On the flight home from Azerbaijan earlier this month, Pope Francis summed up his approach to picking cardinals. “A little bit of everywhere,” he said, “as the Church is everywhere in the world.” The list of new cardinals that he revealed on Sunday did indeed give us “a little bit of everywhere”: the 17 cardinal designates come from 11 countries on five continents.
During the airborne press conference, the Pope explained that, through his choices, he wanted “to show the universality of the Church in the cardinals’ college, not just the, let’s say, European centre”. He has certainly achieved that goal: only five of the 17 are European (and one of them is currently Apostolic Nuncio to Syria). When the cardinals are installed on November 19, six countries will have their first cardinals: Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, Lesotho, Malaysia, Mauritius and Papua New Guinea.
