Pope Francis has appointed 20 new cardinals, but has decided to take advantage of the occasion to also hold a meeting on the 29th and 30th in which he has invited all the cardinals of the world to participate and in which winds of conclave blow being the first time that those who will elect the future pontiff will face each other.
For the consistory, as the meeting of cardinals is called, the first to be held in the middle of August, the appointment of 21 new cardinals had been announced, but there will be 20 because the Belgian Lucas Van Looy decided not to accept the biretta and the cardinal’s ring.
Of the 20 new appointees, there will finally be 16 electors, under 80 years of age and therefore they will be able to enter the Sistine Chapel to elect the new Pope. And there are 4 non-voters, who do not have the right to vote. Of all of them, five are American, five Asian, eight are European and two are African.
[El Papa Francisco nombra cardenal al salmantino Fernando Vérgez]
Francis has left his mark on the college of cardinals, as he has elected 83 of the 132 cardinal electors, about 63% of those who will be part of the conclave and will meet for the first time in Rome.
The main topic of the meeting will beas the Pope pointed out, reflect on the new Apostolic Constitution ‘Praedicate Evangelium’which reforms the organization of the Curia, the administration of the Catholic Church.
Although for some, the Pope could also consult the cardinals on other important issues for the Church such as the drafting of statutes that regulate the figure of the Pope Emeritus.
The unprecedented town hallthe Pope in a wheelchair and the visit this Sunday to L’Aquila (center), the city where Celestine V, the first pontiff to resign, is buried, has fueled the lucubrations about the possible resignation.
Journalist Alberto Melloni stated a few days ago in the newspaper The Republic that the meeting has “a clear preconclavian flavor” because “the Pope has repeatedly announced that the “door of resignation is open.”
“Perhaps the Pope convened it to verify the quality of the names he has chosen or to create a bit of cardinal sociability: but certainly the cardinals have never seen a consistory like this,” Melloni explained.
[Francisco inquieta a la Iglesia sugiriendo su adiós: “Se puede cambiar de Papa, no es una catástrofe”]
The priest and journalist Luis Badilla, who manages one of the most followed blogs on Vatican issues (the seismograph), he titled in one of his articles on the consistory: “Conclave essays”. Badilla estimated, according to the calculations of the reservations in the religious residences dedicated to the cardinals, that it is possible to foresee “a presence of 145-150 cardinals”.
“The meeting, regardless of how it is called and presented, in fact, canonically, will be an extraordinary consistory, the second of this Pope who on February 20 and 21, 2014 brought together the cardinals to talk about the family and in which only the first 19 cardinals created by Jorge Bergoglio were present,” he explains.
Cardinals from around the world
The new cardinals come from all corners of the world such as the Archbishop of Ekwulobia (Nigeria), Peter Okpaleke, the Archbishop of Goa and Damao (India), Filipe Neri António Sebastião di Rosário Ferrão, the Archbishop of Ekwulobia (Nigeria), Anthony Poola , or the Bishop of Wa (Ghana), Richard Kuuia Baawobr.
And among them are also the Spanish Archbishop Fernando Vergez Alzaga, the Archbishop of Brasilia, Paulo Cesar Costa, the Archbishop of Manaus, Leonardo Ulrich, who will be the first cardinal of the Amazon region, and the Archbishop of Asunción, Adalberto Martínez Flores, who will become the first Paraguayan cardinal. Among those over 80 is the Archbishop Emeritus of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), Jorge Enrique Jiménez Carvajal.
Another unexpected new cardinal is Archbishop Giorgio Marengo, a 48-year-old Italian who is the administrator of the Catholic Church in Mongolia, where there are just over 1,500 Catholics. The total number of cardinals will increase to 227, electors will go from 116 to 132, and non-electors from 91 to 95.
The geographical distribution has also changed because, for example, in 2013 Asia and Oceania had 11 cardinal electors and, after the consistory, they have now reached 24, and some come from areas where they never had cardinals, such as Tonga or Papua New Guinea.
Europe does not change much at the numerical level, from 60 it goes to 54although a drop in Italian cardinal voters has been detected, since in 2013 there were 28 and at the end of next year, when some turn 80, they will remain at 14.
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