On Pentecost, Francis Revs Up The Red Machine, Taps 14 New Cardinals

Marking another push to the church's “peripheries” – and even the Vatican’s – at the noontime Regina Caeli on this Pentecost Sunday, the Pope revealed his slate of 14 Cardinals-designate to be elevated at a Consistory on 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.

Francis' fifth intake into the College of his five-year pontificate, 11 of the group are younger than 80, and thus eligible to vote in a Conclave. For the remainder of this year, the picks will top up the electoral ranks to 124, four over the standard maximum set by Paul VI – a limit which the soon-to-be saint's successors are, of course, free to break as they see fit.

The list topped by the Baghdad-based Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako, 69 – as a sign of papal solidarity with the decimated Iraqi fold, the second consecutive head of that 1,800 year-old church to be elevated since the US-led invasion in 2003 – yet again, anyone betting on the names would've come up short, even on the group's Curial contingent: while the choices of the CDF prefect, now Cardinal-designate Luis Ladaria SJ and the new Vicar for Rome, Cardinal-designate Angelo DeDonatis, maintain usual form, the two other in-house picks – the Sostituto of the Secretariat of State Angelo Becciu, 69, and the Polish-born Papal Almoner Konrad Krajewski, 54 (Francis' very prominent field marshal in providing for the poor and stricken around Rome and beyond) – hold posts whose occupants have never received the red hat. In the former case, given Becciu's current job as deputy to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the veteran diplomat's elevation ostensibly signals a new post for him in the short-term future; by long tradition, a seat in the College only goes to a Sostituto – the Vatican's equivalent of the White House chief of staff – shortly after his departure from the role.

Far from Rome, meanwhile, the biglietto represents yet another kaleidoscope of the church's universality – with, as ever, a preferential option for workaday prelates far removed from major centers of wealth or power.

Among these, Pakistan will have its first new red hat in nearly 50 years, as will Japan in a quarter-century (and not in Tokyo, to boot); the bishop of Fatima will now be Portugal's second active "prince of the church" alongside his metropolitan, the patriarch of Lisbon (creating the global church's lone province with two cardinals helming dioceses); and another far-flung Italian – Archbishop Giuseppe Petrocchi, 69, of quake-ravaged L'Aquila (Abruzzo) – joins a home-turf bloc that's seen Francis routinely deny the scarlet to its usual A-list destinations; most conspicuously of all, the new archbishop of Milan – Mario Delpini, the bike-riding native son who Francis tapped to lead Europe's largest diocese last year – is absent from today's list.

With the new class, Francis will have elevated just shy of half (58) of the eventual electors of his successor – even more significantly, the group from which the next Pope will emerge.

While a Consistory at some point in 2018 has been broadly expected from early in the year – with either June or October leading the educated guessing – Francis' penchant for keeping even his picks in the dark until the moment of his public announcement made any anticipation of a timeframe come with the proverbial (heavy) grain of salt until word emerged from the pontiff himself.

As for Francis’ potential future impact on the College’s electoral makeup, barring unexpected deaths, 11 more voting seats open up from now until the beginning of 2020 as their occupants turn 80. Should Papa Bergoglio fill them all, the choices would put his combined crop of appointees – many of them the first cardinals ever named in their respective countries – within striking distance of the two-thirds threshold required to elect a new pontiff: indeed, the most concrete and consequential “reform” of all, extending Francis’ legacy beyond his own reign.

Notably, too, with today's announcement Francis again did not summon the entire College for what had been the customary daylong consultation on significant issues facing the church. A practice instituted by Benedict XVI, Francis hasn't hosted a discussion with all the cardinals since his first Consistory in 2014, when he tapped Cardinal Walter Kasper to deliver a keynote on the church's outreach to the family – the first stage of the synodal process which produced Amoris Laetitia.

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Arranged in the usual strict order of seniority by which the designates will be inducted into the Pope's Senate, here's the list (all archbishops unless otherwise noted; ages via Catholic-Hierarchy):

–Louis Raphaël I Sako, 69, patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans (Iraq)
–Luis Ladaria SJ, 74, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
–Angelo De Donatis, 64, vicar-general of Rome
–Giovanni Angelo Becciu, 69, Sostituto of the Secretariat of State and papal delegate to the Order of Malta
–Konrad Krajewski, 54, Apostolic Almoner
–Joseph Coutts, 72, archbishop of Karachi (Pakistan)
–António dos Santos Marto, 71, bishop of Leiria-Fatima (Portugal)
–Pedro Barreto Jimeno SJ, 74, archbishop of Huancayo (Peru)
–Desiré Tsarahazana, 63, archbishop of Toamasina (Madagascar)
–Giuseppe Petrocchi, 69, archbishop of L’Aquila
–Thomas Aquinas Manyo, 69, archbishop of Osaka (Japan)

And those over 80, thus ineligible to enter Conclave:

–Sergio Obeso Rivera, 86, archbishop-emeritus of Xalapa (Mexico)
–Bishop Toribio Ticona Porco, 81, prelate-emeritus of Corocoro (Bolivia)
–Father Aquilino Bocos Merino CMF 80, former superior-general of the Claretians (Spain)

In closing his announcement, Francis asked for "prayers for the new cardinals that, confirming their adherence to Christ, the merciful and faithful high priest, they might help me in my ministry as Bishop of Rome for the good of all the Holy, Faithful People of God."

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