VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Agency
Vatican City, Jan 5, 2015 / 11:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In creating 20 new cardinals – 15 of whom will be cardinal electors – Pope Francis has continued to set his sights on the world’s peripheries, and at the same time he began designing the College of Cardinals in order to push forward his reforms.
Among the new cardinal electors, only Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, hails from the Roman curia; he had previously served, since 2006, as the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States.
Most of the new red birettas hail from the peripheries of the world, and follow the rationale of “the universality of the Church,” as Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, put it in a written note delivered Jan. 4.
With the Feb. 14-15 consistory at which the new cardinals are officially appointed, the weight of the curia will be diminished in the election of the next Bishop of Rome.
consistory, there will be 34 voting cardinals from the curia, among 125, a reduction of three percent.
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