Cardinal points: selection of new prelates doesn't reflect the broader church

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In naming 23 new cardinals Oct. 24, Pope Benedict XVI chose to acknowledge one bit of demographic reality, but largely ignored a much bigger one.

Americans have noted, and rightly so, that the nomination of Archbishop Daniel DiNardo in Houston accurately reflects a shift in Catholic population in the United States away from the East Coast, toward the South and Southwest. From a global point of view, however, the new crop of cardinals is remarkably unrepresentative of where Catholics are today.

To understand that, it's essential to recall that Catholicism experienced a demographic revolution in the 20th century. In 1900, there were 266 million Catholics in the world, 200 million of whom lived in Europe and North America. Just a century later, there were 1.1 billion Catholics, only 380 million of whom were in Europe and North America, with 720 million in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The global South accounted for 25 percent of the Catholic population a century ago; today it's 67 percent and climbing.

You wouldn't know that, however, from looking at Benedict's appointments. Focusing just on the 18 new cardinal-electors, meaning those under 80 with the right to vote for the next pope, 10 are Europeans and two are from the United States. (Three of the five over-80 cardinals named by Benedict are likewise Europeans. Had Bishop Ignacy Ludwik Jez of Poland lived to receive the honor, it would have been four of six.) After these new cardinals join the church's most exclusive club in a Nov. 24 consistory, 60 of 121 electors will be European. Adding the cardinals from the United States and Canada, the total for the global North rises to 76 electors out of 121, meaning 63 percent.

To put this into a sound bite, two-thirds of the cardinals come from the global North, while two-thirds of the Catholic people live in the South.

Such disparities do not go unnoticed. The pope's announcement was made at roughly 11:30 a.m. Rome time, and within a half-hour I had an e-mail from La Tercera, a newspaper in Santiago, Chile, asking for a reaction to the following question: "Two-thirds of the nominees are from Western Europe or the United States. Why?"

Why indeed? At least three reasons suggest themselves.

First, for all the efforts of the Vatican to deny that Benedict XVI is "Eurocentric," it's clear that the pope's core personal concern is with the fate of Christianity in the ultra-secularized milieu of Western Europe, which he has termed a "dictatorship of relativism." If one believes, as Benedict obviously does, that when Europe sneezes the rest of the world catches cold, then it makes sense to allocate limited appointments here.

Second, historically speaking, there's never been any pretense that the College of Cardinals should reflect the broader church. Originally, cardinals were the most important local clergy in Rome, responsible for running large Roman parishes, administering charitable programs, and advising the pope. It was only in the 12th century that popes even began to appoint cardinals who lived outside Rome. The first cardinals born in either Latin America or Africa to actually serve there were not named until the 20th century, and serious efforts to internationalize the College of Cardinals did not begin until the era of Pope Paul VI in the 1960s.

Third, Benedict is a man of tradition, which means he feels bound to honor the custom that a whole litany of positions in the Vatican must be held by cardinals. Of the 18 new cardinal-electors Benedict named Oct. 24, the first seven were Vatican officials. Given that Europeans, especially Italians, are always overrepresented in such positions, they're also overrepresented among the cardinals.

These factors may make the preponderance of Europeans and North Americans more comprehensible, but ultimately they don't address the question of whether it's healthy for the church that its senior leaders are so unrepresentative of its actual membership.

That question has both an internal and an external dimension. Internally, it's fair to ask whether the college can develop a realistic grasp of the global Catholic situation when it's top-heavy with cardinals from a single part of the world, and one that accounts for a diminishing share of the population. For example, when the college met in April 2006, it spent a good bit of time debating the old Latin Mass. One wonders if that would have been the priority chosen by cardinals outside Europe and the United States, in places where the post-Vatican II split between liberals and conservatives--of which debates over the old Mass are often a symbol--never really happened.

Externally, the current profile of the College of Cardinals cannot help but create an impression of a glass ceiling for Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. No matter how opaque Catholicism can seem to outsiders, few people fail to grasp the difference between a cardinal and everybody else. Given that the future of Catholicism in many ways lies in the global South and that the church across much of the South faces stiff challenges from religious competitors, sheer self-interest, if nothing else, is likely to create momentum to make the college better resemble the Catholic map.