Rite & Reason: The new pope should remember that Jesus left no recorded teaching on birth control, homosexuality or abortion, writes Father Paul Surlis.
Later today in Rome, cardinal electors, following prayer and intense politicking, will begin to choose the new pope. Future challenges for him will include allowing women's voices to be heard on all issues; acknowledging that women are half the human race and more than half of Catholic Church members; and that they have a right to full co-equal membership in all areas of church life and ministry, including being deacons, priests, bishops and pope.
No leader can claim to be a champion of human rights while denying them to women; these rights are also human rights.
The new leader of over one billion Catholics will not allow a rigid, intransigent defence of outmoded teaching on artificial birth control and homosexuality, for example, to render ineffective concerns with promoting social justice for all oppressed people.
Teaching on sexuality, especially when it is hard and uncompromising, polarises people, and makes leaders, especially, deaf to weightier matters such as living wages, healthcare, housing, access to schools and sufficient food, together with care and medicines for people with Aids.
The new pope will do well to remember that there is no recorded teaching from Jesus on birth control, abortion or homosexuality, and that the teaching we do have from Jesus on divorce has been legalised and made punitive beyond Jesus's intentions and indeed the practice of the church for most of the first millennium.
Likewise, the new pope will need to remember that celibacy as an absolute requirement for ordination to the priesthood was enacted only in the 12th century, and does not belong to the essence of the Gospel. In fact, today's insistence on mandatory celibacy is one factor leading to the decline of Catholicism and to depriving people of full Eucharistic celebrations and ministerial care.
The new pope will respect the full teaching of the Second Vatican Council, and will not pay it lip service while decimating it in practice.
A test of his sincerity here will be in allowing the Synod of Bishops full freedom and discretion in addressing church issues, and refusing to let the Curia, the papal civil service, overrule the bishops so that their teaching becomes an echo of curial or papal pronouncements which often have proven to be moribund but are maintained, spuriously, in the name of tradition.
The new pope is heir to great traditions and sometimes lethal failures as in the case of the sex scandals still diminishing the church. He will need to be holy, open to the promptings of the Spirit and also open to the profound but different needs of persons in wealthy and impoverished countries. He will need to be a man of great vision and courage.
Above all, he will focus on the values of the Gospel: social justice for all the downtrodden, food for the hungry, healthcare for all, restorative not punitive justice for criminals and the imprisoned, women's rights and unflinching courage in speaking truth to power.
He will see leadership as service as Jesus did and, if he does all this, he too will be mourned and celebrated when his term as pope comes to an end.
We pray for the cardinals that they will choose wisely, and that the man they choose will measure up to enormous challenges, and will achieve a measure of greatness complementing that of John Paul II.
The outpourings of grief combined with testimonies of the highest praise that occurred on the death of Pope John Paul were unprecedented in the 2000-year history of the Catholic church.
Continuous TV coverage on many channels and excellent print media coverage facilitated this global solidarity of mourning and praise. John Paul was most skilful in presenting his message and his person on a global scale for the benefit of Catholics and humanity at large. The great, long-suffering people of Poland loved him as their liberator, and felt ennobled by his championing of peace and human dignity in their country, in eastern Europe and on a worldwide scale - with the exception of China and Russia, which did not extend invitations to him.
China, which has a state-controlled Catholic population and underground Catholic communities, doubtless feared the effect a visit would have on people struggling for rights.
In Russia, Orthodox Church leaders accused the Vatican of poaching their congregants, and resented the return of church buildings confiscated from Roman Catholics after the 1917 revolution.
In countries he visited, John Paul uncompromisingly supported the dignity of life from conception to natural death; he opposed war and capital punishment; and he championed full human rights for indigenous peoples, workers, the sick, homeless and other oppressed peoples.
Anyone championing preventive war, which John Paul labelled unjust and immoral, or the death penalty, which he came to rule out in all cases, cannot co-opt the Pope's promotion of a "culture of life" without, therefore, facing accusations of cynical and political opportunism.
Father Paul Surlis taught Catholic social teaching and theologies of liberation at St John's University, New York, from 1975 to 2000. He is now retired