Sooner or later, in a few years’, or months’ time, the world will have a conclave.

The way the world is today, and Christianity, the choice of the new Pope will be an all-consuming planetary event. The 120 cardinals locked up in Michelangelo’s doom-laden Sistine Chapel will be making a choice whose far-reaching effects will go beyond the confines of the Catholic Church.

The way it is (and has always been) it will obviously be a choice of personalities: this personality as against that one. But it goes far beyond the level of personalities.

For at work, hard at work all through the years, ever since the fragility of the present Pope became more pronounced, there are terrific groundswells based on very different, opposed, Weltanshaungs (world-views) existing side by side (even if not at all comfortably) within the same church, even more within Christianity.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that humanity is sorely in need of redemption. There is a thirst for spiritual meaning in today’s life which is far more searing than most people, certainly most churchmen, realise. People living in totally different cultures and civilisations exhibit a thirst for certainties and all they get are ideologies, clashes of civilisations, terrorism and wars.

This is the wide background against which the choice of the new pope will be played. It would be short-sighted to focus on the inner interplay of the forces within the Catholic Church or the ups and downs of the Roman Curia when so much more is at stake. Had the Conclave of 1978 been as short-sighted, the world would have got another short-lived Italian, not Karol Wojtyla as pope.

At this point in time, perhaps the best simplification and explanation of the issues involved may be summarised in two widely-different, both very popular, oeuvres which have attracted mass attention in recent months and which can be construed to depict two very different, nay, opposed, world-views.

It must be said at the outset that this is a simplification, a tool to help understanding, rather than that there is this clash lurking within the Catholic Church.

The coming conclave thus is a fight between, on the one hand The Passion of the Christ and on the other, The Da Vinci Code.

On the one hand (or rather, in one corner) there is The Passion of the Christ. Not the film, which was, unjustly, attacked as being anti-Semitic. Nor the hard core of violence which pervaded the book. But rather the in-your-face attitude: this is how it happened. This is the Bible as read literally. This and nothing else. Sola Scriptura, though not in the sense Martin Luther gave it.

In the other corner, The Da Vinci Code. Not the fantastications the book makes about Mary Magdalene, the Sion legacy and the Templar mysteries. The book is a well-crafted thriller, though not without blemishes and mistakes (if it’s any consolation, Dan Brown’s other book, Angels and Demons, has far worse mistakes, ironically on the subject of a conclave). In a way, though, the book’s sub-text about Opus Dei and its church-wide designs (though not the blood-thirsty organisation the book makes it out to be) is very much part of this issue.

The book, one could say, has attracted world-wide attention not because of the fantastic history it gives as background, but rather despite this. For it opens up a glimpse of a ‘what if’ scenario: what if the history of Christianity had been otherwise, what if some of the basic orientations of Christianity were different, especially in the way women are considered and treated.

Obviously, if the issue were to be considered along these terms and inside the Catholic Church only, The Passion of the Christ would win hands down. Time and again in the history of the Catholic Church caution has prevailed over boldness, tradition over innovation, forgetting that Christ was bold and not cautious, an innovator rather than a traditionalist.

It has often been said that history is at a crossroads, and this beginning of the Third Millennium does seem to be like one. The focal point is the position of woman, rather than the outcome of the next conclave. To consider Christianity and Islam in parallel, the position of woman in these world religions is becoming crucial, what with the issue regarding women priests in some Christian religions and the growing movement for a better understanding of woman in Islam.

To choose an ‘in-your-face’ type of Christianity and keep to the trusted and true way of the Bible without considering that, just as Salvation History had an evolution of its own, so too there can be an evolution (rather than revolution) in today’s understanding (just like the evolution of primitive Christianity from one geared to an imminent End of World scenario to a more nuanced one, or the parallel evolution of the church’s teachings on interest and usury and slavery) may be a way of choosing to run away from the challenge of coming to the help of the badly-beleaguered humanity.

Whoever the next pope will be – black, brown, or yellow, young or old – the world prays he will be one open to the ‘what if’ dimension rather than one closed in the fortress of certainties.