New cardinals quarantine in hotel ahead of ceremony
ROME — The Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel was built to sequester cardinals during papal elections.
Now, it’s sequestering soon-to-be cardinals in town for this weekend’s ceremony to get their red hats.
A few clerics are in protective coronavirus quarantine, confined to their rooms on Vatican orders and getting meals delivered to their doors.
The 10-day quarantines, with COVID-19 tests administered at the start and finish, are just one example of how today’s ceremony to elevate new cardinals is like nothing the Holy See ever has seen.
“They told me it would be like this but I didn’t think it would be so strict!” marveled Cardinal-designate Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel, the retired archbishop of Chiapas, Mexico.
During a Zoom call from his hotel room, Esquivel said he’d thought there might be some exceptions to the lockdown for new cardinals.
“No! Here, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cardinal or a pope. The virus doesn’t respect anyone,” he said.
Pope Francis will elevate 13 clerics to the College of Cardinals, the elite group of red-robed churchmen whose primary task is to elect a new pope.
It’s the seventh time Francis has named a new batch of cardinals since his election in 2013, and his imprint increasingly is shifting the balance of power away from Europe and toward the developing world.
The Vatican has said two new cardinals won’t make it to Rome for the ceremony, known as a consistory, because of COVID-19 and travel concerns: The Vatican’s ambassador to Brunei, Cardinal-designate Cornelius Sim, and the archbishop of Capiz, Philippines, Cardinal-designate Jose Advincula.
The Vatican is arranging for them, and any of the cardinals who might not make it, to participate in the ceremony remotely from their homes. They’ll get their three-pointed “biretta” hats from a Vatican ambassador or another envoy.
Usually, consistories are full of parties and crowds: Cardinals come to town with family, friends and sometimes benefactors and parishioners who get to see the new “princes of the church” up close and then attend receptions and dinners in their honor.
Under normal circumstances, the consistory would be followed by “courtesy visits,” where the new cardinals greet well-wishers and the general public from the grandeur of their own reception rooms in the Apostolic Palace or Vatican auditorium.
This year, there will be no courtesy visits, and each cardinal has a 10-person limit for guests.
History’s first Latin American pope long has sought to name cardinals from the “peripheries,” to show the universal nature of the church and boost small communities, where Catholics are a minority, with high-profile leaders.
As of today, there will be 128 voting-age cardinals, 42 percent from Europe.
The Pew Research Center notes that in 2013 Europeans made up 52 percent of the voting-age block, evidence of Francis’ effort to decrease the strength of Europeans as a voting bloc and give greater visibility to church leaders from Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Among the new voting age cardinals is the first African-American, Cardinaldesignate Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Washington, D.C
He, too, was in quarantine at the Santa Marta hotel.
Gregory said he was humbled by Francis’ decision to make him a cardinal and said he would return to a United States still in the throes of the pandemic with hope that vaccines against the virus soon will work.
“I hope we can use them effectively to protect people and … once this pandemic is brought under control, to face the future with hope,” he said.