If you start seeing pictures of the man at the right or hearing his name now and then, here’s why.

On the international Godbeat, it’s never too early to start speculating about who will become the next pope. The current head of the world’s largest church, Pope Benedict, is admirably fit at 82, but facts like that never discourage avid Vatican watchers. “Vaticanistas” look beyond the present pope to find who else stands out in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Who’s on his way up? Who’s taking on important jobs? Who’s out there publishing books or giving lectures or visiting other cardinals or doing anything else that looks like — perish the thought! – a subtle campaign in an unofficial race whose candidates never throw their birettas into the ring.

(Photo: Cardinal Turkson, 13 April 2005/Max Rossi)

It looks like Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana is now firmly in this group known as the papabili, or possible popes, thanks to an important job he’s doing this month. He’s the relator, or secretary general, of the Synod for Africa, a major meeting of African bishops in Rome to discuss the Church’s future on that continent.  Previous cardinals who served in such posts include the future popes John Paul II and Benedict. Like another African cardinal once tipped for the job, Nigeria’s Francis Arinze (now 77 and retired), he counts among his plus points an on-the-job familiarity with Islam. John Allen, the veteran vaticanista for the U.S.-based National Catholic Reporter, headlined his story on Turkson “Say hello to Africa’s next great hope to be pope.”

Coming after the first non-Italian pope in centuries, it was unlikely that the 2005 conclave would take another daring leap and choose a non-European. The next papal election, whenever it comes, could be different. The received wisdom after the last one was that the Latin Americans had the best chance.

But you never know what the coming years will bring. Catholicism is growing in Africa, in contrast to Latin America.  One of Latin America’s best candidates, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, is a player in the current political crisis in his native Honduras and his prospects could depend on how that develops. And you have to wonder if the example of a precedent concerning a world figure outside the Church — the first African-American president, Barack Obama — could exert an indirect influence.  Some Catholics may read that and fire off a comment saying politics has absolutely nothing to do with papal elections. Not directly as in the past, but cardinals don’t all live in Sistine Chapel-like isolation from the rest of the world either. Turkson has strong credentials, as do other papabili, and the advantage of personifying some additional quality — hope? equality? change in continuity? –  could well work in his favour.

(Photo: Cardinals file into Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope, 18 April 2005/Osservatore Romano)

P.S. — For what it’s worth, the Dublin-based bookmaker Paddy Power still has Arinze topping its betting list with odds on who will be the next pope. Turkson is nowhere among the 44 names mentioned (including Bono in last place). Paddy Power took the 2005 conclave so seriously that it sent a man out to Rome to keep up with  the buzz. Will Turkson’s name appear on this list after the Synod for Africa is finished?

UPDATE: At a meeting with journalists in Rome on Monday, Cardinal Turkson was asked about this speculation, Catholic News Service reports. “An African pope? Why not?” he asked. “If by divine providence — because the church belongs to God — God would wish to see a black man as pope, then thanks be to God,” he said.

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One passage in Pope Benedict’s letter today about the Williamson affair particularly stood out — the part where he confessed to almost complete ignorance of the Internet. There can’t be many other world leaders who could write  the following lines without blushing: “I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.” This made it look as if the world’s largest church was ignorant of the world’s liveliest communications network.

That’s not the case, of course. The Vatican runs a very full website of its own, www.vatican.va, as do Vatican Radio (in 38 languages), Catholic bishops conferences, dioceses and parishes as well as Catholic publications all around the world.

In fact, somebody in the Vatican seems to be following the Internet far more closely that the mainstream media (including ourselves), which missed an interesting little nugget now popping up on tech blogs and some Catholic sites mostly in Europe. The Holy See’s representative to the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently warned against the tensions that could be caused if ICANN created new top-level domain names (so-called gTLDs) for religions.

In a letter to the president of ICANN dated February 20, its representative Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani spoke of “the possible perils connected with the assignment of new gTLDs with reference to religious traditions (e.g., .catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam; .muslim, .buddhist, etc…). These gTLDs could provoke  competing claims among theological and religious traditions and could possibly result in bitter disputes that would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition.”

ICANN President Paul Twomey responded on February 24 that ICANN was indeed considering new faith-based gTLDs but “an objection may be filed if there is substantial oppostion to the gTLD application from a significant portion of the community to which the gTLD string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted.”

Imagine a group of technicians and managers having to decide who gets to use the domain name “.islam”? What could they tell the Vatican if they ignore Polvani’s plea and let “.catholic” domain names proliferate out of control? What about that “.orthodox” domain name — orthodox what?

Is this a good idea?

The uproar over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust highlights an open secret here in Rome: Vatican departments don’t talk to each much, or at least as much as they should. The pope appears to have decided to lift the 1988 excommunication of four schismatic bishops of the SSPX (including Williamson) without the wide consultation that it may have merited. The Christian Unity department, which also oversees relations with Jews, was apparently kept out of the loop. The head of the office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told The New York Times it was the pope’s decision. Kasper’s office and the Vatican press office, headed by Father Federico Lombardi, were clearly not prepared for the media onslaught that followed the discovery of Williamson’s views denying the Holocaust.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

Pope Benedict’s lifting of the ban and Williamson’s comments about the Holocaust are unrelated as far as Church law is concerned. The excommunications lifted last Saturday were imposed because the four were ordained without Vatican permission. As Father Thomas Resse, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me: “The Holocaust is a matter of history, not faith. Being a Holocaust denier is stupid but not against the faith. Being anti-Semitic, however, is a sin.” This is an important distinction, but not one the Vatican seems to be able to get across.

It was all very reminiscent of the pope’s Regensburg speech in 2006. Few in the Vatican knew it was coming. The Vatican was overwhelmed by the Muslim reaction and the media interest. This time, it is also not clear how many people in the Vatican even knew about Williamson’s history. Surely, those negotiating with the traditionalists for the lifting of the excommunications should  have known. If they didn’t, why didn’t they? If they did, why did they not tell Kasper’s department? The Holocaust is such a sensitive issue for Jews that this response could have been seen from miles away.

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks at Regensburg University, 21 Sept 2006/KNA)

Even if the Vatican felt the rapprochement with the traditionalists was necessary, a clear and severe distancing from Williamson’s views issued simultaneously to the announcement of the lifting of the excommunications certainly would not have hurt.

It is still too early to gauge the public relations fallout within the Jewish community and in the Church itself. In all the years I have been covering Catholic-Jewish relations, this is the biggest blow-up I can recall — bigger than the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the Good Friday prayer,  the controversy over Pius XII or the late Pope John Paul receiving Arafat.  It will take a long time for this one to heal. Those involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue say it will go on. It will.

In 2003, several Reuters correspondents — including myself — published a book entitled “Pope John Paul, Reaching Out Across Borders.” One contributor, Alan Elsner, is Jewish and lost relatives in the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942. He concluded his chapter on Catholic relations with Jews with this paragraph:

“For the Jews, the central question to be put to Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer ‘Can we trust you, can we trust you now?’ For Pope John Paul, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.”

It had to happen sooner or later.

Someone pretending to be Pope Benedict’s personal secretary Monsignor Georg Gänswein, a German priest whose good looks have made him a celebrity in his own right, has set up a false Facebook account in his name. Several journalists in Rome have received an invitation from someone claiming to be him and asking them to be his Facebook friend.

But the journalists noted something strange in the dialogue with the purported monsignor. He sprinkles his Italian with German words like gut (good)  — something the real one doesn’t  do since he speaks perfect Italian. The bogus monsignor also posted a video clip of the real Gänswein walking with the pope during the Benedict’s summer holidays last year in the northern Italian mountains. The video — shot by Vatican television — is readily available.

(Photo: Monsignor Georg Gänswein and Pope Benedict at the Vatican, 7 June 2006/Max Rossi)

But the real Gänswein, dubbed “gorgeous George,” doesn’t really need Facebook to make friends. There already are at least four Facebook fan clubs started by swooning admirers. One of the fan clubs uses an Italian play on words that can mean both that he should leave the priesthood or take off his priestly clothes.

Another fan club, writing in English, says “The papal secretary is a very attractive older man.” Gänswein may have some problems with that. He is only 52 and looks much younger.

Gänswein has played a much more marginal role in Benedict’s pontificate compared to his predecessor Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was Pope John Paul’s private secretary for all 27 years of his papacy and had served him when Karol Wojtyla was archbishop of Krakow (where Dziwisz is now cardinal). Dziwisz was a mover and shaker who enjoyed being the gatekeeper. He kept up contacts between the pope and journalists, politicians, commentators, authors and artists.

Gänswein keeps a much lower profile, perhaps because he worked with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger only for a few years before his boss became pontiff in 2005. But his good looks have often thrust him in the limelight he tries to avoid.

The pope’s secretary may not like being part of the new media, but the Vatican does. On Friday, the Vatican and Google will announce that the Holy See will have its own channel on the video sharing site YouTube.

Is a hoax like this disrespectful? Or just the price to pay for being a public personality?

(Photo: Georg Gänswein, 17 May 2006/Max Rossi)

Cardinal Renato Martino, the papal aide who angered Israel and Jews by comparing Gaza to a “big concentration camp” is no novice at being outspoken or controversial. The southern Italian cardinal speaks his mind, loves to talk and sometimes has had to pay the price. Martino, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (effectively its justice minister), has a laundry list of people and governments with whom he has clashed. But that hasn’t stopped him.

(Photo: Cardinal Martino at the Vatican, 12 April 2005/Tony Gentile)

Perhaps his most famous remark came in December, 2003 when, shortly after U.S. troops captured former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Martino told a news conference at the Vatican that U.S. military were wrong to show video footage of Saddam. “I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures,” he said at the time.

The “treated like a cow” remark was heard around the world and, needless to say, was not very appreciated in the White House. The Vatican had opposed the U.S.-invasion of Iraq in March of that year. In fact, a certain chill developed between Martino and then U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, a Vietnam veteran who later went on to become Bush’s Secretary for Veteran Affairs.

While that is the Martino quip everyone remembers, there has been no lack of others.

In 2005, ahead of a meeting of the Group of Eight rich nations summit in Scotland, he pointedly said the United States had to “open its eyes” about the problems of Africa. He angered anti-immigration parties in Italy by backing a proposal to allow Muslim pupils in Italy to study the Koran in state schools. He angered U.S. conservatives, including well-known television commentators, when he said Washington’s plan to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border was part of an “inhuman programme.”

(Photo: Cardinal Martino visits AIDS patient in Abidjan, 19 May 2007/Luc Gnago)

The former Vatican diplomat, who was the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations in New York from 1986 to 2002, made headlines again last year when he called on Catholics to withdraw support their financial support for Amnesty International over the group’s call to decriminalise abortion.

Martino had more of a free rein during the papacy of Pope John Paul, who was not shy himself about speaking out. But Vatican sources have said Pope Benedict wants his cardinals to keep a lower profile and that Martino had been told by Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to keep the lid on and not be so controversial.

The cardinal obviously disregarded the advice when he gave his interview with the Gaza=concentration camp comparison to the Italian on-line newspaper Ilsussidiario.net. His comment only added to the speculation Israel’s military operation in Gaza is putting Benedict’s tentatively planned trip to the Holy Land in May in serious doubt. While both the Vatican and Israel have officially said the trip is still on, diplomats are not so sure.

(Photo: Israeli weapons explode over Gaza, 9 Jan 2008/Suhaib Salem)

What do you think of Martino’s concentration camp comment and his outspokenness in general? Do you think the pope should go ahead with his planned Holy Land visit despite events in Gaza?

Is the pope’s fan club thinning? The number of faithful at his weekly general audience, held on Wednesdays, is certainly trending downward.

Data out this week shows that 534,500 people attended his 42 general audiences in 2008 — or about 12,726 people each audience. That compares to 729,100 people at his 44 audiences in 2007 – or about 16,570 people per audience.

More than a million people attended his general audiences in 2006, his first full year as pope.

But do the numbers tell the whole story? The Italian news agency AGI pointed out that the Pope spent more time this year at his private retreat at Castelgandolfo, which has less room for the public at general audiences. Located outside Rome, it’s also harder to get to.

The numbers for 2006 were probably swelled by Catholics who came to Vatican City also to pay their respects to the late Pope John Paul II, so it’s probably unfair to measure the drop from that high level. But the drop from 2007 to 2008 is still big.

What do you think? Could there be other factors affecting attendance?

More data will come out later this year, talking about crowds at all Vatican functions, which also include his more popular Angelus blessing on Sundays. But if the general audience data is any indication, expect those figures to trend downward too.

Mexicans have long suspected their former President Vicente Fox was a little barmy. The tall, mustached one-time Coca-Cola executive is known for his racial gaffes, a very public falling out with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2002 and clumsily flaunting his wealth in glossy magazines in impoverished Mexico. Now — in a painful snub for a president who broke with decades of repression of the Catholic Church in Mexico by openly practicing his Catholic faith and even attending a papal Mass — the Vatican has decided that Fox has a personality disorder and may not be fit to remarry with the Church’s blessing.

Fox, a conservative who ended 71 years of one-party rule in 2000, wants a church wedding for his second wife and former press secretary, Marta Sahagun. The couple wed in a surprise civil ceremony in 2001 and planned to tie the knot before a Catholic priest in Asturias, Spain next year. Sahagun has already bought her wedding gown, Mexican media say.

(Photo: Vincente Fox and his wife Marta Sahagun, 26 Oct 2002/Claudia Daut)

According to confidential documents obtained by the Mexican online magazine Reporte Indigo, the Vatican last year annulled Fox’s first marriage of 20 years, but only because he is “self-obsessed and narcissistic and has a personality disorder.” That diagnosis by Vatican doctors means he is unfit to remarry in the Catholic church because he leads a double life, hiding his “hysteria” and his insincerity behind the politician’s mask, it says. The Vatican did not question his fitness for public office, however.

On Dec. 7, Fox confirmed to reporters the existence of the Vatican documents, said they should never have been made public and argued they had been misinterpreted following their publication. He declined to comment further, saying the process was confidential. “I love Marta and as soon as I can I am going to marry her. I am saving for the wedding, ” he added.

Fox stunned the country in 2002 when he knelt to kiss Pope John Paul II’s ring during the pontiff’s visit to Mexico.  The country has a long history of anti- clericalism and religious persecution. It only established diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1992. Given Fox’s support for it, the Catholic Church in Mexico may yet come to the rescue with some lobbying on his behalf. Mexican Archbishop Jose Guadalupe Martin, from the central city of Leon, says he sees no reason why Fox cannot marry in church.

(Photo: Fox kisses ring of Pope John Paul, 30 July 2002/Andrew Winning)

Mexico’s best-known social commentator Guadalupe Loaeza says Fox, who was generally well-liked as president even though he achieved little in the way of new legislation, is misunderstood. “He’s crazy all right, but crazy for love … Is that a sin?” she asks in a column.

Unless you’re a pope or a saint, it’s hard in Vatican City to make headlines years after your death. But not when you’re Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the late former Vatican bank head whose name alone elicits controversy.

Marcinkus, whose tenure at the Vatican’s Institute for Religious Works was marred by financial scandal, was accused this week of ordering the killing of a 15-year-old girl in 1983.

Marcinkus died in 2006 and could not defend himself from the accusations, brought by a girlfriend of a slain mobster and given ample coverage in Italian newspapers — despite big questions about her credibility (See here and here).

So, the Vatican stepped up to defend him. In an unusually speedy reply by Holy See standards, it issued a harsh condemnation of the “defamatory and groundless  accusations.”

It said the Italian media had stooped to sensationlism, abandoning professional ethics in the pursuit of an eye-grabbing headline. The slain mobster’s girlfriend had accused Marcinkus of hiring a hitman to kidnap and kill Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee.

Prosecutors are believed to be treating her comments with great caution, as some were contradictory. A judge familiar with the mob gang in question chalked up the accusations to “pure fantasy.”

It is not the first time that Orlandi’s disappearance has been linked to the Vatican. Investigators even probed at one point if there was a link to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981 by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.

But it was a new blow to the memory of Marcinkus, an American who gained notoriety for the 1982 crash of Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano but denied that he or the IOR were responsible for its downfall.

Calvi, known as “God’s Banker” for his close ties to the Vatican, was found hanging from a bridge in London in 1982 with bricks and cash in his pocket after the Ambrosiano collapsed. He was first ruled to have committed suicide but an Italian court found last year that he had probably been murdered by the Mafia for losing money he was supposed to launder.

Marcinkus may not have been surprised that his name would still draw unwelcome attention. He retired to the United States in 1990 after leaving the Vatican, admitting he would likely be remebered as a villain. He was 84 when he died.

Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga has denied throwing his red zucchetto (clerical skullcap) into the ring as a possible candidate to become the next pope. As we’ve already blogged here and here, the publication of a French book of interviews with the archbishop of Tegucigalpa last month has been interpreted by some Vatican watchers as subtle self-promotion — una autocandidatura, as they say in Rome. This was bolstered by unfounded speculation about Pope Benedict’s health, which seems quite good for a man of his age (81).

Now, in an interview with the Milan daily Il Giornale, Rodríguez Maradiaga has dismissed this speculation as a “mistaken interpretation” of his words. Most importantly, he said the interview in question took place in 2004, before the death of Pope John Paul II and simply expressed an obvious fact being discussed at the time. “Of course, the day will come for a pope from the South, as it came for one from the East,” he said. “At no time have I thought of myself as papabile (a possible pope). I have much to do in my beloved Honduras and I’ve never thought of putting my name forward.“

Kudos to Il Giornale’s Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli for tracking this down. The book in question, a collection of the cardinal’s interviews with a French journalist in Rome, states the conversations were held in 2006 or 2007. Soon after the speculation began in the French press, Tornielli challenged the date of these “recycled quotes” on his blog Sacri Palazzi. He later nailed down the date as 2004.

That said, Rodríguez Maradiaga remains a dynamic, attractive and relatively young (65) cardinal whose name will stay high on the list of possible papal candidates.

Remember ping-pong diplomacy, the exchange of ping-pong players between the United States and communist China in the 1970s that was one of the first steps that led to a thaw in relations between the two countries? If the Vatican had a ping-pong team, perhaps China would have considered sending their squad to the walled city in Rome for a match.

But the Vatican does not have a ping-pong team, as far as we know. So, the next best thing appears to be music. This week, Vatican Radio made a surprise announcement on its daily 2 p.m. bulletin. The China Philharmonic Orchestra of Beijing and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus will perform Mozart’s Requiem for Pope Benedict on May 7 in the Vatican’s audience hall, adding a stop to its already scheduled European tour.

As one diplomat said, “this could not have happened without the Beijing government approving it.” Given the fact that relations between the Vatican and Beijing have been scratchy to say the least, one can only wonder if this is the start of a mating game. It could lead to diplomatic relations and China’s recognition of the pope as leader of all Catholics in the world, including Chinese Catholics, many of whom have been forced to join the state-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Something seemed afoot in the last few months. In November, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary for relations with states, was reported to have made a secret visit to China. The Vatican never denied the reports. In March, a Chinese delegation secretly had talks in the Vatican, sources confirmed.

One precedent for baton diplomacy that comes to mind is a similar event that happened in the Vatican on February 20, 1988 when the now mostly-forgotten Cold War still existed.

The then-Soviet Union’s Red Army Choir performed for Pope John Paul, singing, of all things, Ave Maria. It, too, was a shocker when it was announced. But on Dec 1, 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his historic visit to the Vatican, turning relations between the Kremlin and the Vatican on their head after some 70 years of mutual distrust. Relations between Russia and the Vatican were established in 1990 and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, if music be the food of diplomacy, play on.