Pope Elevates 6 Cardinals for a Less-European College

By Nicole Winfield
Columbus Dispatch
November 26, 2012

www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2012/11/25/pope-elevates-6-cardinals-for-a-less-european-college.html

[with video]

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI responded to criticism that the club of churchmen who will choose his successor is too Eurocentric, elevating six new cardinals from the United States, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Nigeria and the Philippines during a ceremony yesterday.

Benedict welcomed the prelates into the College of Cardinals during an hourlong ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica, telling them that their presence among the other red-robed prelates was a sign of the “unique, universal and all-inclusive identity” of the Catholic Church.

The ceremony was both joyful and emotional: Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle, seen by many to be a rising star in the church, visibly choked up as he knelt before Benedict to receive his three-pointed red hat, or biretta, and gold ring. He wiped tears from his eyes as he returned to his place.

The archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, meanwhile, seemed to want to sit down and chat with each one of the dozens of cardinals he greeted in the traditional exchange of peace that follows the formal elevation rite.Benedict has said that with this “little consistory,” he was essentially completing his last cardinal-making ceremony held in February, when he elevated 22 cardinals, the vast majority of them European archbishops and Vatican bureaucrats.

The College of Cardinals remains heavily European even with the new additions: Of the 120 cardinals younger than 80 and thus eligible to vote in a conclave to elect a new pope, more than half — 62 — are European.

Critics have complained that the “princes of the church” no longer represents the Catholic Church today, since Catholicism is growing in Asia and Africa but is in crisis in much of Europe.

The new cardinals give an eventual conclave a slightly more multinational air: Latin America, which boasts half the world’s Catholics, now has 21 voting-age cardinals; North America, 14; Africa, 11; Asia, 11; and Oceana, one.

Among the six new cardinals is Archbishop James Harvey, the American prefect of the papal household. As prefect, Harvey was the direct superior of the pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence in a Vatican jail for stealing the pope’s private papers and leaking them to a reporter in the greatest Vatican security breach in modern times.

The Vatican spokesman has denied that Harvey, 63, from Milwaukee, is leaving because of the scandal. But on the day the pope announced that Harvey would be made cardinal, he also said he would leave the Vatican to take up duties as the archpriest of one of the Vatican’s four Roman basilicas. Such a face-saving promotion-removal is not a rare Vatican personnel move.

Harvey’s departure has led to much speculation about who would replace him in the delicate job of organizing the pope’s daily schedule and arranging audiences.

Cardinals serve as the pope’s closest advisers, but their main task is to elect a new pope. And with Benedict, 85, slowing down, that task is ever more present. For the second time, the ceremony was greatly trimmed back, lasting just over an hour to spare the pope the fatigue of a lengthy ceremony.