“The one who goes into the conclave a pope, comes out a cardinal.”

It is a favorite pastime of scribblers on the beat, and it is the job of the cardinals to be thinking about the next guy pretty much all the time. They are never more than a heartbeat away from having to discharge the primary duty of their office.

At least, they are always thinking about the profile of the next guy. It is not something constantly at the fore of the mind, but is more like a background function or subroutine.

That is, until it isn’t.

Commentators, both amateur and professional, sometimes complain that such prognostication is indecorous. Such complaints usually come from the side sympathetic to the incumbent. In any case, questions of propriety during the happy reign of a Roman Pontiff are moot now.

Handicapping the papal horse race, however, is still mostly a fool’s errand.

The Romans have an expression about conclaves: Chi entra ner conclave papa, ne risorte cardinale.

That’s Roman dialect for, “The one who goes into the conclave a pope, comes out a cardinal.” It isn’t invariably true, but it points to a general truth those of us on the outside do well to remember: The concerns of the men in the room are not those of the folks who aren’t.

So, for what it’s worth, here is my view of the cardinal electors’ concerns going into the conclave, offered as a sort of rudimentary profile sketch.

First of all, the electors will be looking for someone who is an institutionalist in terms of character and temperament but not a curial lifer. They will want someone, in other words, with knowledge of how the Roman apparatus of ecclesiastical government is supposed to work, but isn’t a cog in the Roman machine. This is largely because the machinery is not in any sort of repair. They will look for someone close enough to know how to fix it but far enough removed from it to be willing as well as able to do the needful without fear or favor.

That is a tough needle to thread.

They are going to want someone with an appreciation of the Church’s place in the international community and role in the international order. Someone with diplomatic experience will have an edge, then.

The other side of that coin is that the cardinals electing the next pope would likely prefer someone with a non-zero number of years in care of souls. They will want someone with pastoral experience, that is. At least, they will prefer someone with some experience in real pastoral government to someone with none, and the higher the level of experience the better.

Also, the nature of the papal office in the 21^st century is spectacular. The ability to carry an audience is a premium. They will want someone who has stage presence and—this is a bigger deal than folks realize—can speak at least a few of the major world languages well enough to engage both individual interlocutors and a large public.

That said, they will want someone willing to stay home and govern, which means they will probably look for someone resistant to the allure of the limelight.

After all that, an exchange from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man comes to mind, between the heroine of the story (Marian Paroo) and her rather nosy but wise and surprisingly worldly mother, over Marian’s spurning of “Prof.” Harold Hill, a travelling salesman come to River City, Iowa—the ladies’ home town—who expressed some interest in Marian:

Marian Paroo: Do you think that I’d allow a common masher—? Now, really, mama. I have my standards where men are concerned, and I have no intention…

Mrs. Paroo: I know all about your standards and if you don’t mind my sayin’ so there’s not a man alive who could hope to measure up to that blend of Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat, and Noah Webster you’ve concocted for yourself out of your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness, and your li’berry full of books!

Even if those qualities are more in tension with one another than flatly contradictory, they should be a very tall order to fill, indeed.

A final consideration, one rather beside the particulars of the profile, is that Francis’s successor is highly unlikely to have much of a honeymoon.

Francis was great for news copy, right from the get-go. He carefully fostered a narrative that the scribbling and chattering classes were frequently happy to adopt. Beyond the curiosity of novelty, there is not likely to be much new relationship energy.

Whoever he is, the new guy should get a hard look.

The most the cardinals can hope for is a general willingness to give the new guy a fair shake.