Who are the leading cardinals for the new pope? How are the cardinals that are allowed to vote (all under 80 years old?) distributed nationally?
Good article on contenders
http://slate.msn.com/id/2089815/
Until someone puts a better breakdown, we can say as of today there are 117 in the conclave of which:
The Italian contingent will be composed of twenty cardinals and will still be the largest: in the cardinal college; all five continents are present numbering 66 countries, 52 of which have cardinal electors and among these besides Italy only the USA, with 11 members, exceed the threshold of ten representatives in the conclavehttp://www.agi.it/english/news.pl?doc=200504011138-1037-RT1-CRO-0-NF11&page=0&id=agionline-eng.oggitalia
BTW if the coverage starts throwing around mysterious names here is a site with bios of all the Cardinals
http://www.fiu.edu/~mirandas/a-z-all.htm
See this list of cardinals.
That slate article is good but a bit out of date. Running odds can be found here:
That updates automatically - you might not want to leave it up. When “PaddyPower” comes on line, they have odds on that whole list. Tettamanzi is front runner, Arinze in second place. Papal election are hard to handicap - Cardinals don’t openly campaign for the job, and the Vatican is very secretive about their internal politics. If it isn’t decided on an early ballot, they might very well wind up choosing one of the longer shots as a compromise.
What is the balloting process even like? Can a non-cardinal get the job anymore? Where do I send my resume? Will they ask if I’m gay? :smack:
And what do the religious right say about a black pope? Sign of the end of the world for them?
From this interesting page.
The religous right is largely Protestant. What the more fundamentalist of them think of “Popery” in general finds expression in Jack Chick’s tracts on the subject. Since the extreme end of that crowd thinks the Vatican is evil incarnate, it will either make no difference to them, or, for the ones inclined to be racist as well, have them saying “that figures” and using the fact to rail about Vatican conspiracies in even louder voices.
Why? Heck, I bet the black/African Catholic prelates are much like the Anglican ones, the most conservative ones in the Curia.
Don’t confuse “religious right” with “racist right”.
After the Pope dies and is buried, the cardinals get locked into the Sistine Chapel. Then each of them gets a ballot that says “I think _______ should be Pope”, which they fill in, and then at the end, they count the votes. If nobody gets two thirds of the votes, they burn the ballots and then do it again. If nobody gets two-thirds then, they go have lunch. Then there’s more balloting.
If this goes on for 3 days without a 2/3 winner, they get yelled at by the cardinal who they’ve put in charge of the whole election proceeding, then take a break for a day for discussion and prayer.
If after 7 ballots, there’s another lecture, and the cardinals can decide either to keep up the 2/3 rule, or agree they’ll vote on the two candidates that got the most votes on the last ballot, to be decided by simple majority.
You don’t have to be a cardinal to get elected…they can elect anyone they want, so long as the person is Catholic and a man.
RE the Protty radical religious right- and Chick can be the most radical of them all (tho I bet he’s probably against a lot of RR political activism)- he’s definitely not racist
and there is a Catholic religious right- watch EWTN for a while
I meant those on the right that believe the end of the world is being signaled in current events. To them, a black pope might mean some bizarre thing… their (dis)liking of him isn’t the issue.
Well, they didn’t seem to think to badly of a Polish pope.
Researching this answer has led me to realize I have no idea how to spell “pollock” (or whatnot) and Google was no help!!
[I wonder if the apocryphal Cardinal Sicola will be in the running, as he was in the '70s?]
Question: So, who’s in charge of Catholicism between the Pope’s death and the installation of the new Pope?
Whadya bet at least one candidate is pulling the voters over to the side and promise better vending machines in the Vatican cafeteria if elected 
Yep. And the African Catholics tend to run on the charasmatic side, too, which could shake things up in Vatican City a bit, plus Christians in general in Africa are known for seeing all the cool miracles. As far as docrine goes, I’d think the Protestants would be glad to see a Pope like this.
I believe it’s the Vatican’s Secretary of State who is charge of funeral arrangements and the convocation of cardinals for electing a new pope.
Actually, by law, the Secretary of State loses his office upon the Pope’s death. Funeral and conclave arrangements are handled by the Camerlengo (the Chamberlain).
Currently, any other decisions are supposed to be made by the College of Cardinals as a whole, but that hasn’t been tested yet, because no pope has died since the new rules came into place. Here’s a copy of Universi Dominici Gregis, from 1996, which lays out what’s supposed to happen when a pope dies (and which replaces any earlier rules).
The Web Page from America Magazine that This Year’s Model previously cited has detailed answers to almost all of these questions and many more. It was updated yesterday (March 31), so is very current.
Go to the Betfair website and Maradiaga is the front runner now. He has been coming in for a while, while Tettamanzi has been drifting a little.
Well, it’s a live tote board, and it changes. Maradiaga does seem to have made a sudden challenge from somewhere back in the pack. He’s western hemisphere (Honduras) - that could be interesting, too. Figuratively speaking, they haven’t even rounded the first turn yet.