The Dialog

By Francis X Rocca

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — Since its release Dec. 1, Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter on the “service of charity” has provoked widespread speculation on how it might affect Catholic charitable agencies in their fundraising, hiring and selection of projects.

The letter directs bishops to strengthen agencies’ religious identity and ensure that their activities conform to church teaching, in order to prevent a Catholic charity from becoming “just another form of social service.”

According to the cardinal who leads the church’s largest confederation of relief, development and social service agencies, the apostolic letter is also an important message to him and his brother bishops.

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (CNS/Paul Haring)

By legally requiring bishops to oversee charitable works in their dioceses, the document “implicates the role of the bishop in social action,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, president of Caritas Internationalis.

“Many, many times we have heard (bishops) saying, ‘Oh, no, my task is evangelization,’” the cardinal said. “In some places they thought (charity) was only the work of laypeople.”

In truth, the cardinal said, such service is incumbent on “every single baptized person. No one is permitted to delegate to others what is a duty of faith. And the duty of faith is to put your faith in practice through charity.”

“Evangelization is incomplete without human promotion,” the cardinal said, citing Pope Paul VI’s 1975 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi.” And he noted that the October 2012 Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization affirmed that the “diakonia (service) of faith passes through the diakonia of charity.”

The obligation to perform works of charity cuts across class divides, Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga said, reciting the adage that “nobody is so poor that he has nothing to share, and nobody is so rich that he had nothing to receive.”

Caritas Internationalis, an umbrella group of 164 agencies, including Catholic Relief Services in the U.S., observes this principle in its own fundraising, the cardinal said, noting that affiliates in poor countries are contributors as well as beneficiaries. Following the Haitian earthquake of 2011, he said, some of the nearly $500 million raised for relief and rebuilding there came from the cardinal’s own country of Honduras.

Caritas and other Catholic agencies rely above all on the donations of “simple people,” he said, and take relatively little from governments or other large institutions. For instance, he said, although Catholic charities care for 27 percent of patients with AIDS or HIV around the world, they have received only 2 percent of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The cardinal said this financing model will facilitate compliance with one oft-noted rule in the new apostolic letter, which forbids Catholic charities to “receive financial support from groups or institutions that pursue ends contrary to the church’s teaching,” or to “accept contributions for initiatives whose ends, or the means used to pursue them, are not in conformity with the church’s teaching.”

Such measures to preserve the distinctive religious identity of Catholic agencies are essential to their integrity and vitality, he said.

“We are not acting as another NGO [non-governmental organization],” he said. “We are motivated by faith. We are doing what we do because we are believers.”

Yet the cardinal stressed that the main purpose of the apostolic letter, as of papal documents in general, is not remedial but inspirational.

“Of course when there are mistakes it is necessary to correct them, but the first approach is always to encourage and support the good that is being done,” he said.

In a similar spirit, Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga downplayed news reports explaining the Vatican’s increased control over Caritas Internationalis, under rules issued in May 2012, as an effort to defend the confederation’s Catholic identity. He called the organization’s new statues, which were the result of a five-year process, a “step forward.”

“We are not used to looking for dangers or negative aspects,” he said. “We know that the Holy Spirit is guiding the church and guiding history, and we try to answer.”

By Mark Pattison

Catholic News Service

Dave Brubeck, the influential and prolific pianist whose composition “Take Five” became a standard in the annals of jazz, died Dec. 5 at age 91, one day before his 92nd birthday.

He died of heart failure. He was reportedly on his way to visit a cardiologist in Norwalk, Conn., with his son Darius when he suffered a heart attack.

Brubeck played his “cool” brand of West Coast jazz before Blessed John Paul II and eight presidents.

Jazz musician and composer Dave Brubeck is pictured in a 1996 photo. The Catholic musician died of heart failure Dec. 5 in Norwalk, Conn., after being stricken while on his way to a cardiology appointment. He would have turned 92 the following day. ( CNS photo/Bob Roller)

He became a Catholic in 1980 after completing a commission from Our Sunday Visitor, a Mass titled “To Hope.” Brubeck said in a PBS biographical profile, “I didn’t convert to Catholicism, because I wasn’t anything to convert from. I just joined the Catholic Church.”

He received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame and the Christophers’ Life Achievement Award, both in 2006, and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He got an honorary degree in sacred theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 2004. Brubeck also received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009 for his contributions to American culture and the arts.

Over a half-century, Brubeck and his band gave concerts in foreign lands during goodwill tours. He was honored by the State Department in 2008 for his efforts.

He formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and kept the combo going, with different musicians, through 1967. It was during this period that he co-founded Fantasy Records, had his first huge hit with “Take Five” (credited to his saxophonist, Paul Desmond), and toured regularly despite recording up to four albums a year.

“When the quartet was on the road in the early days, we were being played so much that we just used to go on the car radio and turn the dial,” Brubeck told Catholic News Service in a 1996 interview. “One night we heard three of our songs being played on three different stations at the same time. That’s how much we were being played.”

Later versions of the group after it re-formed included his four sons and even his grandsons.

Brubeck originally turned down the commission for “To Hope” since he wasn’t a Catholic then, but Ed Murray, then the editor of Our Sunday Visitor, “just wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Brubeck said.

“When I’d say I didn’t know anything about the Mass, he’d say, ‘Exactly what I want, it’s a fresh view. Somebody who will come in and just look at this with fresh eyes.’” Brubeck said. He eventually told Murray, “I’ll do it if you have some very knowledgeable Catholic people. I’ll write three parts of the Mass and if they like it, then I’ll continue.” After they listened to what he had written, the word came: “Tell Dave to continue and don’t change a note.”

As for “On This Rock,” which he composed for the 1987 visit of Blessed John Paul to San Francisco, he was also reluctant, Brubeck told CNS. “I wouldn’t accept that. They called me late in the evening and they needed an answer right away, the next day,” he recalled.

“So I said no, and then I asked for the text. And the text was ‘Upon this rock I will build my church and the jaws of hell cannot prevail against it.’ So I’m thinking, ‘Now they want nine minutes on this one sentence. How am I going to do that?’

“I went to bed and in the middle of the night I thought the only way to do this is how Bach would have done it, with a chorale and fugue. We can use the words over and over. I was dreaming the subject of the fugue,” Brubeck continued.

“When I woke up I said, ‘Jeez, I’ve got it. This is the way I can do it, is with a chorale and fugue.’ I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”

Among Brubeck’s favorite jazzmen were Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and a fellow pianist-bandleader, Art Tatum. Brubeck was chagrined when, in 1954, he became only the second jazz musician after Armstrong to grace the cover of Time magazine, believing such an honor more rightly belonged to someone like Ellington.

In addition to dozens of albums of jazz compositions, he wrote several oratorios, including “Bending Towards the Light … A Jazz Nativity,” a live recording of the annual Christmas jazz pageant performed at Lincoln Center in New York.”

Brubeck, a native of Concord, Calif., and a veteran of World War II, was active at his craft until his death. His last album release was a live recording, “The Last Time Out,” in 2011.

Besides his four sons, he is survived by his wife, Iola, herself a lyricist; a daughter, Catherine; and 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Another son died a few years ago.

By Cindy Wooden

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — Advent’s liturgical preparation for Christmas calls Christians to renew their faith in the reality of God’s great love and to make a commitment to bringing his love to the world today, Pope Benedict XVI said.

Advent, he said, “places before us the bright mystery of the coming of God’s son, the great plan of God’s goodness through which he desires to draw us to himself to let us live in full communion, joy and peace with him.”

Addressing an estimated 4,000 people at his weekly general audience Dec. 5, Pope Benedict also asked for prayers for peace in Congo, where continuing ethnic violence and civil strife have led to dozens of deaths and has forced thousands of people to flee their homes.

A man dressed as St. Nicholas attends Pope Benedict XVI’s general audience in Paul VI hall at the Vatican Dec. 5. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

In response to the fighting and “the serious humanitarian crisis” it was causing, the pope called for “dialogue and reconciliation,” and he asked the international community to take action to meet the needs of the Congolese people.

In his main audience talk, Pope Benedict continued his reflections on the Year of Faith, which he opened in October.

Accepting God’s love and freely choosing to follow his ways “brings a fundamental change in how we relate to the entire created reality. Everything appears in a new light; it is a true conversion. Faith is a change of mentality because God, who has made himself known in Christ and has made his plan of salvation known, draws us to himself,” the pope said.

“Faith is accepting God’s vision of reality, allowing God to guide us with his word and sacraments in understanding what we must do, the path we must follow, how we must live,” he said.

“In the midst of many difficulties, Advent invites us once again to renew our certainty that God is present, he entered into the world, becoming human like us, in order to bring to fullness his plan of love,” the pope said.

In return, he said, “God asks that we, too, become signs of his action in the world. Through our faith, our hope and our charity, he wants to enter into the world once again and make his light shine in our darkness.”

Among the pilgrims at the audience were representatives of an association of Italian bakers and pastry chefs; the pope thanked them for their gifts of “panettoni,” Italian Christmas cakes, which he said would be distributed to the poor.

By Dennis Sadowski

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON — The destruction from Typhoon Bopha in portions of Mindanao in the southern Philippines is worse than feared as rescue workers continued to discover bodies under knee-deep mud, said a Catholic Relief Services official coordinating the agency’s storm response.

“It looks like a tsunami hit. It’s just complete and total destruction. Whole hillsides were washed away in flash floods,” Joe Curry, CRS country representative, told Catholic News Service Dec. 6.

“The staff there have been through a half dozen typhoons and floods in the Philippines, and they say this is probably the worst,” Curry added. “I’ve heard the same from other seasoned people from other donor organizations.”

Residents wash their clothes Dec. 6 in a stream near their houses that were destroyed by Typhoon Bopha Dec. 4 in Montevista, Philippines. Catholic Relief Services and Caritas Philippines planned to begin distributing basic necessities to 1,250 families as soon as possible. (CNS photo/Erik De Castro, Reuters)

Typhoon Bopha made landfall on the east coast of Mindanao north of Davao Dec. 4, lashing the island with 120-mph winds and torrential rains, before sweeping inland. Witnesses reported that the rain turned normally placid rivers and streams into raging torrents that inundated the fertile Compostela Valley. The accompanying winds destroyed banana plantations in the fertile valley.

Curry said that a CRS team reached New Bataan, a city of about 80,000 in the Compostela Valley, Dec. 6 and found much of the community under mud and without electricity. He said local officials reported that at least 240 people had died in the city alone while hundreds more were swept away in flash floods.

The government confirmed Dec. 6 that 370 people were dead throughout Mindanao.

“The town had a lake on the top of a hill, and the rain caused the lake to come down like a waterfall and wash everything out,” Curry said.

Other teams of CRS workers continued to assess damage and the needs of storm survivors.

CRS had planned to begin distributing hygiene kits, sleeping mats, blankets, cooking utensils and water Dec. 6, but Curry said that it would likely be Dec. 10 or 11 before supplies could reach the affected areas because of blocked roads and washed-out bridges.

“The government is doing more search and rescue right now. They’re looking at saving lives and digging out people from the mud. The scale of this is huge. These are areas that are not accustomed to storms,” Curry said.

CRS also planned to distribute tarps and other shelter materials for people who have been forced to live in the open since the storm dissipated because the evacuation centers were filled to capacity.

“People are trying to salvage materials to put a roof over their heads,” Curry said.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said the typhoon affected 231,630 people in 513 villages in 25 provinces, reported the Asian church news agency UCA News. Of these, more than 179,000 people sought shelter in 417 evacuation centers, the council reported.

The government continued to call for donations for victims.

“Filipino solidarity is at its most potent amidst testing times. We call on our countrymen to give generously for the relief and well-being of our brethren in the Visayas and Mindanao,” a statement from the presidential palace said.

By Cindy Wooden

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — At the end of a three-day meeting in Lebanon, the Catholic patriarchs and bishops of the Middle East said peace in the region will be impossible without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 77 Catholic leaders said the greatest contribution to peace in the region would be to finally find a “just and peaceful solution to the Palestinian question,” which they said is at the root of all the tensions in the region.

Israeli soldiers talk to relatives of a dead Palestinian man at a roadblock near the West Bank city of Nablus Dec. 3. Middle East bishops and patriarchs say the resolution of Israeli-Palestinian conflict is key to peace throughout region. (CNS photo/Abed Omar Qusini, Reuters)

The bishops and patriarchs met Dec. 3-5 in Harissa, Lebanon. According to Fides, the Vatican’s missionary news agency, at the end of the meeting, they issued a pastoral statement on implementing Pope Benedict XVI’s September document on the church in the Middle East as well as their appeal for peace in Syria and throughout the region.

Fides said the appeal makes three main points, beginning with the urgency of finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a response to the desire of the Palestinian people to have an independent country.

The second point, Fides reported, was to ask everyone in the region to work to end local conflicts and violence by putting into place projects for reconciliation and peace that “guarantee freedom for all and the safeguarding of human dignity.”

“The appeal refers explicitly to the situation of martyred Syria,” Fides said.

The third point focused on the situation of Christians in Syria and throughout the Middle East.

The bishops and patriarchs say Christian leaders must intensify their relationships and their cooperation on projects designed to help Christians stay in the region, Fides said. They also asked their Muslim neighbors to help safeguard the full rights of the region’s Christians, recognizing them as fellow citizens.

By TheDialog

Catholic News Service

NEW ORLEANS — Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer — a philosopher, accountant, former university president and leadership consultant — always has had a fascination with the intersection of faith and reason.

He’s smart enough to have debated physicist Stephen Hawking, an avowed atheist, on national television over the scientific underpinnings of the beginning of the universe and the theological arguments for the existence of God.

In this image from the Hubble Space Telescope, a bluish nebula of glowing hydrogen expands out into the remains of a molecular cloud that collapsed to form massive stars. “There is something else, and that something else has to transcend the universe and be powerful enough to literally create it,” says Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer. (CNS photo/NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

In a recent address in New Orleans, Father Spitzer said the exciting news for the new evangelization being called for by Pope Benedict XVI is the recent discoveries in “space-time geometry,” prompting eminent physicists to assert the cosmos had to have a beginning and thus had to have a creator.

On the occasion of Hawking’s 70th birthday in January, physicist Alexander Vilenkin, director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University, read a paper asserting just that. Science journalist Lisa Grossman, writing in New Scientist, pithily described Vilenkin’s presentation as “the worst birthday present ever.”

If the rate of expansion of the universe is greater than zero, something virtually all physicists agree on, “at the end of the day we will reach an absolute beginning point prior to which the universe and multiverse (a combination of universes) were nothing,” said Father Spitzer, founder and president of the Spitzer Center for Ethical Leadership in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“Physical reality itself was nothing, and the one thing we know about nothing is that it’s nothing,” he said, eliciting laughter from his audience at the annual dinner of the Catholic Foundation of the Archdiocese of New Orleans Nov. 8.

“The second thing we know about nothing is that nothing can only do nothing, and if the only thing nothing can do is nothing, then the whole of physical reality, configured as universe or multiverse, was nothing. It could never have moved itself to something by itself, because the only thing that it could do when it was nothing is nothing.”

The scientific evidence points only toward a created universe, he said.

“There is something else, and that something else has to transcend the universe and be powerful enough to literally create it,” he continued.

“Then, as you begin to investigate the cosmological constants, the initial conditions of the universe and multiverse, and when you look at the fine-tuning paradoxes that virtually every physicist, including Stephen Hawking, has admitted, then that creator is not just transcendent and powerful but really, really smart.”

Why this is important, Father Spitzer said, is that it gives Catholics another reason to evangelize a culture that is mired in materialism and “its loss of the sense of eternal dignity.”

Father Spitzer said when he teaches college students, someone usually poses the question about the existence of God and whether we really know “that Jesus walked and talked upon this earth.”

“And then the rest of the classroom goes, ‘Yeah, do we really know?’” said Father Spitzer, who retired in 2009 as president of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.

“The answer is, ‘Yes, I think we do know,’” he said. “What’s my point? This contemporary approach is given to us almost as a gift from God. Alexander Vilenkin says in the final part of his essay that a good argument will convince a reasonable man and that a proof will convince even an unreasonable one. Well, now that the proof is in place, cosmologists cannot even hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. They must confront the reality.”

All this allows us to answer “our kids’ questions” about the evidence for God. Father Spitzer said even recent studies about near-death experiences point to God.

Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, wrote about his experiences after being in a coma for seven days with his cortex completely shut down.

“He was clinically dead and he was monitored the whole time and he actually had these experiences,” Father Spitzer said. “He could show definitively there was no physical activity that produced it. There are really good studies taking place in multiple hospitals that give evidence that human beings survive bodily death, that we have a soul that literally leaves the body.”

This is riveting evidence that God exists and is moving in the world, and Father Spitzer said, “it’s a chance for re-evangelization.”

“But then it comes right back to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the resurrection into glory, into unconditional love,” he said.

“We do have to make it contemporary. But as we point and point again, our eternal destiny becomes clearer and clearer even in the midst of the darkness of secularism. It falls upon us, as church, to move once again to begin the process of re-evangelization, of healing the culture and of reminding everyone that they are transcendent. You are not simply molecules and atoms.”

Father Spitzer, who also is founder and chairman of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith in Irvine, Calif., said the early church transformed the Roman Empire by preaching the Resurrection, the intrinsic and eternal dignity of every human being, love as the greatest commandment and the redemptive view of suffering.

“We are grounded in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is with us,” Father Spitzer said. “Human beings are transcendent and destined for eternal destiny and dignity. We must evangelize it.”

By Carol Glatz

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — In a special appeal against HIV and AIDS, Pope Benedict XVI called for special attention to those unable to afford life-saving drugs, especially pregnant and nursing women affected by the disease.

The pope, speaking before World AIDS Day Dec. 1, said his thoughts and prayers were with “the great number of children who contract the virus every year from their own mothers, despite the fact there are therapies for preventing it.”

A nurse uses a syringe to give liquid medicine to a young HIV patient at San Jose Hospice in Sacatepequez, Guatemala, in 2011. Pope Benedict XVI, speaking before World AIDS Day Dec. 1, said his thoughts and prayers were with “the great number of children who contract the virus every year from their own mothers, despite the fact there are therapies for preventing it.” (CNS photo/Jorge Dan Lopez, Reuters)

AIDS has caused “millions of deaths and tragic human suffering, most markedly in poorer regions of the world, which have great difficulty in getting access to effective drugs,” he said Nov. 28.

The pope encouraged the many initiatives the church supports aimed at “eradicating this scourge.”

The Vatican has estimated Catholic agencies provide about 25 percent of all HIV treatment and care throughout the world. The World Health Organization has estimated that perhaps as much as 70 percent of all health care in Africa is provided by faith-based organizations.

By Carol Glatz

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — Traditionalist and progressive camps that see the Second Vatican Council as breaking with the truth both espouse a “heretical interpretation” of the council and its aims, said the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Pope Benedict XVI has said the interpretation of the council’s reforms as “renewal in continuity” is the “only possible interpretation according to the principles of Catholic theology,” Archbishop Gerhard Muller said in remarks published Nov. 29.

“Outside this sole orthodox interpretation unfortunately exists a heretical interpretation … of rupture, (found) both on the progressive front and on the traditionalist” side, the archbishop said.

What the two camps have in common, he said, is their rejection of the council: “the progressives in their wanting to leave it behind, as if it were a season to abandon in order to get to another church, and the traditionalists in their not wanting to get there,” seeing the council as a Catholic “winter.”

Pope John XXIII leads the opening session of the Second Vatican Council in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Oct. 11, 1962. (CNS)

A “council presided over by the successor of Peter as head of the visible church” is the “highest expression” of the Magisterium, he said, to be regarded as part of “an indissoluble whole,” along with Scripture and 2,000 years of tradition.

The doctrinal chief’s remarks were published in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to present the seventh volume of “The Complete Works of Joseph Ratzinger.” The volume collects both published and unpublished notes, speeches, interviews and texts written or given by the future pope in the period shortly before, during and just after Vatican II.

Archbishop Muller specified that by “continuity” Pope Benedict meant a “permanent correspondence with the origin, not an adaption of whatever has been, which also can lead the wrong way.”

The term “aggiornamento” or updating, one of the watchwords of the council, “does not mean the secularization of the faith, which would lead to its dissolution,” but a “making present” of the message of Jesus Christ, he said.

This “making present” is the “reform necessary for every era in constant fidelity to the whole Christ,” he said.

“The tradition of apostolic origin continues in the church with help from the Holy Spirit,” he said, and leads to greater understanding through contemplation and study, intelligence garnered from a deeper experience of the spiritual, and preaching by those who through the “apostolic succession have received an assured charism of truth.”

By Catholic News Service

ISTANBUL — Many Syrian families fleeing war in their homeland and stranded in Turkey are desperate to provide a sense of normalcy for their children despite the chaos and upheaval of war, said the head of an emergency mission of the U.S. bishops’ Catholic Relief Services.

“Both fathers and mothers’ biggest concern (is) that their children are scared and have seen terrible things … and need something to do,” Jennifer Poidatz, head of the agency’s Syria emergency response team, told Catholic News Service. Poidatz was in Turkey to launch a million-dollar project focused in part on providing hundreds of Syrian refugee children with urgently needed social outlets.

Read more »

By Francis X Rocca

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY — Recalling that Christ’s mission transcends “all ethnic, national and religious particularities,” Pope Benedict XVI created six new cardinals from four different continents, representing the Latin rite of the Catholic Church as well as two Eastern Catholic Churches.

The churchmen who joined the College of Cardinals Nov. 24 were U.S. Archbishop James M. Harvey, 63, former prefect of the papal household; Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai, 72; Indian Archbishop Baselio Cleemis Thottunkal, 53, head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church; Nigerian Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan , 68, of Abuja; Colombian Archbishop Ruben Salazar Gomez, 70, of Bogota; and Philippine Archbishop Luis Tagle, 55, of Manila.

New Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, poses with pilgrims from his country during a reception for six new cardinals in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican Nov. 24. Cardinal Onaiyekan was among six new cardinals created by Pope Benedict XVI during a consistory. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

“I want to highlight in particular the fact that the church is the church of all peoples, so she speaks in the various cultures of the different continents,” the pope said during the hour-long service in St. Peter’s Basilica. “Amid the polyphony of the various voices, she raises a single harmonious song to the living God.”

The six new cardinals later stepped up to the pope, who was seated before the basilica’s main altar, to receive symbols of their office: a ring, the “zucchetto” skull cap and the three-cornered hat called a biretta. The headwear was colored scarlet, like the cardinals’ robes, to symbolize the blood they risk shedding in service to the church.

The new Eastern Catholic cardinals received modified versions of the biretta, consistent with the distinctive clerical garb of their churches. Cardinal Rai received the turban-like Maronite tabieh, and Cardinal Cleemis a head covering in a shape reminiscent of an onion dome.

Pope Benedict also assigned each of the new cardinals a “titular church” in Rome, making them full members of the Rome clergy and closer collaborators of the pope in governing the universal church.

Cardinal Harvey’s titular church is the Church of Saint Pius V a Villa Carpegna, a post-war church about a mile southwest of Vatican City. The pope has also named Cardinal Harvey to serve as archpriest of the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, one of Rome’s four major papal basilicas.

The Nov. 24 ceremony was a much quieter affair than the last consistory in February, when Pope Benedict created 22 cardinals, including three from the United States and Canada. This time, there was no overflow crowd in St. Peter’s Square, and only 99 of the 211 members of the College of Cardinals were in attendance.

Yet the congregation was spirited, with pilgrims applauding enthusiastically as the new cardinals’ names were called. Cardinal Tagle seemed especially moved as he knelt before the pope, and afterwards was seen wiping a tear from his eye.

At the end of the ceremony, the College of Cardinals had 211 members, 120 of whom were under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote in a conclave to elect a new pope.

The new consistory raises the percentage of Asian electors from 7 percent to 9 percent. Catholics in Asia account for just over 10 percent of the worldwide Catholic population.

At the same time, the percentage of European electors dropped slightly, to just over 51 percent. But the continent remains statistically overrepresented, since the Vatican reports that fewer than 24 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Europe.