VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider
With the creation of the six new cardinals, Benedict XVI “purifies” the Church hierarchy and gives us a preview of his successor’s characteristics: non-European and a pastor of persecuted communities
GIACOMO GALEAZZI
Vatican City
The Filippino cardinal was in tears as a group of Nigerian nuns prayed with their hands raised towards the sky and Indian pilgrims kneeled down around the obelisk gripping their rosaries. Emotions and fragments of a special and unprecedented day. For the first time in history, a batch of cardinals that come from countries outside Europe. St. Peter’s Square, packed as it was with faithful from emerging countries, was the prophesy of a global Church of the third millennium. With today’s mini Consistory, Benedict XVI pointed towards an exit from the Vatileaks scandal, he “purified” the ecclesiastical hierarchies corrupted by scandal and outlined the characteristics of his successor: non-European and a pastor of persecuted communities.
The Pope essentially renewed the Church’s hierarchy and changed the face of his “senate”. “What makes the Church catholic is the fact that Christ in his saving mission embraces all humanity” and Christian Messianism proposes “a mission directed to the whole man and to every man, transcending all ethnic, national and religious particularities” the Pope explained in the homily pronounced during the Consistory for the creation of six new cardinals, his main collaborators in the Church government. “It is by following Jesus, – Benedict XVI remarked – by allowing oneself to be drawn into His humanity and hence into communion with God, that one enters this new kingdom proclaimed and anticipated by the Church, a kingdom that conquers fragmentation and dispersal.”
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