The cardinals finished their pre-brewing meetings in the Vatican, trying to identify a new pontiff possible to follow Pope Francis deceased on April 21 at the age of 88.
The 133 cardinal voters of 70 countries seem fundamentally united to insist that the question which grasped them is not as long as the Catholic Church obtains its first Asian or African pontiff or if it is conservative or progressive.
Rather, they say that the main task is to find a pope who can be both a pastor and a teacher and someone who can unite the Church and preach peace.
“We need a superman!” said Cardinal William Seng Chye Goh, the 67 -year -old Archbishop of Singapore.
This is an important task given the scandals of sexual abuse and finances that have harmed the reputation of the Church and secularizing trends in many regions of the world that divert people from organized religion.
Add to that the terrible financial state of the Holy See and often the dysfunctional bureaucracy and the work of being pope in the 21st century seems intimidating.
Of the 133 cardinals who will vote, Pope Francis appointed 108 of them, but there is an element of uncertainty about the elections, because many of them did not know each other before last week.
This means that they did not have much time to establish who among them is best suited to direct the church of $ 1.4 billion.
The cardinals held their last day of meetings before the contractions on Tuesday, during which the Ring of Pope Francis and his official seal were destroyed in one of the last formal rites of the transition of his pontificate to the next.
The cardinals will start the process of choosing the new Pope when the conclave starts in the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday afternoon and the cardinals voted.
Assuming that no candidate attracts the majority of two -thirds necessary, or 89 votes, the cardinals will retire for the day and will return on Thursday.
They will have two ballots in the morning, then two in the afternoon, until a winner was found.
When they were asked what the priorities of cardinal voters were, Goh told journalists that the first issue was that the new Pope should be able to spread the Catholic faith and “make the church relevant today. How to reach young people, how to show a face of love, joy and hope.”
A Pope for the future
But beyond that, there are geopolitical concerns of the real world to take into consideration.
The Catholic Church grows in Africa and Asia, both in number of baptized faithful and vocations in the priesthood and religious orders of women.
ADVERTISEMENTHowever, it shrinks in the traditionally Catholic bastions of Europe, with empty churches and the faithful officially leaving the Church in places like Germany, many of which citing the scandals of abuse.
“Asia is ripe for evangelization and harvesting of vocations,” said the Reveand Robert Reyes, who studied the seminar with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Cardinal Philippin considered a competitor as the first Asian Pope.
But if the incoming pope must reflect the new face of the Catholic Church and inspire the faithful in certain parts of the world where the momentum of growth is already underway is one of the questions to which the cardinals will inevitably treat during the conclave.
Pope Francis was the first Latin American pontiff and the region still has the majority of world Catholics.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Indian cardinal Oswald Gracias, the retired archbishop of Mumbai, thinks that the Church must become more Asian, culturally and spiritually.
The “center of gravity of the world moves to Asia,” he said. “The Asian church has a lot to give to the world.”
At 80, Gracias is unable to participate in the conclave, but India has four cardinal voters and throughout Asia has 23, which makes it the second block of voting after Europe, which has 53.
One of the major geopolitical problems faced by Cardinals is China and the 12 million Catholics who live there.
ADVERTISEMENTBy virtue of Pope Francis, the Vatican signed a controversial agreement with Beijing in 2018 governing the appointment of bishops, which many conservatives have decided as a sale of underground Chinese Catholics who had remained faithful to Rome for decades of communist persecution.
The Vatican defended this agreement as the best possible offer, but it remains to be seen whether Pope Francis’s successor will honor politics.
Church in Africa
According to the Vatican statistics, Catholics represent 3.3% of the population in Asia, but these figures increase, in particular in terms of seminarians, as they are in Africa, where Catholics represent around 20% of the population.
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa and another cardinal who appears regularly on possible pope lists, said that he was in Rome to elect a pontiff for all the Catholics of the world.
ADVERTISEMENT“I am not here for the Congo, I am not here for Africa, I am here for the Universal Church. It is our concern, the Universal Church,” he told journalists.
“When we are finished, I will return to Kinshasa and I will come back to my archbishop of Kinshasa Hat and the fight continues.”
