Pope Francis installs 20 new Cardinals, changes makeup of body that will elect his successor

Pope Francis’ selection of Cardinals marks shift toward Asia

Pope Francis has installed 20 new Cardinals, continuing his practice of fundamentally changing the makeup of the College of Cardinals that will elect his successor.

The Catholic Church will be heavily influenced by Asia in the future as many more cardinals from Asia doubled with the latest installation.

Malaysia, South Sudan, Israel: with the promotion of 21 clergymen on Saturday, Pope Francis is expanding the number of countries represented in the College of Cardinals. In the future, the body that elects the pope — meaning all cardinals who are not yet 80 years old — will comprise men from 71 nations, more countries than ever before.

Since his first consistory, which is what a pope’s appointment of new cardinals is called in church jargon, Pope Francis has remained true to his course: making the group of cardinals who will someday choose his successor more international. Many more countries are now represented in the Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals with only one member each. This broadens the perspectives represented, as well as the various theological schools of thought.

This is the ninth time Pope Francis has appointed cardinals since he became the head of the Catholic Church a decade ago. He has now chosen over two-thirds of the cardinals eligible to elect his successor as Pope.

The Pope has shelved the concept of almost automatically making the leaders of important archdioceses, and those steeped in tradition, cardinals. Thus, the archbishops of Paris, Venice, Milan and Berlin have missed out for years. In earlier decades, the archbishop of Milan could always count on the promotion from his superior in Rome. Instead, Pope Francis always chooses priests who do not conform to the cliché.

This makes it harder to predict how a future papal conclave will behave when it comes time to elect a new pope. The cardinals are now much less familiar with each other than they were previously.

In the future, 23 of those eligible for the papal conclave will come from Asia — during the conclaves of 2005 and 2013, there were only 10. That means Asia is the third-placed region, behind Europe and North America, which in comparison to their proportion of Catholic believers is overrepresented. Latin America remains underrepresented — about 42% of Catholics worldwide come from this region, but only 18% of the papal conclave cardinals live there — as does sub-Saharan Africa.


The Pope’s whole way of thinking about synodality is influenced by Asia, Munsterman thinks. He is seeking a harmonious church.” Asia has made strides toward dismantling clericalism, while the Catholic Church in Africa, which is also growing, is still strongly shaped by clerical thinking. Asia, where Catholicism is a minority religion, is for Francis “truly the future of the church because in Asia harmony is sought after. Pope Francis completed a visit to Mongolia in September, where he said the Church had no political agenda, but he also called on Chinese Catholics to be “good citizens.”