Last week was all about consistories. When will the next one be? Who would turn 80 when, and what will it all mean for the Church heading out of 2019 and into 2020? It was easy to get caught up in those questions – which were the right ones to ask – and forget to consider another significant curial birthday: the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Luis Ladaria SJ’s 75th, which came and went this past April.
Ladaria never wanted the top job at the CDF. Truth be told, he never wanted any job at the CDF. He didn’t want the secretary’s desk, which Benedict asked him to take in 2008. He didn’t want the prefect’s chair, into which he came after Francis decided not to renew the mandate of his predecessor, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, in 2017. Müller was fairly vocal about his frustration with the way his dicastery – traditionally the “doctrinal watchdog” of the Church and the first to take a red pen to drafts of papal documents – was being sidelined in the Francis era.
