Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals Sunday, significantly increasing the size of the College of Cardinals and further cementing his mark on the group of prelates who will one day elect his successor. They include a man who will be the oldest cardinal: Monsignor Angelo Acerbi, a 99-year-old retired Vatican diplomat who was once held hostage for six weeks in Colombia by leftist guerrillas. Another will be the youngest: the 44-year-old head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Melbourne, Australia, Bishop Mykola Bychok, named in a nod to the war in Ukraine, the AP reports.
The new cardinals will get their red hats at a ceremony, known as a consistory, on Dec. 8, an important feast day on its own that officially kicks off the Christmas season in Rome. It will be Francis' 10th consistory to create new princes of the church and the biggest infusion of voting-age cardinals into the college in Francis' 11-year pontificate. Acerbi is the only one of the new intake who is over 80 and hence too old to vote for on the next pope. Usually the college has a limit of 120 on voting-age cardinals, but popes often exceed the cap temporarily to keep the body robust as existing cardinals age out, per the AP. As of Sept. 28, there were 122 cardinal-electors; that means the new infusion brings their numbers up to 142.
Among those named by history's first Latin American pope were the heads of major dioceses and archdioceses in South America. They are the archbishop of Santiago del Estero, Argentina, Vicente Bokalic Iglic; the archbishop of Porto Alegre, Brazil, Jaime Spengler; the archbishop of Santiago, Chile, Fernando Natalio Chomali Garib; the archbishop of Guayaquil, Ecuador, Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera; and the archbishop of Lima, Peru, Carlos Gustavo Castillo Mattasoglio. That stands in contrast to the lone new cardinal from North America: the archbishop of Toronto, Francis Leo. Francis also elevated bishops from Iran, Indonesia, Tokyo, the Philippines, and Africa. "Like his predecessors, but even more so, he's making sure that Catholic leaders from the church's edges have a voice at the big table," said Christopher Bellitto, a church historian at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.
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