The process to select a new pope has already begun. Cardinals are meeting almost daily in pre-conclave gatherings

The cardinals already have a lot to say. To date there have been nearly 70 individual speeches, according to the Vatican press office, as the men look ahead to the all-important votes to decide who will next lead the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. 

Only the 135 cardinals who are under the age of 80 can enter the Sistine Chapel to participate in the conclave. However, the general congregations are open to all 252 men in the College of Cardinals.

In short, it's a time to reassess the church's pastoral priorities and also audition certain personalities to see if they might be right for the top job. 

The congregations are "an occasion when the careful discernment of character and competence of potential papabili is more subtle than partisan," said Michael Higgins, author of The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis. 

"They are a stage on which the disparate and diverse members of an ever-enlarging College of Cardinals get to fraternize and familiarize in unthreatening ways," Higgins said.

In addition to the formal speeches, known formally as interventions, there are the coffee breaks and walks to and from the Vatican. These planned and impromptu encounters are critically important because it is where the cardinals get to know each other. 

The informal get-togethers are important because many of the cardinals have spent little time together and this is when they ask questions of each other — and themselves — as they contemplate what and who will take the seat of St. Peter. 

"For 80% of the conclave voters, this is an entirely new experience," Thavis said. "They need time to take in ideas and take the measure of potential candidates." 

Thavis said this is especially true this time. "Pope Francis made a point of creating cardinals from distant places, and they are generally not familiar figures," Thavis said.

During the 2013 conclave, one of the major fault lines among the cardinals was whether reform was urgently needed in the Roman Curia, the church's central government. After years of bad headlines, from abuse to the financial scandal, there was a growing appetite for an outsider to clean up the Curia.

While cardinals are barred from campaigning for the job, they are allowed to speak freely. And in 2013, when Argentina's Cardinal Bergolio did that, he inadvertently got himself elected to the top job, which by all accounts he was by no means seeking. 

"When the church does not come out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then gets sick," he told the other cardinals, according to his notes he later gave to another cardinal from Latin America.

"In Revelation, Jesus says that he is at the door and knocks," Bergoglio told his fellow cardinals. "Obviously, the text refers to his knocking from the outside in order to enter but I think about the times in which Jesus knocks from within so that we will let him come out."

"The self-referential church keeps Jesus Christ within herself and does not let him out," he said.

It was only a four-minute speech. 

But, as Thavis recalled, "his words impressed many cardinals and clinched his ascent to the papacy." 

Bergoglio, said the papal biographer Higgins, "was the ideal outsider they could trust. He offered the electors a way out of the moral and mismanagement malaise on the Tiber."

Twelve years later, as the cardinals return to these general congregations ahead of a conclave, which is likely to begin by May 6, history reminds us that what will be happening behind the Vatican's closed doors, could open up new horizons for tomorrow's Catholic Church.