By John L. Allen Jr.

ROME (Crux) — On Saturday Pope Francis created 20 new cardinals, including 16 under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope. It was Pope Francis’ eighth consistory, and whenever we get a new crop of Princes of the Church, several chronic misconceptions tend to head once more into the breach.

Herewith are three conceptual mistakes to avoid in thinking about the men who wear the red.

It’s not about liberals v. conservatives

To begin with, there’s a natural tendency for Western handicappers to try to divide up the cardinals like they do everyone else, meaning in terms of where cardinals stand on the liberal/conservative divide.

This generally works fairly well for Americans and Europeans — it’s not wrong, for example — even if it’s a little reductive — to think that new Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego is to the left of the traditional center of gravity within the American bishops’ conference, or that new Cardinal Arthur Roche of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Divine Worship is more progressive than his predecessor, Cardinal Robert Sarah.

The left/right taxonomy tends to break down, however, once you exit Western airspace. Care to take a stab, for instance, at locating new Cardinal Anthony Poola, India’s first Dalit cardinal, on that spectrum? What about Cardinal Virgilio Carmo da Silva of East Timor?

It’s not just that we don’t know which side they are on — it’s that the left/right classification system often just doesn’t apply. Prelates from the developing world often can be quite traditional on doctrine, for instance, but extremely progressive on matters of social justice.

Moreover, their perspectives are informed mostly by their local situations. Presumably, new Cardinal Peter Okpaleke of Nigeria is far more concerned about corruption, sectarian violence and security, the issues that dominate his country right now, than transgender rights or the legal status of abortion, which define the left/right fault lines in America.

The bottom line is that Catholicism is a global faith, a fact increasingly reflected in the College of Cardinals in the Pope Francis era. As a result, we have to stop trying to analyze it in primarily Western terms.

They’re not Vatican experts

There’s also a natural tendency for outsiders to assume that if a guy’s a cardinal, he must know the ins and outs of the Vatican. That’s just not so — in fact, most of these cardinals would be the first to admit that the corridors of power in Rome are every bit as much terra incognita to them as the tundra of the Arctic or the isolated islands of the Pacific.

I’d be willing to bet, for example, that of the 16 new cardinal-electors named yesterday, only two of them likely could name more than, say, three of the 10 defendants currently facing trial in the Vatican for alleged financial crimes.

I’m presuming most could correctly identify Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, especially since he’s on the guest list for the cardinals’ get-together — thanks to Pope Francis — despite the fact his privileges were stripped in 2020. But after that, I’d guess none could pick Raffaele Mincione or Gianluigi Torzi out of a lineup, the two lay Italian financiers accused of swindling the Vatican, possibly save for Roche and Cardinal Fernando Vérgez, both of whom work in the Vatican.

Based on 25 years of experience interviewing cardinals, I can testify that the usual dynamic is that we spend some time on the record with me asking the questions and then another few minutes with the recorder switched off while they pose queries about what in the world is going on in Rome. Anybody who covers the Vatican probably has had similar experiences.

This long-standing reality today is compounded by the fact that Pope Francis has named so many cardinals from the world’s peripheries who not only don’t work in the Vatican, but who’ve spent precious little time in Rome over the years. Half the time, the waiter serving them dinner in a Roman trattoria probably could speak more knowledgeably about Vatican power games than they could.

Of course, if you’re a rank-and-file Catholic out there with a concern about the Vatican, there’s nothing wrong with expressing it to your cardinal — they are, after all, supposed to be the pope’s closest advisors. Just don’t necessarily expect him to know any more about what’s actually going on than you do.

They’re not BFFs

Speaking of natural but mistaken assumptions about cardinals, there’s also a tendency to assume that because it’s such a small club — as of yesterday’s consistory, 226 cardinals in all, of whom 132 are electors — they must all be tight.

Yet when Crux recently asked one of the new inductees how many of the world’s cardinals he knew personally, the answer was revealing: “About seven.”

While that reply may be on the low end of the average, it’s nevertheless true that many of today’s cardinals are effectively strangers to one another. Given Pope Francis’ penchant for distributing red hats to improbable locales, that’s the most natural thing in the world — after all, what are the odds, really, that the cardinal of Ekwulobia in Nigeria would be the BFF of his colleague in, say, Singapore or Mongolia?

In fact, many observers assume that the real purpose of the two-day gathering of cardinals that begins Monday isn’t so much to discuss Vatican reform, which is the ostensible motive — after all, as noted above, most of these cardinals don’t know much about the Vatican, and two days is hardly enough to give them a meaningful crash course.

What the session will accomplish, however, is to afford them a chance at least to meet one another and to form some fleeting sense of one another’s concerns and experiences.

All this can’t help but have an impact on electing a pope, whenever that moment may come.

I recall that in 2005, one cardinal who took part in the conclave had a thick briefing book on various reputed papabili, or candidates, which he studied on the flight to Rome, later explaining that he felt compelled to do so because he really didn’t know much about most of them. (In the end, that conclave ended up selecting Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whom pretty much everyone knew, but no one could be sure of that outcome going in.)

This unfamiliarity has been compounded under Pope Francis, which means that a great deal of what will have to happen the next time the cardinals gather for an election isn’t so much campaigning as introductions.

Perhaps the moral of this story can be summed up as follows.

When you look upon a cardinal, try to moderate your expectations. Yes, they hold the highest office in the church short of the papacy itself — but that doesn’t make them experts on everything, including, frankly, a lot of the stuff you’d really love to know.

Currents News Staff

After the August consistory, the number of cardinals rises to 227; 132 of them will be electors. In the 2013 conclave, there were 117 electors and two did not attend.

It’s not just a question of quantity, however. What has changed in the College of Cardinals in these last 9 years is the nationality of the cardinals.

For example, in 2013, Asia and Oceania had 11 cardinal electors. After the consistory, they had 24 and some came from areas where there have never been cardinals before, such as Tonga and Papua New Guinea.

“On the one hand, it responds to a need of this pontificate, which has always talked about emphasizing the peripheries and putting them on the front lines; on the other hand, it favors candidates who have a strong knowledge of the local areas but less of the universal Church,” said Fr. Roberto Regoli, a historian at Pontifical Gregorian University.

Europe does not change much in terms of numbers, going from 60 to 54. However, there is a drop in the number of Italian electors. In 2013, there were 28 and as of Saturday, the number will drop to 21. By the end of next year, another 7 will reach the elector age limit, and the figure will be reduced to only 14.

Of the 132 electors, approximately 36 work or worked in the curia, so their presence continues to carry a lot of weight.

Lastly—as of the August 27 consistory—almost 60% of the cardinal electors were chosen by Pope Francis.

Currents News Staff

They’re known as the “princes of the Church.”

Cardinals come from every corner of the world to help the pope guide the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, and most importantly, elect his successor.

Among the 20 cardinals most recently named by Pope Francis, only one comes from the United States, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego.

He says his nomination is a chance to bring the American Catholic community closer to the global Church.

“We in the United States tend to be very focused on the United States, we in our own diocese tend to be focused on our own diocese, and one of the contributions which in the role of Cardinals we can make is to point with some constancy to that idea that we are a part of a universal community of faith and part of a universal human family,” McElroy said.

A native of San Francisco, McElroy became bishop of San Diego in 2015, where he has attempted to apply the focus of Pope Francis’ pontificate on caring for migrants and the environment into his own community.

“We as a community of faith in San Diego have tried to sow some of the seeds of the renewal that he talks about, and has tried to move the Church toward the idea of missionary discipleship. The emphasis on pastoral theology has been exceedingly important in the life of the Church alongside of doctrine and biblical theology,” he added.

Pope Francis has said that he would consider stepping down from the papacy if he felt unable to govern the Church. In that case, Cardinal-designate McElroy will be one of the electors who select the next pope.

He says that whoever fills the Pope Francis’ shoes should aim to more fully implement his efforts to build a more inclusive Church attentive to the needs of the forgotten.

“I would hope the trajectories of the renewal Pope Francis has begun would be a high priority in seeking the next pope. I hope that would be many years down the road, but it’ll still be important to try to bring those currents more fully into the life of the Church at all levels,” he continued.

Bishop McElroy will become one of 16 Americans in the College of Cardinals, and at 68-years-old, he will be one of the 132 cardinals under 80 and therefore eligible to vote in a papal conclave.