Pope Francis to invest new cardinals
Fourteen clerics will be elevated
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Sunday revealed his latest picks to be cardinals in the Catholic Church, including his chief aide for helping the poor in Rome and prelates based in Iraq and Pakistan, where Christians are a vulnerable minority.
“I am happy to announce that on June 29, I will hold a consistory to make 14 new cardinals,” Francis said in surprise remarks to pilgrims and tourists gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the pope’s weekly greetings.
Eleven of the men chosen would be eligible to cast ballots in the secret conclave that would someday select Francis’ successor, assuming they don’t exceed the voting age limit of 80 by the time a new pope must be elected.
The latest group is the fifth batch group chosen by Francis to become cardinals since he was elected pontiff in 2013.
The latest “princes of the church” hail from countries that include Madagascar, Peru, Mexico and Japan, which has a tiny minority of Catholics.
Among the new cardinals is Louis Raphael I Sako, 69, the Baghdadbased patriarch of Babylonia of the Chaldeans since 2013.
Also Joseph Coutts, 72, archbishop of Karachi, Pakistan. Two top Vatican officials are also among the group.
Monsignor Luis Ladaria, 74, a Jesuit and a Spanish dogmatic theology professor, who heads the Holy See’s powerful office in charge of ensuring doctrinal orthodoxy.
And Italian Monsignor Giovanni Angelo Becciu, a top official in the Vatican’s influential secretariat of state office after a long career as a Holy See diplomat in Africa, the United States, New Zealand and Europe. In 2009, then-pontiff Benedict XVI, appointed him as his ambassador to Cuba.
Another Italian to be made cardinal is a Rome vicar general, Monsignor Angelo De Donatis. The pope, leader of the entire Roman Catholic church, also serves as Rome’s top bishop.
Francis also chose Monsignor Konrad Krajewski, a Pole who, on behalf of the pope, has personally distributed sleeping bags to Rome’s homeless and driven poor people to seaside day trips paid for by the Vatican.
Others tapped include: Monsignor Antonio dos Santos Marto, bishop of Portugal’s shrine town of Leiria-Fatima; Monsignor Pedro Barreto, a Jesuit and archbishop of Huancayo, Peru; Monsignor Desire Tsarahazana, archbishop of Toamasina, Madagascar; Monsignor Thomas Aquinas Manyo, bishop of Hiroshima before Francis made him archbishop of Osaka, Japan, in 2014; and Monsignor Giuseppe Petrocchi, archbishop of L’Aquila, an Italian mountain town struggling to recover from a 2009 earthquake that killed hundreds of people.
Three other future cardinals are too old to vote for the next pope, but chosen because “they have distinguished themselves for their service to the church.”
They are Emeritus Archbishop of Xalapa, Mexico Sergio Obeso Rivera; Spanish priest Aquilino Bocos Merino; and Monsignor Toribio Ticona Porco, a Bolivian prelate who worked as a miner to support his family before entering the seminary at age 30.