Pope Francis’s down under snub in new cardinal spree

Pope Francis at the Vatican. Picture: AFP

Six months after the death of Cardinal George Pell, the Pope has snubbed Australia with his appointment of 21 new cardinals to be created on September 30.

Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher is better qualified, academically and in terms of pastoral experience, in what Francis calls “the smell of the sheep’’ test than most on the list released on Sunday. He is in good company: the Pope also snubbed Venice, which produced three popes in the 20th century, France, long known as “the eldest daughter of the church’’, and Los Angeles, the largest archdiocese in the US with more than five million Catholics.

Francis did include the Bishop of Penang, which has about 65,000 Catholics.

The Bishop of Hong Kong, Stephen Chow Sau-yan, a Jesuit who strongly supports the Vatican’s secret agreement with China made the list. So did Archbishop Victor Fernandez, author of Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing, the infamous long form poem (“How was God so cruel as to give you that mouth … There is no one who resists me, bitch, hide it”) he wrote when he was a young priest in Argentina.

Archbishop Fernandez is now trying to expunge the poem from his CV after being promoted to head the church’s doctrinal watchdog, the position held by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger for 24 under Pope John Paul II.

In an interview with La Civilta Cattolica in May this year, Bishop Chow said “the Chinese government also has much respect for Pope Francis. They particularly appreciate his open-mindedness and inclusiveness. His love for humanity as a whole is seen to coincide with the values espoused by President Xi Jinping with his focus on the ‘Community of Common Destiny’ of humankind.”

Bishop Chow, who had visited Beijing before the interview, said from what he had seen and read and encountered with the attitudes of Catholics he had met on the trip, “I would say a large ­majority of Catholics in China are loyal to Pope Francis, and they hope the provisional agreement will bring desirable changes for their church, including a meeting between the Pope and President Xi”.

The list of new cardinals included bishops from Juba in South Sudan, Cape Town in South Africa, Tabora in Tanzania and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the most senior Catholic in the Holy Land, Italian Pierbattista Pizzaballa, whose archdiocese encompasses Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Cyprus.

One of the most powerful appointees is the Chicago-born head of the Dicastery for appointing Bishops, Robert Prevost.

Another is the Holy See’s apostolic nuncio, or ambassador to the US, Frenchman Christophe Pierre, whose promotion will strengthen his hand in implementing Francis’s green-Left and modernist back-to-the-1960s agenda in the church in the US.

Others on the list are bishops and archbishops from Corsica, Lisbon, Madrid, Lodz (Poland), Bogota and Cordoba (Argentina). Eighteen of the new cardinals are under 80 and therefore eligible to vote in any upcoming conclave.

After the consistory, the number of cardinal electors will be 137, but that can change rapidly as some turn 80.

The consistory will be Francis’s ninth since his election in 2013.

A month beforehand, he is scheduled to visit Mongolia, where the church of 1300 Catholics is led by the church’s youngest cardinal, Italian-born Giorgio Marengo, 49, whom Francis promoted to the college last year.