In simple terms, at first sight what they and we need is a Francis II, someone to take up where Jorge Mario Bergoglio left off.
Someone to serve the poor, pursue peace, protect the world, touch the lives of people inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church in spontaneous gestures of goodwill and tenderness, defend migrants and confront the privileged and the populists, and keep the smile on Catholicism. And much more.
It's an impossible task even if they were agreed on a Francis profile. They’re not, of course, because some (possibly many) want someone very different, a traditional pope of the centre rather than, as they would have it, a free spirit obsessed with the peripheries.
Someone who had less of an obsession, as they would see it, with stretching traditional Catholic teaching to allow for LGBT and divorced Catholics to feel included in the tent of belonging as Francis saw the Church.
Someone who would feel comfortable in a papal palace rather than in an Airbnb; someone who is at ease with people of other faiths and none; someone who wasn’t ashamed to have money in his pocket and to leave more in his will than Francis’ financial legacy of €90.
In short, a pope who was comfortable with the status quo – like Benedict XVI and John Paul II – rather than a ‘disruptor’ of tradition and precedent like Francis.
While for many, as the numbers at his funeral and the tributes paid to him attested, Francis was a remarkable pope and stretching the mould of the papacy after the long, dull winter of the pontificates of John Paul and Benedict ticked most of the necessary boxes that make for a pope of the present and the future. Not that he hadn’t his limitations and his failings, as were obvious even before the vultures gathered to pick over the entrails of his pontificate.
Even just days after his death, with his body hardly rested in his simple grave in the basilica of Mary Major, with just one word – Franciscus – to denote its humble occupant, a conspiracy of the great, the good, the sacked and the naive are setting out their dismal stall. And what a jolly band they are, among them a number of self-appointed papabile (cardinals regarded as likely candidates for the papacy) in Cardinal Gerhard Muller (76), Cardinal Robert Sarah (79), and Cardinal Leo Burke (88) at one end of the scale to those whose advocacy of the Latin Mass seems to trump every other possible religious perspective.
Muller had one of the highest positions in the Vatican – in charge of the Congregation for the Faith – but when Francis to international acclaim decided not to renew his appointment, he (Muller) had a hissy-fit and became a lightning conductor for (and the effective leader of) the Francis disparagers.
Cardinal Sarah tried to get Pope Benedict to adopt his campaign to resurrect the ancient liturgy of the pre-Vatican II Mass. And Cardinal Burke has travelled the world saying the Latin Mass – complete with the ultra-traditional garb and a coterie of attendants – in an effort to keep alive that almost forgotten liturgy.
So to the 60,000 dollar question: who will be Pope? There is no Francis II on view, apart from a few pale shadows of Francis I but, if there was such a candidate available among the 135, I have no doubt that, despite the begrudgers, the cardinals assembled would acclaim him on the spot.
After all, the gift (courtesy of Francis I) of a new springtime of renewal of our Church is not to be spurned in favour of a narrow ideological preference.
No one, apart possibly from God, knows who the next pope will be because, like the Grand National, it is impossible to predict. But, like the Grand National too, the interest is such that the media are expected to indicate the front-runners.
However, the difficulty with this conclave is that (i) Francis has appointed many new cardinals from all around the world (ii) most of them have never had anything more than a passing chat with each other over the last few days and (iii) commentators know so little about so many new cardinals that they simply can’t predict who might move out of the pack after a few introductory votes.
The usual predictions based on past conclaves are of little use in predicting the outcome of this one. For instance, the handy tradition that a liberal and a conservative take turns as pope doesn’t apply in this case – after all, in recent memory Benedict XVI followed John Paul II. And who can judge who’s a conservative or a liberal when Francis I was accused of being both?
That said my own hope is for one of the cardinals who favoured the Vatican II reforms Francis was introducing. A lot done, yes, but a lot more to do. Francis had become, in the words of Austen Ivereigh, "the world’s peacemaker in an age of war; the world’s greatest advocate for migrants in an age of national populism; and the global symbol of dialogue and encounter in an age of testy polarisation".
But apart from those key roles, the new pope will have a thousand and one other demands on his time, not least the crucial task of delivering a synodal (or people’s-centred) Church for a changing world. We need a pope who is for today and tomorrow rather than a yesterday man.
So when the expected pall of white smoke rises over the Vatican to indicate that we have a pope, I would hope that the Maltsese cardinal, Mario Grech (67), will be God’s choice. Or, if not him then maybe, the French cardinal, Jean-Marc Aveline (67).
No doubt there will be much reflection these next few days, as pen in hand, the cardinals will gaze distractedly at Michaelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, before they vote in what may well be an extended conclave.
May God be with them and in particular with the man they will place in the spotlight of the world for the rest of his life.