Many of the
19 men to be made cardinals by Pope Francis on Saturday share similar
backgrounds and outlooks to the pontiff
theguardian.com,
Associated Press in Vatican City, Saturday 22 February 2014
 |
| Vincent Nichols, right, with the Archbishop of Managua, Leopoldo Jose' Brenes Solorzano, in Rome this week. Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP |
Pope
Francis is putting a personal imprint on the group of men who will choose his
successor, tapping like-minded cardinals from some of the world’s smallest,
most remote and poverty-wracked nations to help him run the Catholic Church.
Alongside
Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the leader of the church in England and Wales,
those elevated will include old friends of the Pope, Vatican bureaucrats and
sentimental favorites.
Francis is
presiding over his first cardinal-making ceremony on Saturday to bring 19 new
“princes” of the church into the College of Cardinals. Two hail from Africa,
two from Asia and six from Francis’s native Latin America, which is home to
nearly half the world’s Catholics but is grossly underrepresented in the
church’s hierarchy.
Cardinal-designate
Chibly Langlois is not even an archbishop, but rather the 55-year-old bishop of
Les Cayes and now Haiti’s first-ever cardinal. Another Caribbean cardinal,
Kelvin Edward Felix, was for a quarter of a century the archbishop of tiny
Castries, St. Lucia, population 163,000.
The
archbishop of Managua, Nicaragua, Leopoldo Jose Brenes Solorzano, is an old
friend who worked alongside the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in
preparing the seminal document of the pope’s vision of a missionary church –
the so-called Aparecida Document produced by the 2007 summit of Latin American
bishops. Nicaragua’s second cardinal, Brenes has made an impression at the
Vatican with his unruly grey curls and the blue jeans he donned for the flight
to Rome.
Cardinal
Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, archbishop of Seoul, South Korea, has ancestors who were
among the lay people who brought Christianity to the Korean peninsula in the
19th century. His great-great grandfather and his wife were executed as part of
the Joseon Dynasty’s persecution of Christians, Asian Catholic news agency
UCANews reported. Of the six children in his immediate family, three became
priests.
Burkina
Faso Cardinal Philippe Nakellentuba Ouedraogo, though he hails from the other
side of the world, sounded an awful lot like Francis in his 2013 Christmas
homily. Nakellentuba denounced the “inequality, injustice, poverty and misery”
of a society in which employers exploit their workers and the powerful few have
most of the money while the masses suffer.
Francis is
“emphasising his preference for what he calls the periphery, or the margins”,
noted Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for the British Catholic magazine
the Tablet.
In a
personal letter to his new cardinals, Francis asked them to accept their nominations
with joy but to refrain from “any kind of expression of worldliness, from any
celebration alien to the evangelical spirit of austerity, moderation and
poverty”.
One
cardinal is sitting out the ceremony even as he makes a record by living to see
it: Cardinal Loris Francesco Capovilla, aged 98, is becoming the oldest member
of the College of Cardinals, but due to his age couldn’t make the trip from
northern Italy.
His is a
sentimental choice for Francis: For more than a decade, Capovilla was the
private secretary to Pope John XXIII, whom Francis will make a saint alongside
Pope John Paul II in April.
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