New Cardinals Reflect a Growing Diversity

Pope John Paul II elevated 44 Roman Catholic prelates from five continents to cardinal rank Wednesday, to the delight of a multinational crowd that turned a solemn, ancient ritual into a joyous celebration of the church’s global reach.

With the pageantry of ages, the new “princes of the church” climbed the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica under a blue sky, took a Latin oath of loyalty and knelt one by one before the 80-year-old pontiff to receive his blessing. In a homily, John Paul admonished them to be “strenuous defenders of the truth” and “sure guides” of the faithful.

The promotions swelled the College of Cardinals to a record 184 members and stamped John Paul’s doctrinal conservatism more firmly on the body that helps him run the church and will one day pick his successor. Since his own election in 1978, John Paul has named all but 10 of the 135 cardinals who are now younger than 80 and thus eligible to vote for the next pope.

But it was the 40,000 spectators in St. Peter’s Square who stole the show. The diversity of the throng made it the most festive and jubilant to watch a consistory--as such promotion ceremonies are called--in the memory of Romans who have attended them since the 1950s.

The square, in effect, was divided into cheering sections for each of the new cardinals, who brought delegations from 27 countries. Head cheerleaders included the president of Honduras and the prime minister of Ireland. With 74 television crews feeding a global audience, some spectators waved national flags when a favorite son knelt before the pope; others broke the traditional solemnity by chanting the name of their country, like soccer fans at the World Cup.

Cheers rose from large delegations of U.S. Catholics for their three new cardinals--Archbishops Edward Egan of New York and Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington and Father Avery Dulles, a theologian at New York’s Fordham University.

When Bernard Agre’s name was announced, 300 compatriots from Ivory Coast serenaded the second cardinal in their country’s history. “Your name is written in heaven,” they sang in French.

Equally raucous was a group of 50 parishioners from La Legua, a shantytown on the edge of Santiago, Chile. They sang to guitar music and did the cueca, a traditional folk dance.

“We come from a noisy country,” Santiago Archbishop Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa explained later, beaming before well-wishers at an overflow reception for him and other new cardinals in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.

Popes began “internationalizing” the Italian-dominated College of Cardinals in the 1960s, but the Polish-born John Paul has taken the process to new lengths, reflecting the church’s rapid growth in developing nations.

Wednesday’s promotions made Europeans a minority among the college’s voting members for the first time and created the first native-born cardinals from Honduras, Bolivia, Ecuador, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as the first black South African cardinal.

Noting the growing diversity of its leadership, John Paul asked in his homily: “Is there not perhaps in this fact a sign of the ability of the church, already in every corner of the planet, to understand the peoples with different traditions and languages?”

George Agayby, a Coptic Catholic from Cairo, agreed.

“This is a turning point in the church’s history,” said the 50-year-old Egypt Air engineer, who came to watch the Coptic Catholic patriarch, Stephanos II Ghattas, become a cardinal. “We are a church that has become truly global.”

Ghattas and two other Eastern Rite Catholic patriarchs underscored the church’s diversity by clinging to their distinctive headgear, shunning the scarlet silk skullcap and crown-like biretta traditionally accepted by new cardinals along with the papal blessing.

Despite the festive mood of the crowd, new cardinals said they left St. Peter’s awe-struck and sobered by this important moment of their careers.

McCarrick said he was thinking: “Is this the man--me--that the Lord wants for this?” And Roberto Tucci, a 79-year-old Italian, said he tried not to think of his late mother “because I was afraid I might cry.”

“The event is pretty startling,” New York’s Egan said.

Italy’s Giovanni Battista Re, in a poignant speech on behalf of the new class, said they felt “a deep sense of trepidation in the face of growing responsibilities” to help the ailing John Paul hold together his 1-billion-member flock. Turning to the gold-robed pontiff, Re said he hopes God “wants to keep you still longer at the helm of the church.”

In turn, John Paul reminded the new cardinals that the scarlet color of their hats and robes signifies willingness to shed blood in defense of the faith.

That challenge was underscored by the presence of Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, a new cardinal who spent 13 years in Communist prisons in his native Vietnam. “I think of myself as a small part” of modern Catholic martyrdom, he said afterward.

Previously named cardinals attended Wednesday’s ceremony, making it the largest gathering of cardinals ever--and perhaps the last of John Paul’s lifetime. Part of the buzz at the receptions afterward was which cardinals are papabili, likely candidates to succeed the first non-Italian pontiff since 1523.

“Maybe there has been an Italian vocation for the papacy over the centuries,” Karl Lehman, a new German cardinal, remarked at one reception. “But we live in a world with much wider horizons now, and we have to look everywhere for the best man.”

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Multinational Slate

The 44 new cardinals are from 27 countries and five continents. A breakdown:

Europe: 23

Latin America: 11

North America: 3

Africa: 3

Asia: 4

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Source: Associated Press