Pressures Mount in Picking the Next Pope

Continued from page 1

A book of 110 newspaper columns written by Hummes - ranging from land reform to drug abuse to human cloning - was released last week in Brazil to capitalize on the buzz about him as a contender.

The book, "Dialogue with the City," includes harsh denunciations of "greedy and powerful" landholders who police believe ordered the February slaying of American nun Dorothy Stang, a longtime defender of land rights for poor settlers in the Amazon rain forest.

Hummes, 70, also holds the line on Catholic teachings regarding abortion and human cloning, which he called a "serious moral crime."

In September 2003, Hummes told a U.N. meeting on AIDS that it is "one of the major tragedies of our time," but must be addressed by education and sexual abstinence rather than condoms.

Another Latin American cardinal, Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, 62, of Honduras, also has lashed out at inequalities.

"We are not moving simply toward a globalization of markets ... but we are moving toward the globalization of poverty," he said in 2003.

But some of his sharpest - and most conflicted - comments have come following the priest sex abuse scandals in the United States. In a 2002 Vatican news conference, he called pedophilia an "illness" that cannot be tolerated in the priesthood. In a later interview with the Italian magazine 30 Giorni, or 30 Days, he decried the judicial "witch hunts" against U.S. clergy.

"(It) reminds me of the time of Nero, Diocletian and, more recently, of Stalin and Hitler," he was quoted as saying.

Italian Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, 71, told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in 1997 that "very grave personal and social risks" stem from giving gay and lesbian couples full civil rights such as marriage and adoption.

Another Italian contender, Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice, 63, carries a similar conservative outlook. On calls for women priests, Scola told reporters in 1997: "The church does not have the power to modify the practice, uninterrupted for 2,000 years, of calling only men."

Cardinal Francis Arinze, 72, a Vatican-based Nigerian, also taken a hard stance against liberal pressures on the church led by American Catholics.

The family is "mocked" by homosexuality and calls to recognize gay marriages, he told a Georgetown University audience in May 2003. Last year, Arinze suggested Catholic politicians supporting abortion are "not fit" to receive Communion. He made the same judgment for militant members of Rainbow Sash, a Roman Catholic gay rights group that has tried to provoke confrontations with clergy.

Arinze, however, stands out as a leading voice for better Christian-Muslim dialogue - a central part of his interfaith work at the Vatican since the 1980s.

"It matters very much, not only to Islam and Christianity, but also to the world how the followers of these two religions relate to one another and how they envisage these relationships at this turning point in history," Arinze told the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Washington.

Schoenborn, of Austria, could encounter more skepticism from Islamic leaders.

In a March speech at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he said Christians must support a Jewish presence in the Holy Land as part of biblical prophecy.

"Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people," The Jerusalem Post quoted Schoenborn as saying.

Schoenborn added that ``we are all longing'' for a solution to end Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he's been less clear on hot button issues in Europe, including whether to accept Turkey as a full EU member.

Ratzinger, however, has been an unwavering defender of Europe's Christian essence.

"Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe," he told the French magazine Le Figaro last year.

Ratzinger - as the Vatican's chief doctrinal overseer since 1981 - offers the broadest range of writings and comments of any of the possible papal successors.

In 1986, he scorned rock music as a "vehicle of anti-religion." Last year, he told American bishops that it was appropriate to deny Communion to those who support such "manifest grave sin" as abortion and euthanasia.

In a book released Wednesday, "Values in a Time of Upheavals," Ratzinger dismissed demands for European "multiculturalism" as a "fleeing from what is one's own." He also wrote that "marriage and family are essential for European identity."

Yet in another book, "Salt of the Earth" in 1997, Ratzinger showed flashes of a pastoral side and sensitivity for the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65, when he was considered a leader among forward-thinking theologians.

"Christianity must rise again like the mustard seed, in insignificantly small groups whose members intensively live in combat with what is evil in the world while demonstrating what is good," wrote Ratzinger, who turned 78 on Saturday. "They are the salt of the earth, the vessels of the faith."