By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — Becoming a cardinal is an insistent call to put Jesus at the center of one’s life, to love the poor as he did and to strengthen the bonds of unity within the Catholic Church, Pope Francis said as he created 21 new cardinals from 17 nations.
“To walk in the path of Jesus means, in the end, to be builders of communion and unity,” the pope told the new cardinals during an afternoon consistory Dec. 7 in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Cardinal Angelo Acerbi, a 99-year-old former Vatican diplomat, was the first to receive his red hat from Pope Francis. Cardinal Domenico Battaglia of Naples, whom the pope added to the list of new cardinals in November — a month after announcing the others — was the last.
The creation of cardinals took place within a prayer service, which included reading the Gospel of St. Mark’s account of the Apostles James and John asking Jesus to “grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.”
In one reflection of the church’s diversity and universality, four of the new cardinals were not wearing a red cassock with a white surplice, topped by a red cape. Instead, the two cardinals from Eastern Catholic churches — Cardinals Mykola Bychok, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic, and George Jacob Koovakad, a Syro-Malabar Catholic — wore vestments from their church traditions. And the two Dominicans — Cardinals Timothy Radcliffe, a theologian, and Jean-Paul Vesco, archbishop of Algiers — wore their white habits.
Pope Francis gave each of the new cardinals from the Latin-rite church a red zucchetto, a red biretta and a ring. Cardinals Bychok and Koovakad received special headdresses.
Echoing the practice centuries ago when the clergy of Rome elected the pope, the bishop of Rome, each of the new cardinals was assigned a title or “titular” church in the city, making them members of the diocese’s clergy.
Pope Francis asked the cardinals to wear the cardinals’ red as a reminder of their call to “be fearless witnesses to Christ and his Gospel in the city of Rome and in faraway regions.”
With the consistory, the College of Cardinals reached 253 members, 140 of whom were under the age of 80 and eligible to enter a conclave to elect a new pope.
