Conclave to Elect New Pope Starts Tuesday, March 12: Vatican Announces New Holy Roman Catholic Church Leader to be Named Soon

The conclave of cardinals that will determine the new leader of the Holy Roman Catholic Church will begin Tuesday, March 12, according to the Vatican.

The position of Pope has been vacant since Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI officially abdicated the position last week. The Sistine Chapel has been closed for 5 days of debates between the cardinal electors. They will begin voting on Tuesday.

Voting will continue until one choice receives a two-thirds majority vote from the 115 assembled electors (77 votes). Recent papal elections have been relatively short, under 5 days in most cases. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's election in 2005 took less than 24 hours.

The cardinals wish the voting process to be a quick one, as they would like to return to their dioceses before Easter, the most important day in the Roman Catholic year.

"As the old song goes, 'I wanna go home!'" U.S. Cardinal Timothy Dolan said in a blog on Friday.

While there is no clear frontrunner for the position as there has been in the past, there is a group of several candidates who seem most likely to win the votes of the electors. Italy's Angelo Scola, Brazil's Odilo Pedro Scherer and Canada's Marc Ouellet, have all been suggested as probable candidates.

Angelo Scola may lose out because of his Italian heritage. The papacy was in Italian hands from 1533-1978 when Polish Pope John Paul II broke their string of elections. He was succeeded by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who is German.

With the majority of the world's Catholics living outside Europe and the Church hemorrhaging numbers globally, many people believe that a Pope will be elected from a dioceses outside European borders. While there have been many calls to modernize the struggling church via a liberal Pope, chances are that the cardinals' choice will be a conservative. All of the current electors were chosen by John Paul II or Benedict XVI, who were staunch conservatives.

Electors are likely to choose an outgoing Pope, however. In the age of social media, it is viewed as important that a new church leader be able to reach out to Catholics, which the notoriously shy Benedict XVI was not quick to do.