Pope Francis Seals Succession by Picking New Pro-LGBT, Marxist Cardinal-Electors
Pontiff exceeds set limit in packing College of Cardinals with ideological clones
Pope Francis has nominated a contingent of new cardinal-electors who align with his agenda on LGBT rights, synodality, climate change, migrant issues, and social justice to pave the way for a successor who will uphold his legacy.
In an unexpected move, the pontiff announced his appointees to the College of Cardinals during the Sunday Angelus at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, causing disappointment among faithful Catholics expecting a change of guard with a new eventual pope.
Stacking the Deck?
Exceeding the limit of 120 electors on the College of Cardinals set by Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, Francis announced 20 new cardinals who will be eligible to vote in the next conclave, including a 99-year-old archbishop who has passed the age of voting.
However, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI surpassed the limit during their papacies, with John Paul II going as high as 135 in 2001.
The 87-year-old pontiff, who suffers from major health issues, already had 122 cardinal-electors as of September 28. The new additions will bring the number in the electoral college to 142.
By December 2024, when the cardinal-designates will officially receive the red hat at a consistory, two of the cardinals will have reached their 80th birthdays and so will be ineligible to vote for a new pope. Nonetheless, Francis still will have created 111 (nearly 80%) of the 140 electors.
Red Hats for Pink Priests
The most radical pro-LGBT cardinal-designate in the new cohort is the Dominican friar Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, who has been the retreat preacher to the Synod on Synodality (a pivotal project initiated by Francis to decentralize the Church) both in 2023 and 2024.
Radcliffe, who served as head of his Dominican order from 1992 to 2001, has publicly dissented from the Church’s teaching on homosexuality for over two decades.
In a 2005 article, “Can Gays Be Priests?” published in the liberal British Catholic journal The Tablet, Radcliffe challenged a papal document instructing seminaries to bar candidates with deep-seated homosexual tendencies.
“I have no doubt that God does call homosexuals to the priesthood, and they are among the most dedicated and impressive priests I have met,” Radcliffe countered. “And we may presume that God will continue to call both homosexuals and heterosexuals to the priesthood because the Church needs the gifts of both.”
In 2006, Radcliffe called on Catholics to “stand with” gay people by “letting our images be stretched,” which means, “watching Brokeback Mountain, reading gay novels, living with our gay friends, and listening with them as they listen to the Lord.”
In the Church of England’s House of Bishops Working Group on Human Sexuality report (2013), Radcliffe suggested same-sex relationships could be regarded as “eucharistic,” noting: “Certainly it can be generous, vulnerable, tender, mutual, and nonviolent. So in many ways, I think it can be expressive of Christ’s self-gift.”
Global Gay-Friendly Prelates
Francis has also appointed the pro-LGBT archbishop of Tokyo, Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, who contributed to a volume of essays titled LGBT and Christianity in 2023. The book is edited by Aika Taira, a homosexual Protestant pastor. Under Kikuchi, the Tokyo archdiocese has begun promoting the LGBT Catholic Japan group, including its monthly Masses.
The Filipino bishop Pablo Virgilio David, who described the failed Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression Equality Bill as a “Christian imperative,” has also been handpicked by Francis for the College of Cardinals.
David stressed that the Filipino bishops had long supported protections and recognition of LGBTQ+ people in the predominantly Catholic nation. In 2021, David published a letter defending Pope Francis’s support of civil unions for same-gender couples, saying the pope is “not out to destroy our morals and orthodoxy.”
While Francis Leo, archbishop of Toronto, is regarded as one of the most orthodox of Francis’s new picks for the conclave, Catholics expressed concern that the prelate had failed to ban Catholic schools in the archdiocese from celebrating Pride Month.
Campaign Life Coalition’s Jack Fonseca said that Leo had been “totally silent about the Toronto Catholic District School board’s celebration of homosexual lifestyles, transgenderism, and the Gay Pride Parade,” and had “not done anything to protect the tens of thousands of impressionable Catholic children who are being spiritually corrupted by this errant board.”
Another new cardinal-elector is Archbishop Roberto Repole of Turin, Italy, who in 2022 granted a priest permission to celebrate confirmation for a person who had undergone a gender transition by creatively reinterpreting a 2003 directive from the Italian Episcopal Conference that disallows changing baptismal records for transgender people.
Archbishop Jaime Spengler of Porto Alegre, Brazil, Archbishop Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera of Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco of Algiers, Algeria, who have all publicly supported Francis’s declaration Fiducia supplicans — which permits priests to informally bless same-sex couples — also have been elevated as cardinal-designates.
Interfaith Evangelists
Vesco has also embraced Francis’s progressive views on relations with Muslims. When Francis appointed him archbishop of Algiers in February 2022, Vesco urged Catholics to “free ourselves from the idea that we must evangelize.”
“Francis shows that evangelization is made by fraternity and not by conversion. It is revolutionary!” the prelate noted, appealing to his flock to “accept that perhaps there is also in Islam a part of the truth that escapes us.”
The pontiff’s appointments from Asia have expressed commitment to interfaith dialogue rather than evangelism. The archbishop of Tehran, Dominique Mathieu, has been appointed cardinal even though his entire diocese has only 2,000 Catholics.
But despite Shia Muslims in Iran converting to Christianity by the thousands, Mathieu’s five parishes remain untouched by the phenomenon, fearing the laws that prohibit the use of Farsi in Catholic churches and forbidding converts access to Catholic churches.
Similarly, Archbishop Kikuchi of Tokyo is passionate about interfaith dialogue in a country with just 400,000 Catholics. Filipino bishop Pablo Virgilio David and Indonesian cardinal-designate Fr. Pascalis Bruno Syukur also regularly participate in interfaith dialogues with Muslims.
Political Picks
Francis’s choices of the Melbourne-based 44-year-old Ukrainian bishop Mykola Bychok, who labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a “modern Herod”; Archbishop Fernando Garib of Santiago, Chile, who identifies as a “Palestinian descendant;” and Fr. George Koovakad from the strife-ridden Syro-Malabar Church and who manages the pope’s travel are being viewed as politically strategic appointments.
The pontiff has also named cardinal-electors who are campaigners for social justice, as is evident from his appointment of the Archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, who proudly identifies as a disciple of Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the “father of Liberation Theology” — a Marxist discipline that Pope Benedict XI condemned.
Gutiérrez had been effectively driven out of the diocese by the previous archbishop, Juan Luis Cipriani. Like Francis, Mattasoglio has waged war on “clericalism,” even asking the Vatican for permission for laypeople to be appointed as pastors or heads of churches.
In keeping with his pro-migration agenda, the pontiff has also appointed Fr. Fabio Baggio, the Vatican Under Secretary for the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development, as cardinal-designate.
Only one of Francis’s new appointees, Archbishop Ignace Bessi Dogbo from the Ivory Coast, has openly challenged homosexuality. In a 2023 sermon to fellow-bishops, Dogbo said, “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations need to be healed, not presented as a canon of behavior to be embodied.”
Conclave Rigging?
The pontiff’s supporters have dismissed accusations of “conclave rigging,” claiming that Francis’s appointments are being viewed as eccentric because he has not followed his predecessors in naming prelates from eminent archdioceses to the College of Cardinals.
“The idea that the pope is capable of influencing his successor is not real,” said Alberto Melloni, a church historian at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia. “It is not even his agenda.
“The message is: ‘I have abolished the right of any diocese to have a cardinal as archbishop.’”
Francis’s acolytes argue that his vision is geographical rather than ideological and the appointment of cardinals reflects his embrace of the peripheries of the globe.
“It’s more about geography than about theology,” remarked Massimo Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia. “It’s generally about giving voice to those who are in the peripheries … more than a particular vision of the Church.”
The office of cardinal is an innovation of the medieval church. In 1139 at the Lateran Council, Pope Innocent II decreed that the cardinals alone had the right to elect the pope, independent of other clergy. The title “cardinal” came into use after Pope Leo IX (1049–54) called them cardines — the hinges upon which the door of the universal Church swings.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.