MANILA, Philippines – Before his death, Pope Francis reshaped the College of Cardinals in a way that gave more power to Asia and Africa.
Based on data from the Vatican, the representation of Asian and African cardinals rose to 30% in this year’s conclave, the election of a new pope.
(This percentage is based on the complete number of 135 cardinal electors, or cardinals below the age of 80. Two cardinal electors will not be able to join the conclave due to health reasons, but the Vatican did not disclose their names.)
This is a far cry from the 19% of Asians and Africans in the 2013 conclave, which elected Francis, and the 18% in the 2005 conclave, which elected Benedict XVI.
The representation of European cardinals, on the other hand, decreased in this year’s conclave — down to 39% from 52% in 2013.
Twelve years after the election of the first Latin American pontiff, Europe no longer forms even a slim majority in the conclave.
This would have been unthinkable more than 120 years ago, when, according to the book Il Conclave: Storia e Segreti, up to 97% of the College of Cardinals were European.
Why?
Europe, particularly Rome, is the traditional power center of the Roman Catholic Church.
Rome is significant for the Catholic Church because it is believed to be the place where Saint Peter, the first pope, was martyred and buried. In the fourth century, the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine also turned Christianity from a persecuted Jewish sect into the official religion, giving it the global dominance it possesses today.
Francis, however, stressed the need for the Catholic Church to embrace diversity and highlight the richness of faith in different parts of the globe.
Catholic, after all, comes from the Greek root word katholikos, which means “universal.”
“During his 12-year pontificate, Pope Francis significantly reshaped the College of Cardinals, making it a less Eurocentric and a more international body,” Vatican News reported.
“This reflected both the late Pope’s personal inclination to shift the center of gravity of Catholicism toward the Global South, with a focus on the ‘peripheries,’ and the broader trend that the Church of the future will likely have an increasingly non-European face,” it added.
Vatican News pointed out that while European cardinals still represent the majority of cardinals in the conclave, “the ‘rest of the world’ now clearly surpasses Europe, with the Americas as a whole significantly increasing its ‘weight’”
“Although regional representation alone won’t determine the outcome of the election of the new Pope, which is also influenced by other critical factors, the geographical aspect cannot be overlooked given the global impact of the Pope’s role,” it said.
It is also interesting to note that in this conclave, 15 countries will have cardinal electors for the first time. These cardinal electors are the following:
- Cardinal Chibly Langlois (Haiti)
- Cardinal Arlindo Furtado Gomes (Cape Verde)
- Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga (Central African Republic)
- Cardinal John Ribat (Papua New Guinea)
- Cardinal Charles Maung Bo (Myanmar)
- Cardinal Antoine Kambanda (Rwanda)
- Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi (Tonga)
- Cardinal Sebastian Francis (Malaysia)
- Cardinal Anders Arborelius (Sweden)
- Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich (Luxembourg)
- Cardinal Virgilio do Carmo da Silva (Timor-Leste)
- Cardinal William Seng Chye Goh (Singapore)
- Cardinal Adalberto Martínez Flores (Paraguay)
- Cardinal Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla (South Sudan)
- Cardinal Ladislav Nemet (Serbia)
The upside of this wide spectrum of cardinals is, certainly, diversity in the highest echelons of the Catholic Church.
The downside is the cardinals’ unfamiliarity with each other. Since they come from the farthest parts of the globe and many of them are meeting for the first time during the conclave, one challenge is building consensus.
The results of the conclave become more unpredictable, too.
Still, it is a much-needed change because Asia and Africa are places where the Catholic Church is growing, in contrast to Europe, where the faith is on the decline.
In Africa, the number of Catholics grew by 3.31% from 2022 to 2023, according to the latest statistics from the Vatican. In Asia, the growth was at 0.6%.
In Europe, however, the number of Catholics grew only by 0.2% during the same period.
Statistics on future priests show how Asia and Africa are lands of promise: 61.4% of the world’s seminarians came from these two continents, as opposed to 37.7% from America and Europe.
Will cardinal electors choose a pope from these emerging centers of power? – with reports from James Patrick Cruz/Rappler.com