There has been little controversy so far on Benedict XVI's choices to be named cardinals, except for some on the extreme left who think his choices are predominantly conservative, and some on the extreme right who think there are too many 'progressives' in the list. The way it fell out, half of the new cardinal-electors are curial heads, and half of them are metropolitan bishops, making for parity in the two categories of offices generally associated with a red hat. Gianni Cardinale gives a numerical breakdown by geographical origin, and provides some data about cardinals who belong to a religious order.
The new College of Cardinals:
A numerical breakdown
by Gianni Cardinale
Translated from
Oct. 21, 2010
ROME - When Benedict XVI formally creates 24 new cardinals next month, the Sacred College of Cardinals will have 203 members in all - of which 121 will be eligible vote in the next Conclave unless they turn 80 before then.
It is one above the 120 maximum number of electors set by Paul VI, but, barring an unexpected death, it will be back to 120 on Jan. 26, 2011 when the emeritus Bishop of maraseilles, Bernard Oanafieu, turns 80.
[Another Vaticanista also pointed out thatduring his 26-year reign, John Paul II often went above the maximum 120 electors.]
Among the 121: 62 Europeans, representing 51.2% of the electors, compared to 56 out of 115 (50.4%) in the 2005 Conclave. A slight and insignificant increase.
Of the Eurpeans, 25 are Italian, 20.7% of the electors, more than the percentage represented by the 20 Italians in 2005 (17.4%), but less than the 22.5% the italians represented in the first Conclave of 1978, when there were also 25 Italians who then represented 22.5%.
[NB: The Italians were split in their support between the 'conservative' and 'liberal' Italian candidates at the time, and the Conclave ended up electing the non-controversial Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice, who became John Paul I.]
Cardinal-electors from Latin America will number 21; from North America, 15; from Africa, 12; from Asia, 10; from Oceania, 1 (Cardinal Pell of Sydney).
The nation with the most cardinals after Italy will now be the United States, with 13. The others in the ranking: Germany 6; France, Spain and Brazil, 5 each; and Poland and Mexico, 4.
In terms of their region of origin, two of the incoming cardinals are from Puglia (Amato and Monterisi). With Ravasi, the cardinals from Lombardy (capital Milan) will be 5, confirming their longtime 'primacy' over the other regions. With Sardi, there will be 3 from Piedmont. Baldelli from Umbria, Piacenza from Liguria and De Paolis from Lazio, bring their respective regional representation to two apiece. Romeo retains representation for Sicily after his predecessor as Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal De Giorigis, recently turned 80. The only cardinal from Rome is non-elector Fiorenzo Angelini, 94.
Two of the cardinals-designate are religious - Amato, a Salesian, and De Paolis, a Scalabrinian - bringing to 34 the total number of cardinals belonging to a religious order. 21 of them are electors. Overall, the Jesuits lead with 9, Franciscans adn Salesians have 6 each/ But among the electors, five are Salesian, 3 are Franciscan, and 2 are Jesuit.
With 10 heads of Curial organisms in the new list, the curial cardinals will total 38 (including non-electors) - 16 Italians, 9 from other European countries, 6 North Americans, two Africans, 3 Latin Americans, and one Indian. Six of them will turn 80 over the next two years.
This will be Benedict XVI's third consistory, after which he will have created 60 cardinals, 50 of them electors (41.3%). In his first five years as Pope, John Paul II called two consistories, creating 32 new cardinals, of whom 30 were electors.
[The determining factor was how many elector seats became available as cardinals reached age 80.]
In the next two years, Benedict XVI, God willing, will have room for as many as 22 new cardinals, since 8 electors will turn 80 in 2011 and another 13 in 2012.
Some notes on the
College of Cardinals
by Filippo Di Giacomo
Translated from
Oct. 21, 2010
The Roman Pontiff is in theory, and by nature, a pastor who is shared universally and not a ruler who is more or less imposed on the Church. And yet, precisely because he is 'ruling', the Bishop of Rome is part of an institutional structure built up over the centuries in order to exclude the hold of any 'regime' or an unexpected coup de theatre, according to the simplifying logic of the Church of 'neither too much nor too litle' that holds for every circumstance, in easy times as well as difficult periods, in health or in sickness.
At every consistory, this unwritten rule seems to find confirmation. When one says 'cardinal', people read 'conclave'. The reason for this was explained by an illustrious canonist-bishop who died too early, and who had participated with then Prof. Joseph Ratzinger in the founding of the theological journal
Communio.
In the editorial for the first issue of that journal which is still considered the theological voice opposed to that of the magazine
Concilium (of Hans Kueng et al), from which the Communio group had broken off because teir interpretation of Vatican II was inceasingly progressivist), Eugenio Corecco said that 'collegiality' had been "for seven centuries the chronic ailment of the Catholic Church".
Take away all the finery and any redundant title, the substance of the College of Cardinals has now been reduced to the one role of maintaining an efficiently functioning electoral college of 120 members that can assure the Church that it can elect a new Pope whenever it has to.
The Holy Spirit ultimately 'chooses' the Pope, but the man is elected by other man. It is not entirely by chance that in order to discern among the 120 the man who will be Pope, the modern Church uses an electoral system that lends itself to the formation of alliances and power groupings within a conclave, just as it happens at the conventions of major political parties. This, in turn, takes place depending on currents that come together and can come apart, not out of theoretical considerations but because of a sense of belonging [to a community of interests].
The new cardinals announced yesterday - ten from the Roman Curia, ten diocesan bishops, and four non-electors - do nothing to alter this mechanism but still leaves unresolved the status of a Catholic Church that is destined to be less and less Western.
In the third millennium of her earthly pilgrimage, if and when a Conclave is called, the cardinal electors of the Church should theoretically represent the 1.2 billion Catholics found in 180 nations of the world.
The present College of Cardinals represents only about 70 of those nations - 60 if we exclude the non-electors. With present criteria, canonists think that a conclave of 500 cardinals could more correctly reflect the geographical and cultural extent of the Church today (taking account of the cardinals with curial positions and possible absences due to illness or old age disabilities).
But such a number, by institutionalizing 500 'super-bishops' among the world's 4,600 bishops, would drastically affect the dogmatically ealitarian structure of the Catholic episcopate.
[???? I don't understand this logic. To be named a cardinal is not a matter of right - it must be earned, and the Pope who names new cardinals must always keep in mind that he is naming a potential Pope in every one of them!]
Still, the almost exponential increase in the membership of the College of Cardinals has been the only strategy by which the Church of Rome can equilibrate two necessities that go with Catholicity: Romanness and universality.
It follows, theoretically, that if the college of cardinals were replaced by other electoral mechanisms and other ocncepts of representation, Christian institutions would not resent it.
Since the 16th century, when the conclave we are familiar with was first instituted, Popes have named about 3000 cardinals, among whom 600 in the 20th century alone.
Indeed, it has been decades since the Bishop of Rome has named any Roman prelate among the 'cardinals' of the Church, indicating a tendency towards less tradition and more universality.
In the world's 'most exclusive club', representatives of countries that are marginalized in the international community are legitimized and stably accredited on exactly the same footing as those from the historically Catholic nations. No other international organization has such absolute parity between rich nations and poor nations.
But the Church does not live by conclaves alone. If, beyond the voices of a few cardinals representing them, the Catholic pastors of the world could find in Rome respect and a willing ear for all the voices that express themselves - as they have been in the last two speicial synodal aassemblies on Africa and the Middle East - then perhaps the 'chronic ailment' of collegiality can begin to be healed.
Di Giacomo does not particularaly express himself well in this. How does he define 'collegiality' in the sense that he and the aforementioned Cosecco use it? They seem to define it as something that fosters 'exclusivity'.
He ignores the one other function that the College of Cardinals performs, at least under Benedict XVI - one that he underscored in making the announcement yesterday: "Cardinals have the task of helping the Successor of Peter in the fulfillment of his principal mission and as the perpetual and visible foundation of unity in faith and communion within the Church", quoting from Vatican II's Lumen gentium.
He has used the occasion of his first two consistories to meet the cardinals as the informal 'Senate of the Church' to hear their 'advise and consent', as it were, on outstanding issues.
But the real venue for collegiality, where cardinals and bishops interact, is the Synod of Bishops to which they all belong, and which Vatican II created precisely for that purpose.
I also think that Di Giacomo does not get enough into the problem of representation in the College of Cardinals.
The remarkable expansion of the Church into the rest of Africa [North Africa was Christian very early on] has been fairly recent in the context of the Church's history. Their local Churches need enough time to develop to the point where they can have more than one cardinal, but wherever brilliant young African priests have emerged, the Church has lost no time in recognizing them and promoting them early/ The late Cardinal Gantin (Joseph Ratzinger's 'classmate' in the mini-consistory of 1977 and his predecessor as Dean of the College of Cardinals) and Cardinal Francis Arinze who was a leading papabile in the last Conclave, easily come to mind, along with Cardinal Turkson of Ghana, already touted as a papabile, and Cardinal-designate Sarah of Guinea.
Nor has the Church been slow to recognize 'potential Popes', in effect, among her Asian prelates. India has six cardinals now (3 of them electors, and one a Curial head), and even Sri Lanka with a tiny minority of Catholics has two cardinals now. This week, the Roman phase of the beatification process for the late Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan of Vietnam begins.
Mainland China had its first cardinal in the legendary Cardinal Ignatius Kung of Shanghai whom John Paul II named a cardinal in pectore (secretly) in 1979 while he was serving a life sentence for 'counter-revolutionary actiivties. (He was released in 1986, after 30 years, kept under house arrest for another two years, and only learned he was a cardinal when he had a meeting with John Paul II in 1989. But this was not made public until 1991, when he was 90 and able to come to the United States, where he died of cancer at age 98. The Cardinal Kung Foundation is now the principal outlet for the underground Chinese Catholics.)
In terms of representation consistent with numbers and a long history of Catholicism, Latin America, which accounts for half of the world's Catholics today, is under-represented in the College of Cardinals, with 21 electors at present (one-sixth of the College), of whom Benedict XVI has appointed four (plus one over-80).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/10/2010 20:37]