Once the Chair of St Peter is vacant, cardinals who have assembled from around the world will begin planning the conclave that will elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor.

One of the first questions facing these “princes of the Church” is when the 115 cardinal electors should enter the Sistine Chapel for the voting. They are holding a first meeting today but a decision may not come until next week.

The Vatican seems to be aiming for an election by mid-March so the new pope can be installed in office before Palm Sunday on March 24 and lead the Holy Week services that culminate in Easter on the following Sunday.

In the meantime, the cardinals will hold daily consultations at the Vatican at which they discuss issues facing the Church, get to know one another better and size up potential candidates for the 2,000-year-old post of pope.

There are no official candidates, no open campaigning and no clear front-runner for the job. Cardinals tipped as favourites by Vatican watchers include Turkson, Tagle, Brazil’s Odilo Scherer, Canadian Marc Ouellet, Italy’s Angelo Scola and Timothy Dolan of the United States.

Benedict, a bookish man who did not seek the papacy and did not enjoy being in the global spotlight, proved an energetic teacher of Catholic doctrine but a poor manager of the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy that became mired in scandal.

He leaves his successor a top-secret report on rivalries and scandals within the Curia, prompted by leaks of internal files last year that documented the problems hidden behind the Vatican’s thick walls and the Church’s traditional secrecy.

“At the past two conclaves, the cardinals elected the smartest man in the room. Now, it may be time to choose a man who will listen to all the other smart people in the Church,” said Fr Tom Resse, a historian and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Centre at Georgetown University.