Cardinals from the Peripheries

by Admin · January 14, 2015

ACTING EDITOR FR CHRIS CHATTERIS SJ

It must have been quite a surprise for Bishop Soane Patita Panini Mafi (just 53) from Tonga, a Pacific island nation of only 103 000 people, to receive a red hat. No doubt the new cardinals from New Zealand, Myanmar, Cape Verde, Ethiopia and Mozambique had similar reactions. Everyone has noticed that Pope Francis� new appointees include the poorer �peripheries� of the Church.

“These structures are not about pomp and power; nor should they reflect which local Church has the most money or the most buildings and institutions or even the largest numbers of people at Mass.” (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Although people tend to think of their own place as being at the centre of the world, one imagines the average Tongan or Cape Verdean realises that their small islands are far from the focus of world affairs and that it is the hefty countries on the world�s continents which are at the centres of gravity of global political, economic and cultural power and influence.

So not only has Pope Francis passed over or delayed the appointment of cardinals to populous and wealthy sees which, by tradition, have the privilege of having cardinals, but it seems he has deliberately chosen some places which most people will only find by consulting Google!

The tiny islands of Cape Verde. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The media have been intrigued. The Times Live headline ran, �Pope Appoints United Nations of Cardinals�. It is clear that the pope wants the College of Cardinals to reflect better the universality of the Church and to put the younger and growing areas of the Church more on the map. With a rather secular, commercial analysis, the International Business Times headline proclaimed: �Pope Francis� Cardinal Appointments Could Boost Catholic Church�s Gains in Africa�.

Bishop Mafi, 53, was one of 20 new cardinals named by Pope Francis. (CNS photoPaul Haring)

�Numerically, that�s where the Church�s centre of gravity is now,� added Mark Faulkner, a senior teaching fellow at the University of London�s School of Oriental and African Studies. And according to the Pew Research Center, �16% of the world�s Catholics now live in Africa, where the Catholic population grew almost 21% between 2005 and 2010, a rate unmatched by any other region of the world�.

But before we start slapping our collective continental backs and reimagining Africa as the new centre of the Church, it is worth reflecting on just how radical Francis is being here. After all, some of the places the new cardinals come from are not, and will never be, large centres of Catholic population. So he is saying that it�s important to acknowledge those parts of the Church that are simply small and insignificant. It�s a fundamental questioning of what we mean by �important� and �unimportant�, �centre� and �periphery� and the value we place on those words.

This should not be news to Christ�s followers. In the Kingdom it�s the humble who find themselves exalted and the last who turn out to be first. Our Lady�s Magnificat expresses this in a prayer of reversals of what human beings normally expect.

Mary�s son is not a king according to the values of his own or any other epoch. His cradle is a manger and his charger a donkey; his throne is the cross and his crown is of thorns. His whole life was lived on the �peripheries�. He grew up in a small village in an unimportant province of the Roman Empire. In his public life he attracted some very marginal people as his followers, many of whom we would today term �losers�. It was not an auspicious beginning for his Church.

But our reforming pope is reminding us of those humble, peripheral beginnings and that therefore the Church is semper reformanda, always in need of reform. She does this by always returning to the sources, the vision and values that the Master handed down to us and which we try to live out.

Hence it is important that even the highest bureaucratic structures of the Church should reflect that which the Lord proclaimed.

These structures are not about pomp and power; nor should they reflect which local Church has the most money or the most buildings and institutions or even the largest numbers of people at Mass.

Rather, they exist to serve and represent what Jean Vanier calls the �little people�, the ones who are forgotten or not even noticed, those like the all but invisible widow putting her savings into the Temple treasury.

It seems that just as the last shall find themselves first, so shall those at peripheries find themselves at the centre!