Pope Francis has named 13 new priests and bishops to be appointed to the college of cardinals, nine of whom are eligible to vote in upcoming papal conclaves. (A conclave is the assembly that elects the new pope after the old pope dies or retires.)
When these nine officially become cardinal electors, there will be 128 cardinal electors; canon law states that there be no more than 120 voting cardinals, but Pope Francis has purported to raise the limit to 135. (Only cardinals under age 80 are eligible to vote at conclave, so some now eligible may have aged out of the voting pool before it becomes necessary to elect the next pope.)
Pope Francis has now appointed 57 percent of total electors, so he is putting his mark on the college of cardinals. And he has been appointing Leftists like himself to the college, increasing the likelihood that the next elected pope will share Francis’ liberal vision for the Church.
Among the new cardinals are prelates known for heterodox stances: Wilton D. Gregory of Washington, D.C.; the Maltese Mario Grech of the Vatican-based Secretary of the Synod of Bishops; Italian Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints; and Celestino Aós Braco of Santiago, Chile.
Archbishop Gregory, for example, delivered the keynote address at the 2017 annual meeting of one of the more liberal Catholic organizations in America, the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests. The group has published essays calling for priest-less parishes, female deacons, married clergy, and pro-homosexual initiatives. Gregory has a history of being pro-homosexual, and praised Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”) Pope Francis’ “apostolic exhortation” that urged priests to be more liberal in applying the church’s teaching on marriage and family (e.g., priests should no longer talk of people “living in sin”).
Bishop Grech of Malta co-authored pastoral guidelines on Amoris Laetitia, in which he purported to give access to communion to persons divorced and remarried in violation of church law. In 2017, Grech attacked a group of Maltese lay Catholics after they defended “real marriage against ‘unnatural’ homosexual ‘marriage’” in a full-page ad in a widely read paper. The bishop called the ad “propaganda.”
The Italian archbishop, Marcello Semeraro, invited adulterous couples to be godparents and to even teach religion in his guidelines for implementing Amoris Laetitia. Semeraro’s document, called “Rejoice with me,” states that “after a careful evaluation by the pastor,” those who are divorced and “remarried” may be deemed “ideal for the teaching of the Catholic religion” or “educators of the faith together with other catechists of Christian initiation.”
It is clear that Pope Francis is re-shaping the college of cardinals to make it more likely that the next pope will be a progressive/Leftist like himself.
Pope Francis has just announced a new group of Cardinals. Several of them are friendly with if not supportive of the LGBT agenda.