With the death of Pope Francis at the age of 88, the world’s attention now turns to who will replace him.

Predicting who will be chosen as the next leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics is notoriously fraught with difficulties. In theory, any baptised Catholic male could be made Pope.

In practice however, the next pontiff will likely be drawn from the cardinals who will gather in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican for the secret papal election known as the conclave.

After Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in 2013, hardly any Vatican observers predicted that Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Argentina would be elected as Pope Francis.

This time around, there are no stand-out candidates, making the guessing game even more challenging.

But there are names of potential “papabile” (likely candidates for the papacy) swirling around the corridors of the Vatican.

Their diverse origins reflect the vast global reach of the Catholic Church.

The contest is likely to come down to a battle between progressives who applaud Pope Francis’ comparatively liberal stance on divorcees, gays and the plight of refugees, and conservatives who loathed his agenda.

Peter Erdo

Among the conservatives there is Peter Erdo, a Hungarian cardinal and Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest.