Profile : Italy’s Man for All Seasons : The cardinal of Milan, a best-selling author, stirs the nation’s conscience.

Question: How could you characterize the Italian author whose prolific, no-nonsense writings on personal ethics and public morality have produced a series of national bestsellers?

Answer: A Martini, straight up.

Question: If Pope John Paul II were to stray in front of a tour bus at the Vatican tomorrow, who would be the odds-on favorite as his successor?

Answer: Carlo Maria Martini, the cardinal who is archbishop of Milan.

A polyglot and patrician prelate, he is one of the most highly regarded leaders of his church and his country’s best-known advocate of moral reform.

Martini jolts Italy. He is the voice summoning a reawakened conscience for a country numbed by relentless institutional corruption.

Straight-backed, cool, awesomely collected in a brocade armchair at the archbishop’s palace adjoining Milan’s Gothic-spired Duomo, Martini offers no encouragement to Vatican handicappers who say he is the most papabile of all the princes of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope he will never be, Martini tells a visitor with a wry smile.

“It’s a nonexistent prospect for me. If I see anything in my future, I’ve said many times, I see my desire to return one day to Jerusalem and to my research on the New Testament; to continue my studies in an atmosphere I love, and where I have fondly invested a great part of my life,” he says in elegant Italian.

Probably he is right. Then again, at 66, Carlo Maria Martini is already an unlikely cardinal. For one thing he is a Jesuit, a member of the Roman Catholic Church’s most rigorously intellectual order, whose priests are often outstanding scholars, linguists, theologians and educators. Although they are sometimes chosen as bishops and cardinals, Jesuits are more directed to academic life.

Martini, who was born in Turin, is a prototypal Jesuit, an eminent New Testament scholar who does research in Latin, ancient Greek or Hebrew. In addition to his native Italian, he speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, modern Greek and, according to those who have heard it, fluent English, quite British-sounding, actually.

His skills as a linguist are among attributes that endear Martini to Vatican specialists who chart flows and ebbs in the College of Cardinals in search of potential Popes. So too Martini’s credentials as a scholar, his foreign exposure--as counterpoint to administrative experience acquired in Milan--and the broad ethical shadow he casts as a thinker and a teacher.

Besides, Carlo Maria Martini looks like a Pope. He has presence and visibility not only in Milan but throughout Italy: Often it is the cardinal of Milan who delivers the inspirational homily after the midday news on state television.

President of the European Bishops’ Conference, Martini hews closely to the party line on issues of dogma. But there are those who suspect that as Pope, Martini might prove more flexible than John Paul on incendiary issues like priestly celibacy and the church’s ban on artificial birth control.

Besides his biblical research in the Holy Land, Martini’s resume includes heading two of the church’s most prestigious universities: for nine years rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and briefly rector at the Pontifical Gregorian University, founded in 1553 by St. Ignatius, father of the Jesuits.

In 1979, John Paul plucked Martini from academe and then sent him as archbishop to Milan to head Italy’s largest archdiocese and one of the most important in Europe: 5 million Catholics in the region that is Italy’s economic dynamo.

Here in designer Milan, magistrates last year stumbled on a back-room payoff by a businessman to a politician. That has mushroomed into the greatest corruption scandal in the history of a country that has democratically matured since World War II from a poor agrarian society into one of the world’s largest economies.

Italians have discovered in the past year that the price for their prosperity and political stability was a web of political corruption.

Watching from the country’s second-most-visible pulpit, Martini notes that corruption is as old as government. What is happening in Italy, he says, is that Italians are paying the bill for being on the winning side in the Cold War.

“The state, the political parties, had too much power for too long and exercised power over things better left to private initiatives. Creating powerful parties capable of confronting the largest Communist Party in Western Europe required more money than the law allotted, so they found other ways to earn money. This created the mechanism of corruption,” he said.

“I think it is providential that in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall we can now try to remedy the damaged roots. . . . Victory over communism cost Italy dearly.”

Now, amid great public revulsion for the political class and nationwide cries for moral rebirth, Italy labors under great stress. But Martini sees a silver lining:

“I am inclined to see as a positive sign the fact that a country, without a revolution, without violence, without struggle, has the courage to look at its own defects and to say, ‘Let’s see up to what point they are true and let’s see what we can do to get out of this situation.’ ”

The first Jesuit named to head an Italian archdiocese in 35 years, Martini became a cardinal in 1983. Tall, slim and poised, he often eschews the scarlet robes and pectoral cross of his rank to greet visitors in the plain black suit and Roman collar of a parish priest.

Martini carries his scholarly discipline with him as an administrator. He has transformed the ordeal of Italian traffic jams into a personal blessing. Someone else drives those stop-go hours on his rounds of Milan’s 1,100 parishes. From the back seat, Martini enjoys a private time to read, to write, to reflect.

Milan’s cardinal, to tell the truth, is a righteous intellectual whirlwind. He has published more than four dozen books--speeches, talks, sermons edited into slim volumes that are bestsellers across Italy.

Martini also is a master of the media: He uses all parts of it to get his church’s message across. Hear Carlo Maria Martini on the radio, see him on TV or watch him on a videocassette as he contemplates the foibles of Italian society in its current period of self-examination.

Not the least of the Italian institutions undergoing the crisis of conscience is the Christian Democratic Party, for years the choice of the Vatican--and the United States--as the mainstay of postwar anti-communism. Now, with the party a chief target of the corruption probe, the Italian church has also been besmirched by the national realization that political corruption was systemic at all levels.

“The shame, particularly of the Christian Democrats, their loss of credit, certainly indirectly strikes a blow against the church, which 40 years ago encouraged the party to fight communism,” Martini said. “Yet the church is not per se mixed up in any of these political realities. The church proposes faith in the Gospel, and, in this faith, also proposes the ethical values which can renovate political life.”

Martini believes that to constructively extricate itself from the mess, Italy must rebuild its political structures piece by piece.

“It’s clear that the political class has to renew itself. But it’s also imperative that those who have fallen short be rapidly punished and those who haven’t be quickly acquitted,” he said.

Biography

* Name: Carlo Maria Martini

* Title: Archbishop of Milan

* Age: 66

* Personal: Born in Turin, Italy. Ordained in 1952. Became biblical scholar, seminary professor and rector. Chosen archbishop of Milan in 1979; elevated to cardinal in 1983. Is a best-selling author.

* Quote: “I am inclined to see as a positive sign the fact that a country, without a revolution, without violence, without struggle, has the courage to look at its own defects.”