By IPS Correspondents
MILAN, Italy, Oct 15 2003 (IPS)

All signs are that the next pope, most likely a Latin American or Italian, will maintain the same conservative profile as John Paul II, despite the many points of dissent it has caused within the Roman Catholic Church.

John Paul II celebrates his 25th anniversary as pope on Thursday.

The first non-Italian-born pope in four centuries, he is credited for his internationally important actions, going beyond his own ecclesiastic duties, such as his opposition to the now-defunct communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.

His constant peregrinations, taking him around the world some 27 times as he visited more than 100 countries since he was elected Oct. 16, 1978, helped make him, in the words of Spanish philosopher Julián Marías, “the world’s most important public figure” of the past quarter century.

Some of the highlights of his 25 years in the papacy include his first visit to his native Poland as pope in 1979, when the socialist system still reigned, and to Cuba in 1998, where socialist President Fidel Castro set aside his trademark military fatigues and received John Paul II dressed in civilian clothing.

Despite his active agenda and his discourse against policies he says generate poverty in the developing South, he has been harshly criticised for his conservative and traditionalist vision of theology, including strident opposition to contraception, divorce, homosexuality, and sex outside of marriage.

In 1938, he moved to Krakow to study philology, but that effort was thwarted by the Sep. 1, 1939 occupation of his country by Nazi Germany, opening the doors to World War II.

It was not until 1941, after the death of his father, that he considered pursuing an ecclesiastic life. The next year he entered the clandestine seminary in Krakow, completing his studies in 1945, after the Nazis withdrew from Poland. He was ordained as a priest in 1946.

Appointed archbishop of Krakow in 1964 and promoted to cardinal in 1967, he was chosen to succeed John Paul I on Oct. 16, 1978. At age 58, he became the youngest pope in the 20th century.

In 1981, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Turkish citizen Mehmet Ali Agca shot the pope, nearly ending the pontiff’s life.

Although he remained relatively healthy as he aged, John Paul II was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2001 and suffers severe arthritis.

His health has so deteriorated lately that it has triggered strong debate inside and outside the church. Many wonder if, at 83, he is still fit to head the Roman Catholic Church and its more than one billion followers, as well as its vast hierarchy.

In spite of the controversy, John Paul II seems determined to serve until the day he dies.

According to the 2002 Pontifical Yearbook, one of every six people in the world professes the Catholic faith: almost 50 percent live in the Americas, 27 percent in Europe, 12 percent in Africa, 10 percent in Asia, and the remaining one percent in Oceania.

However, the cardinals do not represent that geographic distribution.

With the appointment of 31 new cardinals in late September, the membership in the Holy Cardinalate grew to 195. Of that total, 135 are younger than 80, and hold the power to elect the successor to John Paul II, while they themselves are also candidates.

Forty percent of these elector-cardinals come from Europe, 23 percent of whom are Italian, and just 28 percent are from the Americas, 24 from Latin America.

Observers interpret the designation of 31 new cardinals – months earlier than expected – as an effort by John Paul II to influence the selection of his successor, a final attempt, given his fragile health, to ensure that the next pope maintains his conservative line.

But experts in religion also believe that a new pope with the same leadership style and conservative doctrine could push more of the Catholic faithful away, as the church seems to have less and less relevance in their daily lives.

The condemnation of divorce and homosexual unions, the rigid defence of celibacy for members of the clergy, and the refusal to open the priesthood to women are some of the Vatican’s positions that a large portion of the world’s Catholic community today considers antiquated.

But it is the church’s continued ban on contraceptives that brings the strongest criticisms against John Paul II, especially because his rejection of condom use runs counter to campaigns to fight the transmission of HIV/AIDS, a disease that has devastated much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Last week, the British news agency BBC reported that Catholic Church – via its priests and nuns – has been spreading the idea in countries with high HIV/AIDS rates that condoms do not protect against the deadly virus.

Regardless, it is unlikely that John Paul II’s successor will be a more progressive-minded prelate. In the first place, the vast majority in the conclave of elector-cardinals is conservative, which comes as no surprise because only five were not appointed by the current pope.

Furthermore, the chances of the most vocal of the liberal cardinals, Carlo Maria Martini, former archbishop of Milan, were drastically reduced at the 1999 European bishops synod, when the reforms he proposed were resoundingly rejected.

Martini sought to democratise the Catholic Church by giving greater decision-making power to the bishops and reducing the autocratic nature of the papacy.

None other than Dionigi Tettamanzi, his successor as archbishop of Milan, was among the loudest critics of the reformist agenda.

Since then, Tettamanzi’s chances of becoming the next pope have increased notably, and he is currently considered the most serious candidate among the Italian cardinals.

The other Italians who appear to be strong candidates for the papacy are two leading figures of the Curia Romana, the central government of the Catholic Church: Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Congregation for Bishops, and Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s powerful secretary of state.

But there are some observers who insist that the next pope will be Latin American. The names mentioned most often are Mexican archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera and his colleague in Tegucigalpa, Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga.

Other “electable” Latin Americans are Colombia’s Darío Castrillón Hoyos and Peru’s Juan Luis Cipriani.

Castrillón Hoyos, current director of the Congregation for the Clergy, is a defender of the conservative doctrine, along the lines of John Paul II, in regards to strict Catholic morals.

Cipriani, formerly the archbishop of Lima, is a representative of Opus Dei, an ultraconservative Catholic organisation founded in Spain in the 1960s, and which enjoys strong support from John Paul II.

Although there are other compelling candidates to the papacy, such as archbishop of Vienna, Christopher Schoenborn, and the director of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, all indications are that the next in line is either Italian or Latin American.

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