Joseph Ratzinger

VATICAN CITY -- In the name-dropping ahead of the secret vote for the next pope, that of rigorously conservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is making the biggest buzz among those betting that cardinals will go for an elderly, likely short-tenure, pontiff after John Paul II's 26-year run.

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Turning 78 on April 16, on what could be the eve of the start of conclave, Ratzinger is dean of the College of Cardinals. In that role, he had the formal duty of announcing the pope's death Saturday to foreign governments.

"The only candidate which newspapers, especially German ones, are widely talking about is ... Ratzinger, seen as a possible `transition' pope," Marco Tosatti, a veteran of Vatican coverage, wrote in the Turin daily La Stampa.

Since 1981, when John Paul appointed him to one of the Vatican's most important posts -- guardian of the church's doctrinal orthodoxy -- Ratzinger was one of the key men the pope depended on in his drive to shore up the faith of the world's Roman Catholics.

Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, silenced dissident theologians and reiterated church teaching.

The Vatican frowns on cardinals naming any candidate ahead of the conclave, but when they go into the Sistine Chapel for the election, they are widely expected to be divided into distinct camps:

-- Those who want the papacy to return to the Italians, who held it for 455 years before the election of Karol Wojtyla, a Pole, who became John Paul II;

-- Cardinals who would like to see a non-Italian from Western Europe as pope;

-- Prelates who believe Latin America's historically Catholic population deserves a pontiff from one of their own.

-- Others who think an African could reflect the church's increasingly diverse face.

If the cardinals won't budge from their camps, or they are not ready to elect a younger cardinal who might have a long papacy, consensus could develop around a "transition" figure, such as Ratzinger.

Made a cardinal by Paul VI in 1977, the German prelate is one of only three among the 117 voting cardinals who weren't named by John Paul.

"The most buzzed-about possibility is that of a transition pope, that's to say, not a very young one like the 58-year-old Wojtyla when he was elected," La Repubblica wrote, calling Ratzinger the most "authoritative" of such prospects.

The Milan daily Corriere della Sera this week ran a full-page profile of Ratzinger in the first of its series on papal contenders.

A Ratzinger candidacy could be opposed by reform-minded cardinals, although John Paul, by appointing nearly all of those who will vote for his successor, has put his conservative stamp on the body.

But it would please hard-liners who favor continuing John Paul's policies of closing the door to women priests and rigidly opposing abortion, euthanasia and contraception.

Objections could come from cardinals who want the next pope to be an experienced and widely admired pastoral figure, in the mold of John Paul or John XXIII.

Swiss Cardinal Henri Schwery's comments this week that he "feels uncomfortable with certain members of the Curia who made their career" at the Vatican were widely read as a vote against a prelate like Ratzinger. The Curia is the Holy See's bureaucracy.

As John Paul's health failed, he sometimes tapped Ratzinger to help lead ceremonies in his place, giving the cardinal an opportunity to be in the public eye.

German media have suggested that Ratzinger might be hurt in the voting by his nationality.

"For a long time it was accepted that a German can never be pope, for historical and popular psychological reasons," the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote Tuesday, an apparent reference to sensitivity over Germany's Nazi past.

Ratzinger "could be" the next pope, the newspaper said. "Whether he will be is another question."