Since the current pontiff, Pope John Paul II, is 79 and in poor health, many Catholics are concerned about the identity of his possible successors. What kind of man will emerge as the next worldwide leader of the Catholic Church?
That's what the Free Press hoped to explore in an in-depth examination of leading papal candidates.
The problem is that, if John Paul died tomorrow, there would be 107 qualified candidates: all of the current cardinals under age 80.
Beyond interviewing Vatican-watchers, church scholars and our local cardinal, we wanted to offer our own analysis of the current College of Cardinals. The first question was the most basic: exactly how many cardinals were under age 80 and thus were eligible candidates?
Beyond that, we wanted to know more about the background of the cardinals. For instance, could another non-Italian be elected to follow John Paul? How heavily were various countries and continents represented in the current group?
To resolve these questions - and to be able to accurately track the exact makeup of the College of Cardinals in future stories - I created an MS Access 97 database of all current cardinals. To provide a comparison with the makeup of the college that elected John Paul II, I also built a database of all cardinals involved in the 1978 conclave.
I collected data on more than 200 cardinals: their names, birthdates, countries of origin, current assignments, etc. Building the database took several full days of painstaking work, because the information was available only in a printed format - and had to be extracted from a series of annual almanacs. In this case, I could not directly import electronic data.
I wound up with more than a dozen categories of data about each man - including a category to identify those cardinals in our database who had played a role in the church since the 1978 conclave, but who had died.
Immediately, we were able to identify 107 men as eligible for election - as of our publication date. Looking deeper into the data, we found that, since John Paul's election, he has thinned the ranks of Italian cardinals from 23 to 17 - and has spread a few of those votes to new cardinals from Africa and the United States.
We also determined that John Paul has personally appointed nearly 90 percent of the current College of Cardinals, an indication that most of the candidates tend to agree with the current pope on major issues.
The database was the key to writing our story with authority and specificity about the numbers - and, overall, to pushing our analysis of the candidates to a higher level.
The valuable bonus in this case is that, as we continue to follow the issue of papal transition, we can quickly check in on the accurate list of candidates at any point in the future.