23 New Cardinals

POPE BENEDICT XVI announced the creation of 24 new cardinals in October. There are three reasons for a pope to appoint a cardinal, Vatican experts suggest: to boost the status of a certain diocese; to reach out to a particular community; or to reward an individual prelate for his extraordinary service. Thus a Pope’s selection gives clear pointers towards his priorities for the Church.

The new ‘princes’ of the Catholic Church herald from five continents, reflecting what the Pope called the universality of the Church “and the multiplicity of its missions.”

The head of the Roman Catholic church in Iraq as well as the Archbishops of Mumbai, Paris, Sao Paolo, and Nairobi, were among the men who were to be given their red hats at a consistory in Rome on November 24. That ceremony would elevate them to the College of Cardinals, the body of top church advisors.

Eighteen of the new cardinals are under the age of 80, and therefore eligible to vote for Pope Benedict’s successor. The other five cannot vote because they are 80 or older.

Commitment and service

Cardinals appointed over the age of 80 are given red hats in recognition of their commitment and service to the Church.

Among those recognised in Pope Benedict’s latest consistory was Patriarch Emmanuel III Delly of Babylon, head of Iraq’s Chaldean Church, an ancient Christian community that has remained in communion with Rome for centuries.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Catholics have fled their country in fear for their lives since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003, and Patriarch Delly’s appointment was the Pope’s way of demonstrating solidarity with Iraq’s persecuted Christian community.

The Pope said he had planned to name another new cardinal during his 17 October announcement: Bishop Ignacy Jez, the former Bishop of Koszalin-Kolobrzeg, Poland, who spent four years as a prisoner at the Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War. But Bishop Jez died on October 16, at the age of 93, while on pilgrimage to Rome.

There are now 202 members of the College of Cardinals and, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano turning 80 on the eve of the consistory, there are 121 cardinal-electors – 60 from Europe, 21 from Latin America, 16 from the United States and Canada, 13 from Asia, nine from Africa and two from Australasia.

Among the new appointments were some of Pope Benedict’s key Vatican aides, mostly Italians. In a controversial move, Archbishop Dermot Martin of Dublin – an archdiocese normally headed by a cardinal – was passed over in favour of Archbishop Sean Brady of Armagh in Northern Ireland, making him the most senior prelate in both the republic and the province.

Cardinal communication

The November consistory was Pope Benedict’s second round of cardinals’ appointments. Following on from his first consistory, the Pope called the entire College of Cardinals, including the latest designates, and those over the age of 80, for two days of meetings and discussion prior to the November 24 ceremony.

It was as Dean of the College of Cardinals in April 2005, after the death of John Paul II, that then-Cardinal Ratzinger heard complaints from his fellow electors that they did not know each other particularly well. Pope Benedict’s predecessor had called his cardinals together roughly once every three years.

When he was elected Pope, one of Benedict XVI’s first priorities was to ensure the papal electors were better acquainted and better equipped to communicate together their visions for the future of the Church.

The new Pope cut the intervals between consistories and introduced ‘open-mic’ sessions at those meetings to allow the whole College to air their concerns.

So when he announced his first Consistory as Pope in 2006 on the Feast of the Chair of Peter, it was no slip of the tongue that he referred to the cardinals as “pars corporis nostri” – “part of our body” – the ancient term used to describe his office’s closest advisers, whose historic roots are drawn from the early days of the Roman clergy.

Before the Pope made his October 17 announcement, the constitutional norms of Paul VI’s Romani Pontifici Eligiendo about the conclave election of a Pope suggested there should be 120 cardinal electors.

A European focus?

Interestingly, most members of the new group are from Europe, reflecting Benedict’s emphasis on reviving traditional Catholicism. With these additions to the College of Cardinals, there are now 61 European electors in the group, constituting more than half of those eligible to vote for Pope Benedict’s successor, even though Europeans constitute only a quarter of all Catholics throughout the world.

By significantly increasing the European presence of cardinal-electors in the College, Pope Benedict has indicated his keenness to promote the Catholic Church in the old world. One of the stated priorities of his papacy has been to respond to the challenges posed in a continent that houses the Church’s headquarters, but which he considers awash in nonreligious secularism.

Five of the Europeans elevated were residential archbishops: Seán Baptist Brady, 68, of Armagh; André Vingt-Trois, 65, of Paris; Agustín García-Gasco Vicente, 76, of Valencia; Lluís Martínez Sistach, 70, of Barcelona; and Angelo Bagnasco, 64, of Genoa.

Vatican officials made up the remainder of the European contingent of new cardinals: the Italian governor of Vatican City State, Giovanni Lajolo, 72; the German president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, Paul Joseph Cordes, 73; the Polish president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, Stanislaw Rylko, 62; the Italian Archpriest of St. Peter’s Basilica, Angelo Comastri, 64; and the Italian archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, Raffaele Farina, 74.

Some Vatican experts have suggested that the fact that a third of cardinal-electors are from Italy – 22 in all – signifies the power being consolidated by Benedict’s top adviser, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Italian Secretary of State.

Latin America sidelined?

In comparison, only three of the new cardinals were from Latin America, even though the continent is home to more than 40 percent of the global Church: Francisco Robles Ortega, 58, Archbishop of Monterrey, Mexico; Odilo Pedro Scherer, 58, Archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil; and Leonardo Sandri, 70, the Argentinian prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches.

Cardinal Sandri had played a key role as an advisor to Pope John Paul II during his final years, and had stepped in to deliver speeches when the Polish Pope was unwell.

The fact that there are now only 4 cardinal-electors in Brazil, the world’s largest Catholic country, suggests that the Pope does not follow geographical quotas when he makes his cardinal selections.

Two Americans were among those elevated in the November 24 consistory (meaning the United States now has 13 cardinals): John Foley, 72, the new pro-Grand Master of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and former long-time head of the Vatican’s council for social communications; and Daniel DiNardo, 58, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston.

The first cardinal from an archdiocese in southwest United States, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo’s appointment reflected the demographic shifts among Catholics in the country. The number of Catholics in Cardinal DiNardo’s Texas Archdiocese has increased by almost 80 percent in the past 20 years.

Surprisingly, Africa, the continent where the Catholic Church is growing in strength, was only granted two new cardinal electors. This brought the number of African voters to nine, or seven percent, although nearly 15 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Africa. The new African cardinals were Théodore-Adrien Sarr, 71, of Dakar, Senegal; and John Njue, 63, Archbishop of Nairobi, Kenya.

Mumbai’s archbishop, Oswald Gracias, 62, was the only Asian to receive his red hat in November, bringing to 13 the number of Asian cardinals (10 percent of voters).