Meet the conclave: Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle

His route from aspiring medical student to Asia’s best-known Catholic leader.

Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle initially planned to become a doctor. One day, his pastor encouraged him to sit an exam at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, claiming it would lead to a medical school scholarship if he passed. Tagle discovered later it was a seminary entrance exam — and he had failed.

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, pictured in 2015. © Mazur/cbcew.org.uk.

“I was so angry, but now I understand the priest,” he later recalled. “I said: ‘Why did you do this to me?’ He said: ‘I just want to open your mind. You have not considered other possibilities.’”

Tagle began to rise before 5 a.m. to attend daily Eucharistic adoration, seeking divine guidance on whether he was, in fact, called to the priesthood. “Please,” he prayed, “I don’t know what to do.”

Tagle was born in Manila in 1957, the first child of Manuel Topacio Tagle and Milagros Gokim. Milagros, a Chinese Filipino, always called her son Chito, a short form of Luiscito, a diminutive of Luis.

After failing to pass the entrance exam, he pestered the authorities for another chance. The Jesuit who supervised the test called Tagle into his office. On hearing that the youth prayed daily before the Blessed Sacrament, he phoned the seminary rector, who agreed to admit Tagle on probation. On his way back home, Tagle bumped into the rector, who told him: “You had your first lesson: if you want to pursue something, pray hard and work hard.”

Tagle was ordained as a diocesan priest in 1982, at the age of 24, and appointed spiritual director of the seminary in the Diocese of Imus, which was carved out of the Manila archdiocese in 1961.

In 1985, he was dispatched to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he wrote a doctorate on “Episcopal Collegiality in the Teaching and Practice of Paul VI.”

Returning to the Philippines, he combined parish ministry with lectures and retreats, building a reputation as a charismatic speaker. He was invited to join the editorial committee of the Institute for Religious Sciences of Bologna, the influential “Bologna School” whose scholars view Vatican Council II as a decisive break with the Church’s past. He was also named a member of the International Theological Commission.

Shortly after he was appointed Bishop of Imus in 2001, day laborers were waiting for their priest to arrive to celebrate an early morning Mass at a small chapel in the diocese. They raised their eyebrows when a cleric in his early 40s turned up on a motorized rickshaw. When they realized it was their new bishop, they apologized for not offering a formal welcome. Tagle assured them he didn’t mind: their usual priest had reported sick late the night before and he had decided to go in his place.

Tagle was an early ecclesial adopter of technology, offering weekly reflections on Mass readings on the internet, reaching an audience far beyond Imus. (He also captured attention for his spirited renditions of songs, including “You to Me Are Everything.”)

In 2011, he was appointed Archbishop of Manila, overseeing a flock of around three million people, and made a cardinal a year later.

He served as a president delegate at the family synods of 2014 and 2015 at the Vatican. On the disputed question of whether some divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Holy Communion, Tagle suggested that every situation was “quite unique” and “to have a general rule might be counterproductive in the end.”

In 2015, he was also named president of Caritas Internationalis, the global umbrella body for Catholic aid organizations. And in 2019, Pope Francis called him to the Vatican, appointing him prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the influential department overseeing the world’s mission territories.

Catholics in Manila were saddened by Tagle’s departure, but it may have been something of a relief for the cardinal, whose tenure had been overshadowed by the election of mercurial Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who launched a drug war that filled the country’s streets with bodies. Some Filipinos argue that Tagle should have done more to challenge Duterte, who now faces possible trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Upon his arrival at the Vatican — with the moniker the “Asian Francis” —Tagle seemed consciously to cultivate a lower profile, wearying perhaps of the hype that had followed him since his appointment to Manila.

When Pope Francis swept away the leadership of Caritas Internationalis, including Tagle, in 2022, Vatican watchers wondered if the cardinal had fallen out of favor. But following a reform of the Roman curia, Tagle was confirmed as a pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization, the flagship new department that combined the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

In the new role, he continued to clock up airmiles on Vatican business, recently celebrating the closing Mass of the U.S. National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.