He Pope Francis announced this Sunday the appointment of 21 new cardinalsthus underpinning his succession in a future conclave and reinforcing the weight of South America, with five cardinals elected in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.
According to the criteria of
Cardinals, the most distinguished appointment of the Curia, are responsible for choosing in conclave the successor of a pope after his death or resignation, but they only have the right to vote if they are not over 80 years old. Their age, therefore, divides them into voters and non-voters.
Currently, according to data from the Holy See updated on September 28, there are 235 cardinals in the College of Cardinals, but only 122 would be able to access the Sistine Chapel if a sudden conclave were to take place tomorrow to vote for a new pontiff.
Of these, the “electors” named by Francis were already 92, an overwhelming majority compared to the 24 of Benedict XVI and the 6 that survive of John Paul II, but with this Sunday’s announcement, the cardinals of the Argentine pope will rise to 112 .
New South American cardinals
Pope Francis appeared like every Sunday at the window of the Apostolic Palace to pray the Angelus and, once it was over, he proclaimed – by surprise, as always – the convocation on December 8 of a consistory to designate 21 new cardinals. .
Twenty of them would be electors in a possible conclave – some even very young -, while the almost centenary Italian nuncio (diplomat) Angelo Acerbi will be the exception.
A quarter of those chosen come from South America, the pontiff’s continent: the archbishop of LimeCarlos Castilo Mattasoglio, 74 years old; the one of Santiago de Chile, Fernando Natalio Chomali Garib (67); that of Santiago del Estero and Argentine primateVicente Bokalic Iglic (72) and Guayaquil, the Ecuadorian Guerardo Luis Cabrera (69).
The archbishop of the Brazilian city of happy portJaime Spengler (64).
With these five names the number of South American voters in the Vatican will be reinforced: currently there are 14 (in addition to another 13 already without a vote), but soon some will exceed the threshold of 80 years, such as the Venezuelan Baltazar Enrique Porras, next Thursday.
A “peripheral” and young Curia
The rest of the appointments attest to their desires for a decentralized Church that takes into account the distant “peripheries” of the planet. Because his intention, he stressed, is to “express the universality of the Church” and announce God “to all men on Earth.”
For this reason, among the new cardinals is the archbishop of Tokyo, Tarcisius Isao Kikuchi; or that of Aviyan, in the Ivory Coast, Ignace Bessi Dogbo; as well as those from Algiers, Jean-Paul Vesco; from Indonesian Bogor, Paskalis Bruno Syukur; or Tehran, Dominique Joseph Mathieu.
Or the bishop of the Philippine Kalookan, Pablo Virgilio Siongco David; the archbishop of the Italian city of Turin, Roberto Repole, or that of Belgrade, Ladislav Nemet.
A curious fact is that some cardinals are quite young: the most striking case is that of the Ukrainian Mykola Bychok, bishop of the eparchy of Saints Peter and Paul in Melbourne and who is only 44 years old.
He is followed by the organizer of the pontifical trips, the Indian monsignor George Jacob Koovakad, 51 years old; the Lithuanian Rolandas Makrickas (52), coajutor archpriest of the Roman basilica of Santa María Maggiore; and the auxiliary bishop of Rome, Baldasare Reina, and that of Toronto, Francis Leo, both 53 years old.
Finally, Pope Francis has also decided to elevate the British theologian friar Timothy Peter Joseph Radcliffe, and the Italian priest Fabio Baggio, undersecretary of the Migrant Section of the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development, to the carenal position.
The Bergoglio succession
Francis thus continues to leave his mark on the Roman Curia, choosing future “electors” and underpinning his succession.
This in fact will be his tenth consistory, the ceremony in which cardinals are “created”, surpassing by one the nine that John Paul II officiated during his long 27 years of pontificate and doubling those of Benedict XVI.
However, the College of Cardinals, as of today, that is, before the new appointments become effective on December 8, the European cardinal electors continue to be the majority, 49, compared to 21 Asians, 16 Africans, or those from South America (14), Central America (4) or North America (15).
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