This Saturday, Pope Francis named 21 cardinals, including five Latin Americans and two Spaniards (plus a third from the French Church and of Spanish origin), most of whom will be able to choose the successor of the Argentine Jesuit.
Francis, the first Latin American pope, has taken pains to design a Sacred College that is less Western and more oriented towards the southern hemisphere.
The solemn ceremony, the ninth Ordinary Consistory since the pontiff’s election in 2013, was held in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square on Saturday during a sunny morning.
The new cardinals dressed in scarlet red – a color that evokes the blood shed by Christ on the cross – knelt in front of the pope to receive the cardinal’s cap and a distinctive ring.
“Courage!”, “Courage!”, said the Pope to encourage the new cardinals who were accompanied by the cheers of the faithful, who waved flags of various countries.
Among the new cardinals are diplomats, close advisors and men with a lot of experience, profiles that reflect the priorities set by Jorge Bergoglio, 86 years old.
Among the 21 new prelates who will accompany the Pope in the government of the Church, 18 are under 80 years old, so they will be able to participate in the conclave that will elect the next pontiff.
At the ceremony, Francis celebrated that the new cardinals come “from all over the world” and compared the college of cardinals to “a symphony orchestra” where “diversity is indispensable” and each musician “must listen to the others.”
Sensitive to the “peripheries” and minority communities, Francis seeks to promote clergy from developing countries to the highest ranks of the Church, breaking with the practice of systematically highlighting certain titular archbishops of large dioceses.
“Look for cardinals who correspond to the time. They are people who have distanced themselves from the Church of yesteryear, who are making a positive break,” an observer from the Holy See explains to AFP.
The list of new cardinals includes several from regions where the number of faithful is growing, such as Africa, Asia and Latin America, where five of them come from, although only three could participate in a conclave.
These are the Argentine Monsignor Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Ángel Sixto Rossi, archbishop of Córdoba, and the archbishop of Bogotá, the Colombian Luis José Rueda Aparicio.
Luis Pascual Dri, also Argentine, confessor at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Pompeii, and Venezuelan Diego Rafael Padrón Sánchez, archbishop emeritus of Cumaná, will be cardinals, but not electors because they are over 80 years of age.
Likewise, the Spaniards José Cobo Cano, archbishop of Madrid, and Ángel Fernández Artime, rector major of the Salesians, will also be created cardinals. They are both voters.
Among the newly elected are clerics from two geopolitically sensitive areas: the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the main Catholic authority in the Holy Land, and the bishop of Hong Kong, key to trying to improve the Vatican’s relations with communist China.
The new list of cardinals also includes the archbishops of Juba (South Sudan), Cape Town (South Africa) and Tabora (Tanzania).
The European clergy, where Catholicism is in decline, will continue to be strongly represented with eight cardinals, including the Portuguese Américo Aguiar, 49 years old.
Aguiar will be the second youngest member of the College of Cardinals after the apostolic prefect in Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia), Giorgio Marengo.
The distinction of three members of the Curia, the central “government” of the Holy See, close to the Pope also stands out: the Italian Claudio Gugerotti, the Argentine Víctor Manuel Fernández and the American Robert Prevost.
The appointment of the cardinals will be closely followed by observers looking for clues about the direction of the Church, due to the advanced age of Francis, who travels in a wheelchair and who does not rule out resigning from office as his predecessor Benedict did. XVI if his state of health declines.
After this consistory there will be 137 cardinal electors. Almost three quarters of them (99) will have been created by Jorge Bergoglio, while 22% were created by Benedict XVI and 6% by John Paul II.
This distribution may weigh on the two-thirds majority necessary to elect the future spiritual leader of the Catholic Church and its 1.3 billion faithful by increasing the probability that he shares the ideas of the current pontiff.
But the election of a new pope is always unpredictable and as an old Roman saying goes, “he who enters the conclave as a pope, leaves as a cardinal.”
The Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Cortes and Democratic Memory, Félix Bolaños, has shown his desire to “continue reaching agreements with the Spanish Church” in the future and has highlighted that Spain is “the third country that has the most cardinals in the Curia”.
This is how Bolaños spoke this Saturday from Rome, where he traveled to attend the creation of the new cardinals in the Vatican, representing the acting Government of Spain.
Furthermore, the acting minister has highlighted that Pope Francis, in all the consistories he has held during his pontificate, has appointed Spaniards and that “Spain is already the third country that has the most cardinals in the Curia.”
The ambassador of Spain to the Holy See, Isabel Celaá, also attended the ceremony.