The conclave to elect a successor to Pope John Paul II will start on April 18, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said yesterday. A total of 117 Roman Catholic cardinals are eligible to take part in the conclave, which will continue in the Vatican until a new pope is chosen. Not too far from Vatican City, religious pilgrims with a morbid curiosity can pay their respects to 22 popes ? well, at least parts of them. The off-beat chapter of papal history is tucked away in Rome?s St. Vincent and Anastasius church, the final resting place for the internal organs of pontiffs from 16th to the early 20th centuries.

?It?s a bit of a curiosity (for tourists) ... To embalm the bodies back then it was necessary to remove the organs,?said Father Sebastiano Paciolla, adding that Pope Pius X abolished the practice in the early 1900s. ?Today they use more modern methods to conserve the body.? For the hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving in Rome this week to pay tribute to Pope John Paul, who died on Saturday, papal preservation is an inevitable ? even if uncomfortable ? part of the process.

The Pope lies in public view for five full days before his funeral on Friday and Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said only superficial preservation measures are being used to preserve his remains. He said the Pope has not been embalmed. He did not say what those measures were, but despite them the body was clearly showing the signs of death four days after his passing.

?You see him, you see the body, and in Italy they don?t embalm in the same way we do, so you see the face of death more clearly,? Cardinal Francis George was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun Times. ?The person who is there looks like a dead person, and that?s good, that?s the reality of our future, but it?s not the last word.?

In the case of Paul VI, who died in 1978, the morticians had only prepared the body for a closed casket. Just two days after going on display, the Pope?s skin became discoloured, his jaw sagged and his fingernails darkened. The body of Pius XII was preserved so badly in 1958 that the four men standing guard in the Vatican had to be changed every 15 minutes because they could not stand the stench.

Still, there have been tremendous successes in preserving papal remains. A young doctor named Gennaro Goglia was credited by some with a medical miracle for preserving Pope John XXIII with a special liquid after his death in 1963 of stomach cancer. He was drafted by the Vatican to join a team that inserted the formula into the dead pontiff?s stomach hours after his death to stop decomposition.

?They (Vatican officials) asked me to give them a hand, they didn?t know what to do, and they asked for my help,? Goglia, now 82 years old, told Reuters. The world saw John XXIII?s remarkably well-preserved body three years ago when he was moved in a glass coffin from a crypt below St. Peter?s Basilica to a chapel on the altar floor. Pope John Paul will be buried on Friday underneath the spot formerly occupied by John. And if the Vatican is still looking for help, Goglia, who now spends his time painting and writing medical and scientific papers, said he?s ready to come out of retirement. ?I?m here,? he said.

Phil STEWART