New York Catholic leaders and scholars are wondering who the next pontiff will be and how he will shape the ecclesiastical life of American Catholics.

“The only thing you can say with 100% certainty is that it’s not going to be an American,” the president of the Catholic League, William Donohue, said. The national lay organization, based in New York City, boasts 350,000 members.

In addition to persistent anti-Americanism at the Vatican, Mr. Donohue said, anger over the American bishops’ mishandling of sex-abuse scandals, and a reluctance to add ecclesiastical authority to the global influence of the world’s lone superpower, eliminated the possibility of an American pontiff.

Besides, Pope John Paul II, elected in 1978,was the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century, and the church in America represents a small segment of international Catholicism. Americans constitute roughly 60 million of the more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide, though Americans are the largest financial contributors to the church. Nor will North American issues be of paramount importance to the next pope, the co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, James Fisher, said. The next pope, he said, would probably continue John Paul’s evangelizing mission, expanding the church’s appeal in the Third World, and reminding Americans “the U.S. isn’t the center of the world church.”

Even if America won’t provide the next pope or claim much of his attention, it will not be immune to the changes wrought by John Paul’s successor, Mr. Fisher said. Some of that influence will depend on the next pontiff’s experience with the issues most affecting Catholicism in America. Of those, the most pressing remains the sex abuse scandal that exploded in 2002, the Catholic leaders said yesterday.

A prominent New York Catholic thinker, Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, said a pontiff more attentive to the administration of the church would be better about disciplining pedophilic priests and the bishops who covered for them. Rev. Neuhaus is editor of First Things, a New York based journal of religion and culture,

“One criticism of John Paul that I think has considerable justice is that, in being a prophet and witness and such a global evangelist, a lot of the administrative detail of the life of the church got neglected,” he said. “And so we went along with business as usual, and one of the results here in the U.S. was the sex-abuse crisis.”

“I think that quite honestly took John Paul entirely by surprise. He did not realize the degree of laxity in the church in the U.S. that allowed for such a crisis to arise,” Rev. Neuhaus added.

A Jesuit priest who is associate editor of America magazine, a New York based Catholic weekly, said a less administrative and more pastoral approach would benefit the next pope in addressing sexual abuse.

“One of the things that disappointed so many Catholics about their bishops is that … so many failed so utterly pastorally,” remaining unresponsive to parishioners outraged by priestly abuses, Reverend James Martin said.

As to who on speculative short lists of papal successors is best positioned to address the sex-abuse scandal, the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, is cited as a church leader who effectively handled allegations of sexual abuse in Austria.

Mr. Donohue, however, said it will be incumbent on American bishops to help the world church overcome the abuse scandals, regardless of who next occupies the throne of St. Peter. Until American bishops make sufficient amends to the next pope and the rest of the world church for failing to discipline pedophilic priests, he said, the lack of credibility will compromise their leadership on other problems confronting American Catholics.

Assuming church leaders here are able to direct attention to those public policy issues of interest to American Catholics, the next pope will need to be strong on bioethics, “culture of life” matters such as abortion and euthanasia, and the secularization of American society, Catholic leaders said.

That society, according to the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, was not always welcoming to people of faith. So a future pontiff would need to teach American Catholics to work through culture and politics to dismantle secular hostility to religion.

“We need to be able to express the teachings of the church in a public forum, and not be ashamed of it,” the bishop of Brooklyn said.

The bishop also said the church in America would need strong leadership on bioethical issues. As the case of Terri Schiavo illustrated in recent weeks, Bishop DiMarzio said, “There is a misunderstanding of what life is about.”

The disregard for life demonstrated by some quarters of American society “gets us into a bind we can’t get out of,” he said. One of John Paul’s major accomplishments, Bishop DiMarzio said, is that he taught the world about “the dignity of every human person” and the critical value of life, lessons Americans could benefit from hearing from the next pontiff.

Another concern for American Catholics is a dwindling priesthood, and the related question of ordaining women and married men. “This will be a subject at the conclave,” Rev. Martin said. “Whether or not they decide to change those things, they’re certainly going to discuss it – it’s a huge crisis in the church.”

Rev. Neuhaus, however, doubted a new pope would bring about significant changes in the priesthood or any other doctrinal matter that Catholics more theologically and politically liberal than John Paul hope to transform during the next pontiff’s reign.

“For the people who’ve agitated for years and years for women’s ordination, or changes in the church’s teaching on abortion – these are all non-starters, no matter who’s pope,” Rev. Neuhaus said.

Mr. Donohue, too, was skeptical that a change in doctrine would benefit American Catholics. “Orthodoxy is what works,” he said, adding that Protestant denominations that turned away from bedrock Christian teaching had seen the numbers of their faithful plummet in recent years, while doctrinaire Catholicism in the Third World had resulted in a swelling flock there.

If Africa, Asia, and Latin America are the future of the worldwide church, as some have argued, they may also be the future of the church in America, as immigrants, particularly from Latin America, fuel and sustain American Catholicism.

“If we get a Latin American pope, there’ll be dancing in the streets the likes of which even the Poles couldn’t match,” Mr. Donohue said. “They’d all rally around him -Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans.” Mr. Fisher said Americans of all ethnicities would respond to the selection of a Latin American pope, because it would “signal a hemispheric shift, and show a relocation of the center of the church” closer to Americans.

New Yorkers, too, might rally around a pope from Latin America or Africa with special zeal.

“We’re an international city. We’re a microcosm of the world. If we have a pope who’s an international man, he would be able to understand our situation,” Bishop DiMarzio said.

Mr. Fisher, too, emphasized the increasing ethnic diversity of America’s Catholics, and said, “If an African cardinal got in, it would be a real validation of the growing sense of the American church as multicultural, with a non-white majority soon.”

If the next pontiff emerges from Africa, it appears most likely that it will be Cardinal Francis Arinze, archbishop of Nigeria, who is identified as one of the most “papable” of the cardinals now assembling at Rome.