Paddy Power, Ireland's largest bookmaker, is now offering 11/4 odds on Angelo Scola, cardinal of Venice, 7/2 on Peter Turkson of Ghana, and 9/2 on Marc Ouellet of Quebec, Canada. Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, Ladbrokes has Cardinal Turkson in the lead, followed by Marc Ouellet and Angelo Scola.
It might seem irreverent to bet on the future leader of the 1.2 billion-souled flock like a horse race, but maybe the bookies are on to something.
Turning the election into an actual race could put a little more Roman back into the Roman Catholic Church, and give it a welcome dose of positive publicity.
After so many sordid scandals in recent years, the spectacle of those scarlet robes billowing around a restored Circus Maximus would be long remembered by the faithful and heathen alike.
It would also have the practical advantage in ensuring that the College of Cardinals selected its strongest - or at least its sharpest-elbowed - member, either of which are useful qualities in Pontiff.
Of course, the victory in a real race might depend on the length of the race. In a sprint, the 64-year-old Turkson, the youngest of the three, might bring home the mitre.
But a longer race might well turn out differently: Canada's Ouellet may be 69 but his eyes have a marathoner's glint of grim determination. Even Scola, at 71, might not be out of the running either, if he had a few weeks off the pasta first.
But unless Benedict has made a secret change in the rules (a theoretical possibility as the pope remains the absolute ruler not only of the 110-acre Vatican City State in Rome but of Catholicism), the cardinals are likely to choose the next pope the old-fashioned way: by a two-thirds majority + 1 vote in the Sistine Chapel, under the watchful eye of Michelangelo's muscly God.
THE PROBLEMS
When the doors to the conclave close in mid-March, one rumour has it, the conclave always begins with a debate to decide the single most important issue facing the church.
Most groups of 116 single guys - and a great many ordinary Catholics - would say: no girls! - but for better or worse, the staunchly conservative cardinals, most of whom were elevated by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, will probably have other ideas.
To an outsider, four issues might seem most important:
Most Catholics don't approve of child abuse
The first is to regain the credibility the Church has lost in recent years after thousands of people in scores of countries have come forward with shocking allegations that priests had sexually abused them as children, and that the hierarchy had actively tried to cover up the problem.
In the US alone, bishopaccountability.org, an advocacy group for abuse victims, estimates that over 100,000 American children were molested by more than 6,000 priests since 1950 - about 5.6% of the working priests - and so far, the Church has spent over $3 billion in cash awards and settlements of abuse-related law suits.
A 2011 report prepared by scholars at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and commissioned by the US Catholic bishops regarding sexual abuse of minors by priests between 1950 and 2010 found no single cause of the abuse but noted that many of them began their abuse "years after they were ordained, at times of increased job stress, social isolation, and decreased contact with peers".
Nor is it still quite over: some US Catholics are upset that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, stripped of his duties by the Vatican in 2011 for his role in trying to cover up the role of dozens of priests in abusing children in his archdiocese, will be voting in the next conclave.
Catholics in most western countries no longer pay much attention to the Church, even in the predominately Catholic Republic of Ireland, once an overwhelmingly churchgoing society.
In Dublin, for instance, weekly church attendance is now down to 14% of Catholics, according to Catholic archdiocese of Dublin records published by the Irish Times in June 2012.
Although the number of Catholics remains high in the West - Europe remains 40% Catholic and the US is about 20%, according to most surveys - many nominal Catholics feel increasingly out of step with Church teachings on a variety of issues, including its proscriptions on contraception, homosexuality, abortion and divorce.
Even in Ireland, where divorce was illegal until 1996, a recent poll published in the Irish Times found that 75% of Catholics said church teachings about sexuality had "no relevance" for them or their families.
A total of 87% thought priests should be able to marry, and 77% thought there should be women priests.
Vatican Bank is still not squeaky clean
Despite the 1980s money-laundering scandals, so sensational that elements featured in a Godfather movie, the Institute for Works of Religion, aka the Vatican Bank, may still have a few surprises left in its files.
In the past few years, Benedict XVI has tried to cooperate with international authorities to bring it up to international standards of control to prevent money laundering. Although authorities say some progress has been made, even now the situation is not entirely resolved.
Some eyebrows were raised last May when the Vatican Bank board fired Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the president, alleging incompetence, even as he counter-claimed that he was being fired because he was getting "close to the truth", and then again in June.
During a raid on his home to investigate allegations of his knowledge of a military export bribery scandal, the Italian police seized 47 binders of detail on Vatican Bank shenanigans, which he seems to have kept as a kind of insurance policy to avoid meeting the same fate as "God's Banker", Roberto Calvi, an Italian financier who was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London one morning in 1982, shortly after some deposits in his Vatican-funded bank had gone missing.
On December 31, frustrated by the Vatican's lack of progress in making the bank more transparent, Italy barred its own banks from contact with the Vatican.
For most of January, the Vatican Museum and souvenir shops could accept only cash, until they worked out a deal with a helpful Swiss bank, according to a report in the Italian newspaper La Stampa's Vatican Insider website.
Asians and Africans like Mass
Like most big Western enterprises, the 2,000-year-old multinational finds business is much better in the developing world at the present than in Europe and the United States.
A 2010 survey of the Pew Research Center found that only 24% of the world's Catholics are Europeans, 8% are North American - and 68% are from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
And while some of the Latin Americans are being lured away by rival Evangelical brands, Africans are still joining the church in droves.
THE CANDIDATESThe right choice, of course, would depend on the problem.
To recover credibility after the sex scandals and perhaps for coping with the financial shenanigans, Ouellet might seem what the Italians call papabile or pope-able: someone from North America, where sexual abuse is a perennial topic, and who is supposedly well-connected with the Curia, the internal machinery of the Vatican.
But he has said publicly that being elected pope "would be a nightmare", and it may be that he really doesn't want it.
For bringing more people back to church, Scola might be the winner, as a conservative who has ties with some elements of the church in Latin America that favour more social activism.
The National Catholic Reporter crib sheet that tapped him as a possible pope writes, "Fans say that Scola blends John Paul's swagger with Benedict's intellectual heft." He's also evidently the most media-savvy: he's the only one of the three leaders who has his own webpage - and a trilingual one at that.
Look up marcouellet.com and you get one of those fake placeholder sites that links to: Cardinal Tickets, Louisville Cardinal Hoodies, Cardinal Bird Feeders, Cardinal Hotel ST Peter Rome.
For a CEO who could manage what businessmen like to call the growth market opportunity, the choice would be obvious. If the cardinals want to send a message to the developing world, it would be hard to top putting a black man in the white suit.
However, although Turkson is reportedly likeable, he also has already demonstrated a knack for generating headlines for the wrong reasons: showing an incendiary anti-Muslim movie he had found online at a bishop's conference, for instance, or arguing that reports of violence against homosexuals in Africa may be exaggerated and that in any case local cultures should be respected.
Despite the problems, the 266th pope will also have some advantages.
For one thing, he will be following not the wildly popular John Paul II but the wildly unpopular Benedict XVI, who often seemed unable to respond to the various crises around him.
For another, the Church is still an enormous enterprise.
Shuttered churches in Europe and the US may give the impression that the Church is fading away, but a look at its account books suggests otherwise: in the US alone, The Economist estimates, the Church spends about $170 billion on hospitals and other charities every year - more money than 495 of the Fortune 500 earn.
It's true that the Pope now rules only a few acres and 800 Vatican citizens, a far cry from the huge swath of Italy the popes once ruled, but that's only what you can see on the map. In fact, His Holiness is the biggest real estate baron of them all.
The Church is the single largest landowner in Manhattan, according to The Economist, and in Italy, various authorities estimate that the Church reportedly owns not just a lot of hospitals and schools but about 20% of all commercial real estate.
Worldwide, Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns the Land? (2010), estimates church landholdings at 177 million acres - which stitched together as a single parcel would amount to a country larger than France.
The church also knows a thing or two about survival. Stalin might have joked about the pope's legions, but the fact is, the pope's Swiss guards in their silly renaissance motley have outlasted the Soviet empire's legions, and plenty of other empires' legions as well.
BENEDICT'S LEGACY
As for the once and future Joseph Ratzinger, his decision to quit - the first pope to walk away in 600 years - may prove the most positive act of his seven-year reign.
A professor at heart, the German theologian had never wanted the job - he didn't even want to be working in the Vatican, really: in 1997, he'd even asked Pope John Paul II if he could step down as prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to become the Vatican librarian, but was turned down for the transfer.
Meeting some German tourists shortly after his election in 2005, Benedict XVI reportedly recalled to them during the conclave, "At a certain point, I prayed to God 'please don't do this to me'... Evidently, this time He didn't listen to me."
This winter, he had evidently decided to make Him reconsider. Popes often spend years in declining health. John Paul II's Parkinson's disease crippled him terribly toward the end.
But whereas John Paul II supposedly joked that he couldn't abdicate because he didn't know where to send the letter, Benedict just wrote a note to the cardinals and told him he was through.
Not many popes have walked away from the job, just as not many people ever leave a powerful position voluntarily. While there have been popes who died in battle or were murdered - one supposedly by a jealous husband - only four popes have resigned in the past thousand years. One of them was Celestine V: Benedict XVI in 2010 praised him for his capacity "to act according to his conscience, in obedience to God, and therefore without fear and with great courage".
Like Benedict, Celestine V had a hard time in the papacy.
Before being made pope, Pietro Angelerio had founded a strict religious order, the Celestines.
In 1294, annoyed that the College of Cardinals had been at an impasse for two years regarding whom to select as the next pope, he sent them a withering letter, warning him that God would punish them if they didn't make a decision. They took his advice and punished him by electing him pope.
Unfortunately, the 79-year-old monk's tenure was a disaster. He was a political incompetent.
The Catholic Encyclopedia notes, "It is wonderful how many serious mistakes the simple old man crowded into five short months."
At the end of those five months, he ruled that it was permissible for the pope to abdicate, and the next day quit, citing, "The desire for humility, for a purer life, for a stainless conscience, the deficiencies of his own physical strength, his ignorance, the perverseness of the people, his longing for the tranquility of his former life."
Hopefully, Benedict will enjoy his retirement more than Celestine, whose successor, Boniface VIII, fearing that someone might try to make Celestine a second pope, decided to hold him as a prisoner, and he died in prison in 1296.
Once again, a fun run around Rome would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.