Crux

To be perfectly frank, I am only writing this because our Editor-in-Chief assigned the piece to me. He was uneasy – morally, I mean – because he couldn’t see his way to any conclusion that made this a story, but it is a thing that happened and people were talking about it, so he gave it to me. I’m talking about the election of Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle as Dean of the College of Cardinals on Friday. Don’t get me wrong: The story is news. Only, it’s news of the sort as would have been handled in a 150-word blurb on page 3 of a newspaper when I was growing up (with a photo, maybe, on a slow news day). The Chief – Charles Collins, my best friend in the world, for the record – wants news analysis, though, so here I am to tell you why this isn’t much of a story. For one thing, the Dean of the College of Cardinals is a title that sounds more important than it is. The Dean organizes meetings and otherwise “coordinates the activities” of the College of Cardinals, but he has no real power. His office serves essentially as a sort of concierge for cardinals who do not live in the city but frequently come on business. During a papal interregnum, the Dean officially informs the diplomatic corps of the papal see’s vacancy, and he serves as coordinator of the general congregations – the official meetings of the cardinals in preparation for the the conclave to elect the new pope (and to keep the lights on until the election of a new head man) – but that is mostly admin. Also, most of the real prep work happens outside official settings. If the Dean is under the age of 80 and therefore eligible to vote in the conclave, he presides over it. That’s not nothing, but it is also entirely administrative, as the conclave procedures are prescribed down to the most minute detail. In any case, the 69 year-old Tagle has been elected to the post for a five-year term, once renewable, and the 71-year-old Pope Leo XIV has been in office less than two years. Cardinals are always thinking about the next conclave and the next man – it is literally their job, after all – but they just elected a fellow they expect to be in the office for a while, and it’s a safe bet at least a few of them don’t have their “go-bags” quite ready yet. Until a few years ago, the Dean was a papal appointee who served for life, but that changed under Francis, who made the office an elected one and limited its term. Tagle is the first Asian to hold the office, and that’s not nothing, but it is news mostly insofar as it means there has now been a Dean from every habitable continent. (Before you do a double-take, remember that the Vatican considers “the Americas” to be one continent and Oceania is basically “East-East Asia”.) Tagle’s star rose during the early years of the Francis pontificate – the energetic young prelate from the Philippines was dubbed the “Asian Francis” in the media – and punters had him as papabile before the 2025 conclave that elected Robert Prevost Pope Leo XIV. A few observers have suggested his election is a sign of special papal favor, but Leo didn’t pick him. Leo only confirmed the pick, which the cardinal bishops (there are a dozen of them) made on Thursday. Catholics in the United States got to know Tagle a little very recently, since he was the papal legate to the beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in St. Louis, where the cardinal delivered a stirring homily. Some observers found Tagle’s homily to be a master class in ecclesiastical criticism directed at the controversial Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, whose cozy relationship with the Trump administration has been the subject of no little controversy. “To preach your own wisdom, rather than that of Jesus, is falsifying the Word of God, according to St. Paul,” Tagle said in his Sept. 25 homily for the Sheen beatification Mass, “and it is not mission, it is not blessedness.” “To be self-sufficient and self-affirming – ‘congratulations to myself’ – that is a bad sign,” Tagle also said. “It is not a miraculous sign,” he said, “’it is not mission, it is not blessedness.” Tagle certainly wasn’t wrong about that. The cardinal’s presence for the occasion, however, had more to do with his institutional profile than the pope’s personal affinity for him. Tagle is Pro-Prefect for the Section for First Evangelization and New Particular Churches of the Dicastery for Evangelization. That’s a mouthful of a title that means Tagle is in charge of the Vatican office that deals with emerging Churches in mission territories, and Bl. Fulton Sheen was a missionary evangelizer who served 16 years as US national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. Leo XIV is an institutionalist, whatever else he is, and while the old maxim – “personnel is policy” – certainly holds, Leo expects the men in the job to do it because they’re in the job. Just so we’re absolutely crystal clear on the point: Absolutely none of this is to say that Tagle isn’t capable or to suggest Leo doesn’t like him or trust him, but only to say that the pope’s fondness for the “Asian Francis” and trust of him is beside the point. The cardinals – the whole body, not just the cardinal bishops – do consider the personal qualities of the members of the college when they are electing a pope, but the qualities they look for change with the circumstances of the Church and the world, and those are likely to appear very different when the time comes. If the 2025 conclave reminds us anything, however, it is that a media profile does not make a pope of a papabile. On that point, it is worth remembering that the late, great John L. Allen Jr. of Crux Now was among the very few Vatican watchers in the English-speaking world to have Robert Prevost on his short list (though, in fairness, I should mention that Allen profiled Tagle, too). It also bears mention that Charles Collins – Allen’s successor – caused something of a stir during one of his many TV appearances in the run-up to the 2025 conclave, when a presenter for Australian television mentioned Tagle as a front-runner. Collins, using an old expression from his native Texas, said Tagle as a candidate was, “All hat, and no cattle.” Tagle has a new hat. Whether he wears it five years or ten remains to be seen, but chances are he still won’t have any cattle.

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