Counting cardinals

What will change at December's consistory?

Pope Francis will create 21 new cardinals at a Dec. 7 Vatican consistory next month.

One of them, Archbishop Angelo Acerbi, is 99 years old, and so will be from the beginning a non-voting member of the College of Cardinals.

The remaining 20 will be from that day eligible to vote in a papal conclave — unless they turn 80 before a papal death or resignation, they will be among the men to choose the next pope.

Consistory for the creation of new Cardinals, Sept. 30, 2023. Image credit: Mazur/cbcew.org.uk

Who are they, and what does the shifting profile of the College of Cardinals tell us about the Church of today?

The Pillar looks at the numbers.

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Canon law states that the number of voting cardinals should ordinarily be 120, though popes are free to appoint more than that if they choose. In the morning of Dec. 7, before the consistory formally making new cardinals, there will already be exactly 120 voting-age cardinals.

So why is Pope Francis adding another 20?

As it turns out, the coming year is a big one for 80th birthdays among the college. Cardinal Oswald Gracias of the Archdiocese of Bombay will turn 80 on Christmas Eve, just a few weeks after the consistory. 13 more cardinals will celebrate their 80th birthdays during 2025, including such well known cardinals as Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, on Jan 22, and Cardinal Robert Sarah on June 15.

Cardinal Philippe Ouédraogo, the Archbishop emeritus of Ouagadougou in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, rounds out the year by turning 80 on December 31st, 2025.

While the number of voting age cardinals will briefly touch 140, by the end of 2025 it will be back down to 126, as one of the cardinals Pope Francis will create in the upcoming consistory, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., will also turn 80 in 2025.

And if Pope Francis waits until the summer of 2026 to hold another consistory, the college will be back down to 120 by that time.

With those numbers pointing to a generational turnover among the voting ranks of the College of Cardinals, it’s not surprising that 11 years into Pope Francis’s papacy, it is a body increasingly marked by his selections.

Ahead of next month’s consistory, 76% of voting-age cardinals are men elevated to the college by Pope Francis. December’s additional 20 cardinals will bring that portion to 79%.

There are now only six cardinals chosen by John Paul II who remain of voting age, around 5% of the college. While two of them — Cardinal Schonborn and Cardinal Vinko Puljic — will turn 80 this coming year, John Paul II’s mark on the college of cardinals will persist for some years yet. The youngest cardinal he appointed is Cardinal Peter Erdo who is currently 72 and will not turn 80 until June 2032.

After the December consistory, 16% of the 140 voting age cardinals will be men added to the college by Benedict XVI. Of those 23 cardinals, the youngest is 65-year-old Cardinal Baselios Thottunkal, the Major Archbishop the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. He will not reach 80 for another 15 years until June 2039.

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One of the most often discussed aspects of Pope Francis’s cardinal selections is his desire to appoint cardinals “from the peripheries". Six of the 20 new cardinals are from episcopal sees which have never had a cardinal before.

Three of these are Latin bishops from countries which have previously had cardinals, but coming from sees which had not previously had cardinals: the Archdiocese of Santiago del Estero in Argentina, the Archdiocese of Guayaquil in Ecuador, and the Diocese of Kalookan in the Philippines.

Two others are from countries which have never had a cardinal before, and which have very small Catholic populations.

Archbishop Ladislav Nemet of Belgrade, Serbia leads a local church with a history going back to the ninth century. However, with Serbia’s predominantly Orthodox population, the Roman Catholic diocese currently claims under 20,000 Catholics, less than 1% of the population of the diocese.

Archbishop Dominique Mathieu, OFM Conv. of the Archdiocese of Teheran-Ispahan in Iran serves a country which has not had a significant Catholic population in recent years. The 2019 Vatican statistical handbook listed 9,000 Catholics in the diocese out of a population of 83 million people in the diocesan territory.

Finally, Bishop Mykola Bychok of the Ukrainian Catholic Diocese of Saints Peter and Paul of Melbourne, Australia serves in a city which has had cardinals before — though Bychock is not the leader of the city’s Latin Catholic diocese but rather of the Ukrainian Catholic community there.

Bishop Bychok was born in Ukraine, and his selection is seen by some as symbolizing the Vatican’s desire to recognize the plight of Ukrainian Catholics due to the war in Ukraine — though others have seen it as a matter of inter-ecclesiastical political symbolism.

Appointing cardinals from sees which have not previously been considered cardinalate sees and from countries with very small Catholic populations has been a continuing trend for Pope Francis.

Francis has appointed more cardinals from previous un-cardinaled sees than any other recent pope. Pope Paul VI had held the record until 2023. Although Pope Pius XII significantly broadened the geographical distribution of cardinals beyond traditional cardinalate sees in the 1940s and 1950s, and John XXIII continued the trend, it was Paul VI who made the most significant expansion, naming cardinals from 49 sees which had not previously had cardinals. Pope Francis has now exceeded that number with 56 cardinals from sees that had never had a cardinal before.

With those added in this upcoming consistory, 48 of the voting age cardinals will be from the first-time sees, some of them in fairly isolated countries.

In one sense, that move certainly makes the College of Cardinals look increasingly like the Church itself. While it is still common to refer to developing nations as “the peripheries” within the church, as affluent countries become increasingly secularized it is arguable that the “global south” is increasingly the Church’s center of gravity rather than its periphery.

And yet, with few opportunities for the world’s far flung cardinals to gather together and discuss the issues facing the Church, it is possible that when the next papal conclave comes many of the men gathering to elect the next pope will be strangers to one another.

Perhaps the cardinals will use the small tables methods pioneered by the Synod on Synodality to get to know each other and the issues they see in their dioceses before voting. Or perhaps the situation will lend greater influence to the leaders of known factions, with cardinals lining up behind “liberal” or “conservative” leaders. Whatever the results, it is a more decentralized College of Cardinals than ever which will gather when it next becomes necessary to select a pope.

In addition to picking cardinals from new sees, Pope Francis’s emphasis on cardinals from the peripheries has resulted in changes to the geographical makeup of the College of Cardinals.

With 25% of the new cardinals this year coming from South America, some have suggested this could be called the South American Consistory.

The five South Americans being made cardinals this year is not the largest number which the Church has seen in a single consistory.

In 2001 John Paul II added nine South Americans to the College of Cardinals. However, the first Argentine pope has certainly expanded the representation of Central and South Americans in the college. Latin Americans made up 13% of the cardinals in the conclave in which Pope Francis was elected in 2013. In the consistories of the next two years, Pope Francis added eight more Latin Americans to the college, bringing their representation up to the 17% to 18% level at which they have maintained ever since.

The region which has seen the greatest expansion of its representation among the cardinals during the Francis pontificate is Asia and the Pacific. Three of the cardinals made in this consistory are from Asia and another from the Pacific.

All together, the percentage of cardinals from the Middle East, Asia, and Pacific has increased under Pope Francis from 11% in 2013 to 20% after the consistory this year.

With these areas growing in prominence within the College of Cardinals, the region which has seen its representation shrink the most has been Europe. In 2013 57% of cardinals were from Europe.

Europeans make up eight out of the new cardinals: 40%. However, even with that outside portion of the latest consistory, Europeans will have fallen to only 45% of the voting age cardinals.

The number of cardinals from North America has fallen slightly, from 9% in 2013 to 7% after this consistory. And the number of cardinals from Africa has remained essentially flat: 9% in 2013 and 10% after this consistory.

However many more consistories Pope Francis may have before him in his pontificate, the College of Cardinals is now very much formed by his choices.

Far fewer of the cardinals are from historical cardinalate sees. They are more geographically distributed, and many of their selections have been based on a more personal selection process rather than dictated by tradition. And the pope’s approach to selection makes it hard to know what to expect from the College of Cardinals.

Not only does the Church have little idea how the Francis-formed College of Cardinals will go about selecting the next pope, but the next pope will himself have great latitude in how he, in turn, chooses cardinals. The only thing predictable from that vantage point is unpredictability.