person specifications to become the Pope

[tali122]

apart from being able to ride in a popemobile- what are the formal criteria / person specifications to become the Pope?
other than being a senior clergyman

[Famous5]

Presumably you need to be Roman Catholic.

Popes are elected by all the Cardinals of the RC Church, but I don't whether a candidate needs to be a Cardinal.

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/pope/selection/ for a helpful website.

[Octavius]

Good website QM (as usual), one of the links goes on to confirm:

"In theory, any practicing Roman Catholic man can be the pope. In reality, the pope has for centuries been chosen from within the Sacred College of Cardinals."

[Garriq]

Any catholic priest could be pope. For centuries the members of the Sacred College of Cardinals have only chosen fellow cardinals, but they could choose any catholic man. If they did the senior cardinal would ordain him priest on one day, consecrate him bishop on the next and present him to the crowds as Pope on the third.
As an aside, Henry Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie�s brother) was created a Cardinal before becoming a priest. He only used his noble title, and was called the Cardinal Duke of York, although he did occasionally sign Henry R, as he would have been King Henry IX of England if Prince William of Orange had not usurped the throne.

[Peter Pedant]

There's a good play - Hadrian VII by Pontecorvo, about an outsider who is elected Pope. Fiction of course, but it shows the question has been around for some time.

Garriq raises a good point. I thought he was called Cardinal Stuart, but the THING about his accepting a cardinal's hat, was the vow of celibacy that goes with it. And THAT meant, since the Stuart claim to the English throne resided in him, that unmarried and without an heir, the claim was thereby extinguished.

The stuart claim was denied by the Bill of Rights 1689 and Act of Settlement 1701, but what does a few acts of parliament matter. It does seem odd, three hundred years later, that a protestant king was SO desirable and a Roman Catholic king was so undesirable, that the people of England settled for a non English speaking German ! (who kept mistresses and had shut his wife up in a cell in Celle for twenty years for adultery -Sophia Dorothea - ) This makes Chazz and Cazz look almost normal.