William F. Buckley’s quote about how he’d rather be governed by the first 100 names chosen from the Manhattan phone book comes to mind.
One of the Catholic Church’s greatest strengths has been that it is not a democracy. Some of our Protestant brethren have fallen victim to the shortcomings of this when Biblical truths became the subject of up-or-down votes.
However, in this instance the people making the decisions are such insular head-up-their-you-know-wheres elitists, that I think we might be better off letting 100 random Catholics choose the Pope.
Without the reformation, the Medicis and their ilk would have destroyed the church thorough their political intrigue and corruption. The church owes Martin Luther and others like him a great debt of gratitude for turning them away from secular government back to a concentration on the spiritual.
For the record, I would NOT include John Calvin among those others because he was obsessed with political power to the extent that his followers were killing Catholics (and other Protestants which disagreed with them) at the same time Catholic navies were beating back Muslim invaders at Lepanto and Catholic armies were doing the same at the gates of Vienna. I would include most other Protestant reformers including the softer branches of Calvinism such as Roger Williams, John Lathrop and others.