Francis is being accused of ‘stacking the deck’ with cronies and outsiders
By Robert Mickens, LaCroix, September 6, 2019
Even the most ardent supporters and fans of Pope Francis could not have seen this one coming.
On the first day of September the 82-year-old pope surprised just about everyone when, at the very end of his Sunday Angelus address, he announced – out of the blue and rather nonchalantly – that he was going to create 10 new cardinals who were under the age of 80 and eligible to vote in a papal conclave.
Those who have a problem with the men Francis has advanced to be cardinals or to occupy key Vatican posts may be barking up the wrong tree.
“Together with them, I will add to the members of the College of Cardinals two archbishops and a bishop [over the age of 80] who have distinguished themselves for their service to the Church,” he said.
All 13 will get their red hats and officially become cardinals on Oct. 5 during a consistory at the Vatican.
The number of cardinal-electors currently stands just two below the limit of 120 set by Paul VI. After next month’s consistory it will swell to 128, although several days later it will stand at 124. That is still four beyond the ceiling set by Pope Paul.
Barring any deaths, the number of electors will not return to the threshold of 120 until more than a year from now. The exact date is Nov. 12, 2020. That’s when Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop-emeritus of Washington, will be the last of the four cardinals who lose their vote at some point during the next calendar year.
Names and numbers
The limited number of space to add more electors was only part of the reason why so many people were surprised that Pope Francis decided to call a consistory at this time.
Most had expected him to wait until probably November and, then, to add only six or seven new electors so as not to exceed the 120-limit by more than just a few months.
But what really caught everybody by surprise were the names of the new cardinals, especially that of Father Michael Czerny SJ, the 73-year-old undersecretary of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development.
Czerny is a Canadian who was born in the old Czechoslovakia. A Jesuit with missionary experience in Africa and Latin America, he has headed the Integral Human Development office’s section that deals with the plight of migrants and refugees since 2016.
Like his Jesuit confrere, the pope, he believes that addressing the various facets of mass migration in a Christian and humane way is one of the most important social and moral issues of our time.
And he is also one of the staunchest and most energetic promoters of the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, which contains the pope’s impassioned and urgent summons to combat human neglect and exploitation of all God’s creation – from vulnerable, weak and poor people to the natural resources of planet earth.
In short, Father Czerny is squarely in line with Francis’ positions on migrants, the poor, global warming and so forth.
And for many Catholics of a more traditionalist bent, and especially those who are also politically to the right, making the Jesuit priest a cardinal is just one more example of how the pope is trying to stack the deck with like-minded progressives who will elect the next Bishop of Rome.
But it is not just making Czerny a cardinal that has the anti-Francis camp in an uproar.
Those who are opposed to the pope’s pastoral priorities and vision for Church reform are convinced that Francis is sidelining all the churchman who were promoted by Benedict XVI and John Paul II.They accuse him of bringing in outsiders and relatively unknowns to make a radical break with his two most recent predecessors.
There is no doubt that, in just over six years, Pope Francis has steered the Church in a new direction and has carefully laid the foundations for radical and far-reaching reforms, which he hopes will be difficult to reverse.
But, counter to the claims of his critics, he’s done so mainly with people who owe their “careers” as bishops and Vatican insiders to Benedict and John Paul!
Francis’ new cardinals were promoted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Let’s start with Father Czerny. He began working in the Vatican in 2009.He was hired as personal secretary to Cardinal Peter Turkson shortly after Benedict XVI appointed the Ghanaian as president of the now-defunct Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
A year later Benedict appointed Czerny to be an official consultor to that Pontifical Council.
If we go down the list of the rest of the newly announced cardinals we discover that all of them – with the exception of Archbishop Cristóbal López Romero of Rabat (Morocco) – were appointed bishops or named to various Vatican posts before 2013, when Francis became pope.
Of the nine bishops designated to be cardinal-electors (that is, with the exception of Father Czerny), six were raised to the episcopacy by John Paul or Benedict.
Eight were appointed to their current posts or Vatican consultancies by these two previous popes. And all three of the over-eighties became bishops under Pope John Paul.
Here are the rest of the newly named cardinals and how they got to where they are today:
Bishop Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot MCCI, 67, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Benedict XVI brought the Spaniard, a Comboni Missionary and expert on Islam, to the Vatican in 2012 as secretary of this Pontifical Council.
Francis then made him a titular bishop in 2016 and appointed him to his current post in 2019, a year after the death of the Council’s previous president, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran.
Archbishop José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, 53, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church. Benedict XVI made this Portuguese biblical scholar a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Culture in 2011.
Pope Francis asked the priest to preach his and the Roman Curia’s spiritual exercises in February 2018 and four months later appointed him to his current position in the Roman Curia.
Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, 69, Jakarta (Indonesia). John Paul II appointed Suharyo an archbishop in 1997. But it was Benedict who promoted him to Indonesia’s most important diocese, where in 2010 he succeeded Jesuit Cardinal Julius Darmaatmadja, now 84.
Archbishop Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez, 71, Havana (Cuba). Another one John Paul raised to the episcopacy in 1997 and then promoted to head an archdiocese in 2002. Pope Francis put García in his current post in 2016 to succeed Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who died this past July.
Archbishop Fridolin Ambongo Besungu OFM Cap., 59, Kinshasa (DRC). This Capuchin with a doctorate in moral theology from the Academia Alfonsiana in Rome was made a bishop in the last year of John Paul II’s pontificate.
Pope Francis appointed him to him to Kinshasa in 2018 year to succeed Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo, a former member of the pope’s C-9 Council of Cardinals who turns 80 on Oct. 7.
Archbishop Jean-Claude Hollerich SJ, 61, Luxembourg. This Jesuit missionary had been working in Japan for many years when, in 2011, Pope Benedict made the surprising decision to make him and archbishop and head of the Church in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
This is the first time in history that this relatively young archdiocese of will be led by a cardinal.
Bishop Álvaro Leonel Ramazzini Imeri, 72, Huehuetenango (Guatemala). Pope John put this advocate of indigenous peoples in the episcopal ranks in 1988.
But it was Benedict XVI who appointed him to his current diocese in 2012. Ramazzini will be only the third Guatemalan cardinal in history, but the first from this mid-size diocese.
Archbishop Matteo Zuppi, 63, Bologna (Italy). Pope Benedict made this longtime member of the Sant’Egidio Community one of Rome’s auxiliary bishops in 2012.Francis then promoted him to his current position in 2015 to succeed the now-deceased Cardinal Carlo Caffara, one of the four “dubia cardinals” who opposed the current pope’s teaching on marriage in the 2016 exhortation, Amoris laetitia.
Archbishop Cristóbal López Romero SDB, 67, Rabat (Morocco). This Spanish-born Salesian is the only one of the 13 newly designated cardinals who was not promoted by Francis’ predecessors.
The current pope named this missionary with stints in Latin America and Morocco an archbishop just two years ago. López will be first-ever cardinal in this North African country, which is 99 percent Muslim.
Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald M.Afr., 82, former nuncio and Vatican official (England). The name of this “White Father” Missionary and Islamic scholar is synonymous with interreligious dialogue.
Paul VI in 1972 made him a consultor to the Secretariat for Non-Believers, precursor to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID).
John Paul II then appointed him secretary to the same in 1987, bishop in 1991 and PCID president in 2002. But Benedict XVI removed him from that post in 2006 and made him papal nuncio to Egypt, where he retired six years later.
The other two newly announced cardinals – Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevičius SJ, emeritus of Kaunas (Lithuania) and Bishop Eugenio Dal Corso PSDP, emeritus of Benguela (Angola) – only recently hit the 80-year mark. Both were named bishops by John Paul.
We’ve seen a similar pattern in the Roman Curia. The Jesuit pope has been happy to utilize the people he’s inherited – those hired and promoted by his predecessors – rather than bring in lots of outsiders.
Those who have a problem with the men Francis has advanced to be cardinals or to occupy key Vatican posts may be barking up the wrong tree.
If they look carefully enough they are likely to discover that John Paul II and Benedict XVI were the ones who launched the careers of many, if not most, of these Church leaders that opponents of Francis do not like.
All of a sudden the so-called “hermeneutic of continuity” probably doesn’t look so good.