catholics in the moneyed West all feel some cultural affinity and obligation.

Thus the south's champions in the conclave will be many, some with formidable credentials. Rodríguez Maradiaga did not just hang with Bono. Calling debt "a tombstone pressing down on us," he presented a 17 million--signature petition for debt relief at a G-8 meeting, and he has bent German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's ear on the topic. In the 1980s, Brazil's CLAUDIO CARDINAL HUMMES backed strikes and defied his country's dictators by letting leftist labor leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (now Brazil's President) make speeches during Mass. He has spoken out in favor of the organization of the landless in Brazil. Asked his priorities by Time, he immediately replied, "Evangelization and solidarity with the poor." Some outside the Third World have been almost as involved. Milan's DIONIGI CARDINAL TETTAMANZI, sometimes tagged as front runner for the papacy, famously blessed antiglobal protesters in Genoa despite political fire from the Italian right.

If there is a counterposition, it is advanced by a group that Monsignor Brian Ferme, a dean at Catholic University who knows several of the papabili, describes as "not denying the inequalities of injustices but arguing that if you get the church's internal priorities right, its external work will proceed that much more effectively." Roughly translated, that is a line long familiar to some conservative Protestants: Take care of the souls, and the pocketbooks will follow. Yet to become Pope, anyone pursuing in that camp will need to convince his brethren that he does care about the pocketbook part of the equation.

Doctrinal Fidelity