Godfried Danneels

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- When the news came that Pope John Paul II was facing his final hours, Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels was on a mission to China that exemplified his stature as a leading church diplomat.

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Danneels met government officials, Chinese Catholics and representatives of other religions on a rare visit by a cardinal to the communist nation, which severed ties with the Vatican in 1951. He cut short his trip and rushed home to hold a memorial Mass for the pope Sunday in Brussels.

The cardinal-archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels was coy about his own chances of succeeding to the papacy.

"That is up to heaven, what God is thinking about that, and up to the cardinals. I have no comment," Danneels said before flying to Rome for the pope's funeral.

The multilingual 71-year-old was more forthcoming about the qualities needed for a new pontiff.

"The Church will look for a man who will continue, in a certain sense, all the good things that this Pope has begun and will also be very open and sensitive to all the new difficulties and new problems. ... because the Church is in complete revolution and evolution, so he has to adapt," Danneels told Associated Press Television News.

He later listed some of those problems as "evangelization, the secularization in Europe, the poverty in Latin America, Africa."

Although Danneels is seen as having a deft diplomatic touch useful for sensitive interfaith talks, some Vatican observers say his views are too progressive for conservatives within the conclave that will select the new pope in the coming weeks.

Belgian experts give Danneels only an outside chance, if his fellow cardinals cannot agree on one of the front-runners from Italy or Latin America.

"If that fails, then they will look for compromise figure and the name of Cardinal Danneels comes up," said Rik Torfs, professor of church law at the Catholic University of Leuven. "The longer the conclave lasts, the greater the chances of Danneels become."

Danneels has long spoken forcefully about the need for greater "collegiality" -- a Vatican code word for more democracy in John Paul's centralized church. He has also suggested that elderly popes should abdicate if they become too frail to fulfill papal duties.

"One cannot continue to bear the responsibility if you turn 90 or 100, no matter how well you're cared for," he told a magazine interviewer in 2003. "The choice of the right moment must be the prerogative of the pope, and that's how it will work."

Although close to John Paul, who appointed him as cardinal in 1983, Danneels differed on the sensitive issues of contraception. He told a Dutch TV station last year that an HIV-positive person should use a condom rather than risk transmitting the virus.

"When someone is HIV-positive and his partner says 'I want to have (sexual) relations with you,' then he does not have to do it," Danneels said. "But if he does, he has to use a condom. Otherwise he will commit a sin."

Danneels also moved swiftly to distance the Belgian church from comments made by Cardinal Gustaaf Joos, who denounced gays as "sexual perverts" in an interview before his death last year.

Roman Catholicism is by far Belgium's biggest religion, but church attendance is poor. In a sign of the country's increasing secular nature, parliament has passed laws allowing homosexuals to marry and authorizing doctors to carry out euthanasia.

When Belgian bishops visited the Vatican in November 2003, John Paul II expressed concern about the health of the church in Belgium.

Perhaps Danneels' most difficult moment as leader of Belgium's Catholics came in 1998 when a court found the Church had failed to protect the victims of a pedophile priest and ordered Danneels to pay damages to a 12-year-old victim.

His spokesman, Toon Osaer, recently recalled the case.

"It is very difficult to be confronted with the grave faults of Church people, even if you are not responsible," Osaer told the Catholic news agency Cathobel. "That was a very hard time for the cardinal."

Evaluating John Paul's papacy, Danneels praised the efforts to forge better relations with Muslims and Jews. In his Christmas address last year, Danneels spoke in support of a Belgian factory manager who received death threats for employing a Muslim woman.

Danneels was born in 1933 in the Flemish village of Kanegem. He studied in Bruges and at the Catholic University of Leuven before earning a doctorate in theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.

He was ordained in 1957 and taught theology at Leuven before John Paul appointed him bishop of Antwerp in 1977. Three years later he was appointed to head Belgium's largest diocese, Mechelen-Brussels.