ROME.- “I promise and swear, from now and forever, until I live, faithful to Christ and the Gospel, constantly obedient to the Holy Apostolic Roman Church, to blessed Peter and to the person of the Supreme Pontiff Francis and his canonically elected successors , to always preserve, with words and deeds, communion with the Catholic Church (…)”.
With this solemn formula, pronounced in Latin, two people very close to Pope Francis, both from Cordoba – the brand new prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández, and the archbishop of Córdoba, the Jesuit Angel Sixto Rossi-, today they joined a college of cardinal electors -under eighty years of age- increasingly in line with Francis’ vision of the Church. Of 137 members, 99 were created by him. And they will have the enormous responsibility of elect his successor at the next conclave.
In it ninth consistory of his pontificate, they also solemnly swore and received the cardinal attributes – the purple cap, like the blood they must be willing to shed -, 19 other prelates from around the world, many of them young pastors, close to their generation and open to dialogue. Although he could not travel due to age, he was also created a cardinal. un tercer argentino, el nonagenario fray capuchino Luis Pascual Dri, who at 96 years old is still a confessor in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Pompeii, in Buenos Aires and whom Pope Francis wanted reward for “his service” to the Church.
Dri will not participate in the next conclave, like his compatriots Luis Hector Villalba, archbishop emeritus of Tucuman, 88, and archbishop emeritus of Paraná, Estanislao Karlic, 97 years old. The other Argentine cardinal electors are Leonardo Sandri, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, who will turn 80 in November and the cardinal Mario Poliarchbishop emeritus of Buenos Aires, 75 years old.
Among those present in the consistory there was also Argentine representation: there was the ambassador to the Holy See, Maria Fernanda Silvaand the Secretary of Worship traveled from Buenos Aires, Guillermo Oliveri.
In a solemn ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, on a day of radiant sunshine and in front of 12,000 people, in his homily Pope Francis asked the cardinals “to resemble a symphony orchestra, which represents the symphony and synodality of the Church.” “I also say ‘synodality’ not only because we are on the eve of the first Assembly of the Synod that has precisely this topic, but because it seems to me that the metaphor of the orchestra can illuminate well the synodal character of the Church,” he added, explain that in a symphony “it is essential mutual listening”.
“Every musician must listen to others. If one only listens to himself, however sublime his sound may be, he will not benefit the symphony; and the same would happen if one section of the orchestra did not listen to the others, but instead sounded as if it were alone, as if it were the whole,” he warned. “And the conductor of the orchestra is at the service of this kind of miracle that each performance of a symphony represents. He must listen more than everyone else and at the same time his task is to help each one and the entire orchestra to develop to the maximum their creative fidelity, fidelity to the work being performed, but creative, capable of giving a soul to that work. score, to make it sound in the here and now in a unique way,” he stressed.
