Knowing that many synod participants stay wired to the Internet we also invite reflections. If anonymity is required, let us know. What follows is one selection theory held by some church watchers. It might be called the transition option. Were the cardinal-electors to gather today 107 would be eligible to elect the next pope.
History shows that relatively short ones often follow long pontificates.
Father Richard McBrien, who has written extensively about popes, also likes to say a pontificate often contrasts that of its predecessor. Rather than looking for an extension of the past, cardinals generally search for something new, the reasoning holds. If these two currents play out at the next conclave, the next man to wear papal white will be elected as a transitional or interim pope and he could be a man already in his seventies. Perhaps because we are crossing into a new era, not only a new century but also an entirely new millennium and church bishops, while overwhelmingly conservative, are by no means unanimous on where the church should go. Further there is great division in Roman Catholicism, coming out of a century in which the two dominant ecclesial forces have been the renewal of Vatican II and the counter-renewal of the John Paul II pontificate.