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The number of English cardinals eligible to vote in a conclave has been reduced to two. On 22 August, Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe turned 80, meaning he is no longer eligible to vote in an upcoming conclave.
He had been one of three eligible English cardinals, alongside Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Cardinal Arthur Roche. On 8 November, Cardinal Nichols will also turn 80, reducing the English cardinal electors to just one. Cardinal Arthur Roche, who turned 75 in March, has just under five more eligible years to vote. Cardinal Michael Louis Fitzgerald, aged 88 and created a cardinal in 2019, had never been eligible to vote.
Cardinal Radcliffe, a Dominican, entered the order in 1965 after studying at Oxford. He was ordained priest in 1971, later serving as Prior Provincial of the English Province before being elected Master of the Order of Preachers from 1992 to 2001, the first Englishman to hold that post. After stepping down, he returned to Oxford, teaching, preaching and writing widely translated books such as What Is the Point of Being a Christian?, which won the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2007. Pope Francis appointed him consultor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in 2015 and invited him to lead spiritual retreats ahead of synods in 2023 and 2024.
On 7 December 2024 he was created Cardinal Deacon of Santi Nomi di Gesù e Maria in Via Lata and granted dispensation from episcopal ordination and from wearing red, remaining in his Dominican habit. He is one of only two English cardinals since Cardinal Newman to have been granted dispensation from episcopal ordination, the other being Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, abbot of Downside in the 1880s and a friend of Newman’s.
Cardinal Radcliffe is associated with the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, emphasising a preference for less structured worship, and has been particularly vocal on church authority and synodality. In a retreat talk to participants of the 2023 Synod of Bishops, Radcliffe said there “need be no competition, as if the laity can only have more authority if the bishops have less” and that authority is “multiple and mutually enhancing”.
There have been five English cardinals in the 21st century, twice as many as in the 17th and 18th centuries combined. Pope Francis has often chosen to appoint cardinals from the peripheries, creating cardinals from Haiti, Cape Verde and Mongolia, while not raising to the cardinalate the archbishops of Seville, Milan, Venice and Paris.
