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Pope Francis appointed on Saturday 13 new cardinals of which ten may be electors in a future conclave. Among the new cardinals are the Spaniards Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and Cristobal López Romero, archbishop of Rabat. With these new appointments, Francisco creates a cardinal school in his image and likeness : he bets on the peripheries and marginalizes the so-called "princes of the Church" in favor of those who dedicate their lives to the discarded. From now on, in addition, most of the cardinals who will be able to elect the future Pope will have been appointed by Francisco.

Currently the College of Cardinals is made up of 225 cardinals, 97 of whom are over 80 years old and therefore could not vote in a future conclave. With this new session, the sixth in the pontificate of Francisco, Spain becomes the third most represented country behind the United States and Italy. And although it is not a competition between nations, as highlighted in a meeting with the Spanish press Monsignor Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot (Seville, 1952), but a "recognition of the work done" and the pontiff's interest in "promoting dialogue with other religions, " the truth is that the new appointments leave a more heterogeneous Cardinal College than ever, with cardinals from parts of the world barely represented and with a profile similar to that of the Pontiff .

Cuba is represented again after the death of Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, archbishop of Havana for more than two decades, with the appointment of Monsignor Juan de la Caridad García. Francisco has also appointed Cardinal to the Guatemalan archbishop Álvaro Ramazzini , defender of indigenous rights in Guatemala, Lithuanian Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevicius, archbishop emeritus of Kaunas, who spent 10 years in a concentration camp in the Soviet Union, and the African, Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, archbishop of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As usual, the pontiff has also recognized the work of members of the Curia granting the ring and cardinal biretta to the Portuguese José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, librarian of the Vatican and author of some of Francisco's speeches, and the secretary of the Migrants and Refugees section of the Dicastery for the Integral Human Development Service, the Canadian Jesuit of Czech origin Michael Czerny. The only Italian is Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna, one of the most critical voices against Matteo Salvini and the immigration policy of the previous Italian government.

The two new Spanish cardinals have been missionaries and have put into practice the words of the Pontiff, who defends "a Church on the way out" and some priests "with the smell of sheep . " Miguel Ángel Ayuso, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and one of the architects of the historic declaration of Abu Dabhi, worked in Egypt and Sudan, while Cristobal López Romero (Almería, 1952) developed his work in Bolivia and Paraguay and from 2017 is archbishop of Rabat, in Morocco, a country of Muslim majority that Francisco visited this year.

The archbishop of Rabat interpreted the appointments as the will of Pope Francis to " give visibility to some Churches that were practically invisible ." "Every Christian has to be a small bridge between Muslims and Christians, Europe and Africa, between Spain and Morocco, between poor and rich or between blacks and whites," said López Romero, who confessed to believing he was being joked when he was They said the Pontiff had announced his name from the balcony of the Apostolic Palace.

During the homily held in St. Peter's Basilica, the Pope asked the new cardinals for loyalty to his ministry and never to lose the ability to receive and feel compassion for others. "Many unfair behaviors of men of the Church depend on the lack of this sense of the compassion received , and on the custom of looking elsewhere, the custom of indifference," the Pontiff warned.

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