If there’s one thing even the most religiously illiterate person
tends to get about the Catholic church, it’s the difference between a
cardinal and everybody else.
Cardinals matter: they set a leadership
tone, and, of course, they elect the next pope.
The news this week that Benedict XVI has named 24 new cardinals,
including 20 who are under 80 and hence eligible to vote in a conclave,
merits a few reflections.
First, it would not seem that Benedict XVI has stacked the deck in
any ideological sense.
While there are no real liberals in this crop
(not by the standards of secular politics, or for that matter in
ecclesiastical terms), neither is the Nov. 20 consistory stuffed with
arch-conservatives.
In general, there’s a rough balance between
traditionalists and pragmatists. The American appointments offer an
example, with both the uncompromising Archbishop Raymond Burke and the
centrist Archbishop Donald Wuerl.
If Benedict’s aim had been to fill the College of Cardinals with the
most conservative prelates available, he could have elevated Archbishop
André-Joseph Léonard of Brussels, for example.
In truth, Benedict seems determined to defer to tradition at almost
every turn, rather than placing his own personal stamp on the college.
He sticks close to the ceiling of 120 voting-age cardinals established
by Pope Paul VI (while John Paul II sometimes ignored it); he won’t
break with custom by naming a new cardinal before his predecessor turns
80 (that’s why Archbishops Timothy Dolan of New York and Vincent Nichols
of Westminster, as well as Léonard and several others, were not on the
list); and he insists on giving the red hat to all those Vatican
officials who have traditionally held it.
Second, Benedict is continuing what some analysts have described as
the “re-Italianization” of the church’s senior government, with ten of
the 24 new cardinals, and eight of the 20 electors, being Italians. Some
wags in the Vatican press corps have dubbed the Nov. 20 consistory the
“revenge of the Italians” because it brings the Italian share of the
electors up from 17 percent to 20 -- or one-fifth of the total.
Third, and related to the point above, ten of the 20 new
cardinal-electors are Vatican officials, which will bring the total of
Vatican officials among voting-age cardinals to 40 -- representing
one-third of the total electorate for the next pope.
Fourth, while there are a few obvious efforts to recognize the church
outside the West -- elevating a Coptic patriarch from Egypt, for
example, as well as four Africans -- in the end, only seven of the 20
new electors come from outside Europe and North America. The
appointments thus extend a demographic imbalance between the church at
the bottom and at the top. Two-thirds of the 1.2 billion Catholics in
the world today live in the global south, but two-thirds of the
cardinals are from the north.
Fifth, some people may ask whether these appointments say anything about the church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis.
The basic answer is “no,” in the sense that most of these new
cardinals don’t have a high profile on the issue.
Had Benedict wanted to
send a clear signal on that front, he could have tapped Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, just ahead of the coming visitation in
Ireland.
Martin is widely seen as a point person for an aggressive response to
the crisis.
Instead, Benedict again deferred to tradition -- Ireland is
a small country that already has a cardinal under 80 in Sean Brady of
Armagh.
(The situation is further complicated by the fact that while
Martin is enormously popular with the public and the media, he’s a
divisive figure for some clergy and bishops.)
Sixth, there also doesn’t seem to be burning concern with a perceived
PR problem at the senior levels of the church. At least in the
English-speaking world, the best natural communicators in the queue --
Martin of Ireland, Dolan of New York, and Archbishop Thomas Collins of
Toronto -- have to wait for another day.
In general, one could analyze the Nov. 20 consistory largely as a
“business as usual” set of appointments. This remains a teaching
pontificate, premised on what I’ve called Affirmative Orthodoxy --
presenting classic Christian doctrine in the most positive terms
possible.
Benedict simply is not much interested in governance and thus tends
to stick to the script on matters such as who becomes a cardinal --
which, in this case, translates into a bumper crop of Italians and
church bureaucrats.
Whether that’s a commendably evangelical focus on the heart of the
Christian message, or self-defeating indifference to a “crisis of
governance” under this pontificate -- or, perhaps, both -- rests in the
eye of the beholder.
* * *
Handicappers tend to scrutinize a consistory with one key question in mind: Is there a new papabile in the bunch, i.e., a strong candidate to become the next pope?
The consensus answer this time around is “yes,” and it’s Italian
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for
Culture.
Here’s a piece I did on Ravasi from February, laying out why
many people find him so impressive: A prelate with the mind of Ratzinger and the heart of Roncalli.
The sound-bite version is this: Ravasi is a prelate with the mind of
Ratzinger and the heart of Roncalli.
At his best, he blends the
intellectual acumen of Benedict XVI and the pastoral heart of John
XXIII.
More about the new cardinals:
- Thumbnail bios of new cardinals -- part 1
- Thumbnail bios of new cardinals -- part 2
- Thumbnail bios of new cardinals -- part 3
- Thumbnail bios of new cardinals -- part 4 and last
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