Ratzinger should be the new Pope

THE easy media way to talk about the next Pope is to speculate as sports tipsters do. They forecast who is likely to win. They do not put their judgement on the table to say who they think should win on merit.

My starting point is the one made by Archbishop Diarmaid Martin when he addressed priests at the 2004 gathering of the National Conference of Priests in Ireland: “We are not losing people to another Christian church. We are losing them to a secular understanding of life.”

We need, then, a Pope who is competent to address John Paul II’s unfinished business that shows up as the relentless growth of secularism - which David Quinn wrongly equated with atheism in an article in your columns on January 6 last - at the expense of Catholicism.