It was cert html the www same passage that Pope John Paul II used as the cert starting point for the most hardline of his recent enyclicals, Veritatis Splendor, www a ringing denunciation of the modern world and its moral relativism."For the Pope, it's cert all a question of authority," says ipmp Peter Harvey of Newman College, Birmingham, an authority on the passage - which the Pope uses to stress the primacy of the need to keep the Commandments. There was a wider issue: how www would life change for html the world's 970 million Catholics if he were to become the www ipmp next pontiff?The passage he had been asked to address www ipmp offered some intriguing points cert of comparison with the present Pope. It was the story html of the rich young man who ipmp tells Jesus that he has led a virtuous life, keeping all the Commandments, and asks what else he must do: Jesus tells him to sell everything he has and give ipmp it to the poor. But the cert html Jesuit cardinal is too subtle a man not to know html that his listeners were watching for more than biblical exegesis.

He was also one of the early leaders of the movement to purge Italian politics of its systemic corruption. His text was from the Gospel of Matthew. In addition to his pedagogic skills he commands respect for his championing of the homeless, unemployed and immigrants in what is the largest diocese in the world. The formidable Bible scholar, who speaks 11 languages and has written more than 40 scriptural and devotional best-sellers, fills Milan's cathedral every Saturday morning for similar classes He is a charismatic figure. Teaching, in a foreign language, to a cathedral full of English Catholicism's most distinguished figures is a comparatively easy task.

Cardinal Martini politely turns aside such suggestions when they are put to him and concentrates on the task in hand. They had come to see the next Pope. On Wednesday evening, some 1,300 people crowded into Westminster Cathedral to witness a rare public appearance in this country by Cardinal Carlo Mario Martini, the Archbishop of Milan, and the man burdened with the popular assumption that he is the obvious candidate to succeed John Paul II to the chair of St Peter. But although it may have put its name under the new Labour banner, old Labour is not dead, just watching and waiting.. In Scotland he will only get away with it if he can deliver a majority in a Westminster parliament and then a Scottish parliament."The price of failure in Scotland is potentially greater than in England because disgruntled Labour voters north of the border have an alternative political home. After the general election defeats of 1987 and 1992, there was a surge in support for the nationalist wing of the Scottish Labour party. Now, with the Scottish National Party enjoying its most successful electoral period since the mid-Seventies, Labour supporters facing the prospect of another five years of Tory government in 1996 may make common cause with the left-of-centre nationalists.For now, with Labour and Mr Blair himself winning record opinion poll ratings in Scotland, support for new Labour looks secure.