As the last active theologian to have participated in the Second Vatican Council (along with Benedict), I wonder whether there might not be, at the beginning of the conclave, as there was at the beginning of the council, a group of brave cardinals who could tackle the Roman Catholic hard-liners head-on and demand a candidate who is ready to venture in new directions.
These questions must be openly discussed before and during the conclave, without the cardinals being muzzled, as they were at the last conclave, in 2005, to keep them in line.
It was at the last conclave, in 1978, that he may have made his most important contribution to the church.
By an odd coincidence the Maternal Health crew included a professor whose wife was at the League conclave.
The differing approaches across the Catholic world to handling the sex abuse crisis are expected to be evident at the conclave.
But his chancellor, Father Louis R. Stickney, persuaded him that as the dean of the American hierarchy he should be present at the conclave.
Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007.
I called in at a conclave of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the group that was at the heart of the Bennite insurgency in the 1980s.
Conclave is published on 22 September; The Young Pope starts on Sky Atlantic on 27 October; Doctor Faustus is at the Barbican, London EC2, until 1 October.
But on Sunday, just two days before the College of Cardinals is to begin the conclave at which it will select a new pope, his visit to a neighborhood church in Rome had all the makings of a celebrity visit, and the archbishop of New York did not disappoint.
