VATICAN CITY — With the death of Pope Francis, announced by the Vatican on Monday (April 21), Roman Catholics around the globe will start speculating on who among the red-robed cardinals will succeed him.

Given the nature of cardinal appointments Francis made during his papacy, there will inevitably be some expectation that the Argentine pontiff's successor will be another non-European, and that like Francis he could be another progressive, opposed to the Church's conservative wing.

However, the election process that will take place once Francis is buried is highly secretive and nothing will be certain until white smoke pouring from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel tells the world that a new pope has been picked.

Cardinals are a pontiff's closest collaborators, running key departments at the Vatican and dioceses around the world. When a pope dies or resigns, those cardinals aged under 80 are eligible to enter a secret conclave to choose the new head of the nearly 1.4 billion-member Roman Catholic Church from among themselves.

The complex vote will reveal if the current cardinals, most of them put there by Francis, believe his embrace of liberal social values and his progressive reform agenda have gone too far and whether a period of retrenchment is needed.

The cardinals will set the date for the start of the conclave after they start arriving in Rome in the coming days.

Only a pope can appoint cardinals and the type of men he chooses can leave his stamp on the Church long after his reign — because of their status as senior clerics and because one of them may end up as pontiff.

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As of April 21 there were a total of 252 cardinals, 135 of them cardinal electors under 80, according to data published by the Vatican. 108 of the electors were appointed by Francis, 22 by his predecessor Benedict and five by John Paul II.

Cardinals are "created" at ceremonies called consistories, where they are given their ring, a red biretta — a square cap — and pledge loyalty to the pope, even if it means shedding blood or sacrificing their lives, as signified by the colour red.

Pope Francis held 10 consistories and with each of them, he increased the chances that his successor will be another non-European, having beefed up the Church in places where it is either a tiny minority or where it is growing faster than in the mostly stagnant West.

For many centuries, most cardinals were Italian, except for a period when the papacy was based in Avignon between 1309 to 1377, when many were French.

The internationalisation of the College of Cardinals began in earnest under Paul VI (1963 to1978). It was greatly accelerated by John Paul II (1978 to 2005), a Pole who was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.

While Europe still has the largest share of cardinal electors, with about 39 per cent, it is down from 52 per cent in 2013 when Francis became the first Latin American pope. The second largest group of electors is from Asia and Oceania, with about 20 per cent.

A less Euro-centric group

Francis appointed more than 20 cardinals from countries that had never previously had a cardinal, nearly all of them from developing countries such as Rwanda, Cape Verde, Tonga, Myanmar, Mongolia and South Sudan, or countries with very few Catholics such as Sweden.

In some cases he repeatedly overlooked vacancies in big European cities that traditionally had cardinals, to stress that the Church could not be so Euro-centric.

In other places, such as the United States, he bypassed dioceses such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, apparently because they had conservative archbishops.

Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington since March, is seen as a progressive and outspoken ally of Francis' pastoral approach to social issues, such as protection of the environment and a more welcoming approach to LGBTQ Catholics.

A pope's legacy

The more cardinals that a pope names during his reign also increases the possibility that his successor will be someone who holds similar views on Church and social issues.

However, this is not always the case, as the cardinals may choose a person theologically dissimilar to his predecessor but considered the best candidate for internal Church reasons or for the historical times in which the election takes place.

Pope Benedict was chosen to succeed Pope John Paul II in part because Benedict had worked with John Paul for two decades and the cardinals wanted continuity.

But many of the same cardinals felt an "outsider" was needed to succeed Benedict, who resigned in 2013, after the "Vatileaks" scandal exposed a dysfunctional central administration, much of it overseen by Italian prelates.

At the same time, many cardinals clearly felt the future of Catholicism lay beyond ageing Europe, so they chose Argentina's Jorge Mario Bergoglio as their pontiff — the first non-European pope in nearly 13 centuries.

Although cardinals who have turned 80 cannot enter the conclave, they still can affect its outcome. They are allowed to attend meetings known as General Congregations that take place in the days before a conclave starts and where a profile of the qualities needed for the next pope take shape. (This story has been corrected to say that cardinal electors appointed by Pope Francis are 108, not 109, in addition to providing source reference in paragraph 8.)