In naming 17 new cardinals in October, 2016, Pope Francis
moved closer to putting his stamp on the sort of cleric who would follow him as
pontiff. Similar to a U.S. president’s power to nominate justices to the U.S.
Supreme Court, a pope’s power to appoint cardinals who presumably can vote in
the next concave is decisive in terms of leaving a legacy. With the additional
cardinals, Francis had appointed 40 percent of the cardinals who could vote in
the next conclave. The fact that cardinals tend to be old suggests, however,
that any lasting legacy would not be long lasting. I submit that the cardinals’
typical age and even other qualities suggest that the rubric a pope uses in
selecting clerics for the red hat says a lot about how the pope approaches
Christianity.
Among the 17 future cardinals were three Americans.
Interestingly, all three had “indicated they support Francis’ efforts to set a
tone that is more pastoral than judgmental toward women, gays and Catholics who
have divorced and remarried.”[1]
Significantly, the pope passed over Charles Chaput, the archbishop of
Philadelphia, who had been “an uninhibited critic of Francis on doctrinal
matters, expressing concern that his leadership has confused the church by
leaving open the prospect that priests may give communion to divorced and
remarried Catholics.”[2]
In making his picks, the pope was discounting such confusion and highlighting
pastoral outreach, and therein putting his mark on the Roman Catholic Church as
its leader.
The pope’s mark thus goes further than “making sure that his
successor follows his line of thought.”[3]
Yet even as much as Francis’s picks highlight pastoral work over ideological
differences during Francis’s pontificate, the nature of the picks goes further
in terms of what they mean for how leadership itself is to be understood in a
distinctively Christian way. Specifically, in bypassing large archdiocese
including Venice, Philadelphia and Los Angeles that are accustomed to having
cardinals eligible to vote in a conclave, the pope was turning the ways of
worldly power upside-down, hence maybe in line with Jesus’s conception of the
Kingdom of God. Similarly, in “promoting prelates from many smaller
dioceses—not only in the United States, but also in Venezuela and Mexico—who
are ‘the classic Pope Francis-type of bishops’” (i.e., more interested in doing
pastoral work than influencing cultural battles)—the pope was saying something
not only about his pastoral priority and even about the universality of the
Church; he was recognizing value in small places. Faith the size of a mustard
seed can indeed come from a small place, whereas big places can be overwhelmed
by the temptations that go with having the sort of power that the world
recognizes, values, and rewards.
In short, Pope Francis was demonstrating a
Christian sort of leadership, wherein the last are first and many of the first
are, well, lost, even as they suppose otherwise. Reaching outside the
power-centers of the Roman Catholic Church, into dimmer corners where the work
of the Church was being waged in the streets rather than political debates,
says something much more than where the pope stood ideologically and even in
terms of the Church being worldwide rather than European- or Italian-centric;
the use of power to uplift leaders from meeker circumstances and hopefully
attitudes is distinctively Christian, and hence totally in keeping with being
applied within the Church itself. Being
oriented to eternal spiritual verities is superior to trying to be everlasting
via successors.
1. Laurie Goodsetin, “Francis Names Cardinals, Including 3 Americans,” The New York Times, October 10, 2016.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
