THE ITALIAN influence in the Vatican’s College of Cardinals, the body that elects the pope, may well be strengthened today when Pope Benedict XVI is expected to name up to 20 new cardinals.
Vatican commentators suggest that almost half of those appointed may be Italian while no new Irish cardinal is expected to be named.
For months now, it has been speculated that the pope intends to convene a Consistory of Cardinals for the weekend of November 20th-21st.
Commentators suggest that the pope may well announce the consistory this morning at the end of his weekly public audience, in the process also naming the new cardinals. A number of Italian commentators suggest that as many as nine of the new men named today will be Italian, with seven of them already holding Curia posts and the other two being the current Archbishops of Palermo and Florence.
As for the other countries expected to feature today, they may include new cardinals for Germany, Poland, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the USA and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Under canon law, of course, only cardinals under the age of 80 are entitled to vote in a papal conclave. Currently, there are 102 such “elector” cardinals, 18 short of the recommended figure of 120 electors. For that reason, Pope Benedict may well name up to 20 new elector cardinals today.
Of the current 102 electors, 17 are Italians as compared to 11 USA cardinals, five French, five Spanish and five German as well as eight Africans and nine Asians. In other words, the Italian elector cardinals represent approximately 17 per cent of the vote that would elect the next pontiff of the universal church.
If predictions are correct about the next consistory, that share of the vote is destined to rise to 21 per cent.
In other words, the men who, in one way or another, are the expression of 24 million practising Catholics get to have 21 per cent of the vote for a 1.16 billion strong Catholic family, arguably 10 times out of proportion. Twenty-one per cent of 1.16 billion represents approximately 235 million Catholics, almost 10 times the estimated number of practising Italian Catholics. As for Ireland, there is no mystery as to why an Irish nomination is unlikely, given that Ireland already has one elector cardinal in the person of Cardinal Seán Brady.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who has often been tipped as a future cardinal, may miss out on this occasion, partly because Dublin already has a Cardinal Emeritus in the person of Cardinal Desmond Connell.