Pope Elevates More Bishops to Cardinal Rank

Honoring Roman Catholic communities that survived Soviet persecution, Pope John Paul II said Sunday that he has named two archbishops from Ukraine and one from Latvia to the rank of cardinal, in an unexpected enlargement of the body that helps him govern the church.

The pope also elevated four other archbishops to the College of Cardinals, including two from Germany, one from Bolivia and its first black South African member.

John Paul’s announcement reinforced the view held by many of an aging, ailing pontiff seizing what may be his last chance to pack more like-minded conservatives and personal favorites into the college, which will one day elect his successor.

The move was a surprise because the pope had expanded the college by 37 members just a week earlier, pushing the number of voting cardinals to a record 128--eight over the prescribed limit. With the addition of Sunday’s appointments, 44 men will be installed as cardinals here Feb. 21.

Despite his infirmities, which include symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the Vatican has announced plans for the 80-year-old pontiff to make pilgrimages to Syria this spring and Ukraine in June.

Sunday’s round of promotions, read by the Polish-born pope from the window of his study overlooking St. Peter’s Square, was packaged to highlight the loyalty of Catholics from Eastern Europe whose countries came under Soviet rule following World War II.

But by buttressing the Vatican’s standing there, the pope could worsen its troubled relations with Ukraine’s main Eastern Orthodox Church, which accuses Roman Catholics of trying to convert Orthodox believers to Roman Catholicism and opposes the papal visit. The Roman Catholic Church was outlawed in Ukraine from 1946 to 1990 and has been struggling since to recover property seized by the state for the Orthodox Church.

One of the new cardinals is Lubomyr Husar, 67, who fled Ukraine in 1944, entered the priesthood in Connecticut and served in Rome before returning to his country as a bishop in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union’s collapse. On Thursday, his fellow bishops elected him the new leader of the 5 million Ukrainian Catholics whose worship service follows the Greek rite liturgy.

John Paul said that two other cardinals whose identities he revealed Sunday were actually chosen three years ago in pectore--Latin for “in the breast.” They are Janis Pujats, 70, archbishop of Riga, Latvia, and Marian Jaworski, 74, a longtime friend who is archbishop of the 1 million Ukrainian Catholics, many of Polish origin, who follow the same Latin rite practiced in the West.

Popes sometimes keep such politically sensitive appointments secret for years. John Paul gave no reason for having done so in these two cases, but the Vatican has treaded carefully in the former Soviet Union as it has tried to broker a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, divided since the Great Schism of 1054.

Vatican watchers said the pope’s desire to honor those men and raise his church’s profile in the former Soviet republics--he named a cardinal from Lithuania a week ago--now outweighs his hope for an immediate breakthrough in talks with Orthodox leaders.

“The Orthodox don’t seem that eager for a dialogue with the Vatican, so he probably figured, ‘Why not?’ ” said Father Thomas J. Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America.

Last week, the largest Orthodox church in Ukraine, which is subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, urged the pope to delay his visit and warned that if he had any meetings with leaders of two rival Orthodox churches, which the Moscow church considers heretical, it would break off contacts with the Vatican.

“He should stay home and take care of his health,” Archbishop Victrice, leader of an Eastern Orthodox branch in Switzerland, said in a telephone interview Sunday. He called the new appointments “a publicity stunt” by the Vatican to gain converts in Eastern Europe.

John Paul has named all but 10 of the 135 cardinals who are under age 80 and thus eligible to vote in conclave when the time comes to elect a new pope. Most share his strict moral theology, but one of those named Sunday, Karl Lehman, head of the German Bishops Conference, has riled the Vatican by supporting church-sponsored abortion counseling in Germany and questioning the church’s ban on Communion for divorced Catholics.

The pope balanced Lehman’s appointment with that of a more conservative German archbishop, Johannes Joachim Degenhardt.

The two other prelates promoted were Julio Terrazas Sandoval, archbishop of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Wilfrid Fox Napier, archbishop of Durban, South Africa.