Reflecting on the difficult task facing 115 cardinals next week, I was reminded of a comment made to me by Oliver Flanagan TD 33 years ago, as he was driving me back to Dublin after a party meeting that I had addressed at his request in his home town of Mountmellick, writes Garret FitzGerald
Oliver and I were at opposite ends of the, very wide, spectrum of Fine Gael politics - he on the right and I on the left - and also at opposite ends of the theological spectrum of Roman Catholicism. He was also a papal knight of the order of St Gregory, and, domestically, a Knight of St Columbanus.
As we drove along he remarked to me out of the blue that the choice of team members by political leaders was always difficult; illustrating this by reference to the problems faced in this respect both by taoiseach Jack Lynch and by our own party leader, Liam Cosgrave.
Then, somewhat inconsequentially, he added that even Our Lord had found this a difficult task. After all, one of those he had chosen, St Thomas, had doubted him; St Peter had denied him; and Judas had betrayed him.
Glancing across at me, with a twinkle in his eye, to see how I would take this, he then added: "Sure, not one of that lot would have got into the Knights"; referring, I think, to the St Columbanus rather than the St Gregory variety.
That was quite the most original view of the Apostles that I had ever come across, but he had a point.
The choice of a pope can never be an easy one for a college of cardinals, but it will be especially difficult on this occasion. In global terms the personal charisma of Pope John Paul II secured for the papacy a degree of respect and authority outside his own church that no one could have thought possible at the time when he was elected to that office in 1978.
Within his own church John Paul II had inherited a range of problems that during his reign were intensified, rather than resolved. For the revolutionary character of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was already beginning to create internal tensions in the church, between those anxious to develop the potential that meeting had unleashed and others who feared the consequences of the council's novel approach to the modern world.
Early next week 115 cardinals will be faced with the task of finding among their number (for while they are entitled to look elsewhere for a supreme pastor they will not contemplate such an adventurous approach), someone capable simultaneously of sustaining his predecessor's role of global moral leadership and of holding together a potentially divided Roman Catholic Church.
On the issue of social and economic "isms", the Catholic Church - and indeed the Christian churches generally - have the advantage of being able to draw upon a long tradition of seeking to balance the interests of the individual and of society.
It has valued the individual person as being made in the image of God, but it also has had a very strong sense of the importance of a social morality, designed to secure optimal conditions for human development. In recent centuries this balanced tradition has made the Catholic Church a powerful foe of totalitarianism, but also of the extremes of modern liberalism, both in its economic and social forms.
In relation to social liberalism, the church clearly had difficulty in adjusting to profound societal changes in the 20th century that have affected sexual mores. These have arisen from the fact that, with a greatly increased proportion of women entering the labour force in Western societies, marriage has come to be postponed, typically to a time about 15 years after puberty.
When combined with the ready availability of contraception, this has inevitably put under great stress the historically close relationship in Western society between sexual activity and marriage.
Pope Paul VI decided in 1968, against the weight of contemporary theological advice, to proclaim not just that artificial contraception could be abused to promote promiscuity, but that its use even to space pregnancies is intrinsically evil; an approach the irrationality of which served only to weaken the moral authority of the Catholic Church.
Coming to the papacy just a decade later, from the conservative background of the Polish church, Pope John Paul II was never likely to challenge his predecessor's decision on this matter.
The church's moral authority was later further undermined by Pope John Paul II's apparent reluctance to tackle the covering-up by bishops of clerical paedophilia in various parts of the world.
The next pontiff will thus inherit a series of problems that have accumulated around these issues, submerging the prophetic role of the church, at least in Europe and the United States.
And during Pope John Paul II's papacy so many bishops were chosen primarily because they seemed likely to be obedient to Rome that the intellectual vitality of the whole church has been seriously weakened. The centralisation of power in Rome has also undermined the concept of episcopal collegiality, which had been widely seen as one of the most encouraging features of the Second Vatican Council.
However, many of the present College of Cardinals come from other parts of the world, most notably Latin America and Africa, where Catholics may be more preoccupied with quite different issues in relation to which Pope John Paul II was a powerful and positive voice, such as poverty and injustice. Clearly there must now be a real possibility that a cardinal from one of these continents might be elevated to the papacy.
There are choices to be made between Italians and other Westerners; between those from the West and those from the South; between conservatives and liberals; and between an older candidate who might fill the papacy for a shorter period and a younger and perhaps more vigorous candidate, with perhaps a longer potential period in office.
This conclave could see negative as well as positive voting, with efforts to block certain candidates, as well as efforts to promote the cause of others. In the event that over a period of several days no one secures two-thirds of the votes, this threshold will then be lowered to allow someone with lesser support to be chosen. This fact might encourage some to hold up progress until a late stage.