Is Pope Leo XIV the first “pope of the periphery”? During his pontificate Francis created 163 cardinals from 76 countries; 25 of those nations had never been represented before in the College of Cardinals.
They were church leaders elevated by Francis in keeping with his self-imposed mandate of “going to the periphery,” reaching out to the margins of the church where he hoped to find new energy and different perspectives to help guide a universal church of more than 1.4 billion Catholics. Over the last 12 years that has meant creating cardinals from what had been considered the church’s demographic and geographic edges.
The late pope’s attention to geographic detail led to what was described as the most diverse conclave in the history of the church. He drew in the church’s periphery in two ways: choosing not to offer the red hat in dioceses in the United States, Europe and within the curia where such an honor was considered more or less pro forma; and seeking out less attended districts of the global church where a local voice had seldom, if ever, been heard from.
Of course, defining where the margins are and the meaning of periphery in the church betrays certain Western centricities and prejudices. Cardinal Luis Tagle had been brought to Rome by Francis from the Philippines, a nation that may be far from the Vatican but is the home of the third largest Catholic population in the world after Brazil and Mexico. Can it truly be considered part of a periphery?
Other appointments and elevations seem more clearly an expression of Francis’ determination to draw the margins closer to the center, where their influence and spiritual and practical wisdom might be better felt. His intent was to ensure that issues of equity, economics and ecology, most acutely felt in the so-called Global South, would get a fair hearing in Rome. Previously, Western cardinals’ travails with affluenza, evangelization, and culture and liturgy wars had remained morbidly prominent.
Francis’ attention to the peripheries was clear from the beginning. Surveying his first consistory in 2014, John Allen, then reporting for National Catholic Reporter, described a “Francis revolution,” the beginning of a cardinalate and a church “more focused on mercy than on judgment, a political stance closer to the center, and a pastoral emphasis on the peripheries and the poor.”
Among the cardinals made in 2014 was then-bishop of Las Cayes, Haiti: Chibly Langlois, who became the first cardinal from Haiti, among the poorest nations of the world. The late Cardinal Kelvin Edward Felix became the first cardinal from the Caribbean, and Leopoldo Brenes Solórzano became the second cardinal from Nicaragua, where an embattled church still struggles against a leftist authoritarianism.
The consistory in 2014 set a pattern that the nine other consistories under Francis have followed, eschewing the center and its preoccupations for the margins where persecution, interfaith dialogue and acute inequities inform the priorities of church leadership. That focus led to many historic and unexpected selections for the College of Cardinals.
Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi, proclaimed by Francis in 2015, heads a diocese of only 14,000 Catholics in Tonga, an island nation imperiled by rising sea levels and a climate change disaster generated by the industrialized world. Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, also created a cardinal in 2015, leads the minority Catholic community in conflict-riven Myanmar, serving in Yangon as an ongoing resistance struggles to overturn a brutal military junta.
Cardinal Louis-Marie Ling Mangkhanekhoun, I.V.D., apostolic vicar of Vientiane, created and proclaimed by Francis in 2017, represents a small, persecuted Catholic community in Laos. Cardinal Alberto Suárez Inda, proclaimed in 2015, serves the people of God in Morelia, Mexico, an area plagued by drug cartels and violence.
Cardinal Dieudonné Nzapalainga was elevated to the cardinalate in 2016, the first cardinal from the Central African Republic. Proclaimed in 2023, Cardinal Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla serves as archbishop of Juba in South Sudan. The world’s youngest nation, South Sudan has lurched toward civil war, provoking a memorable intervention from Pope Francis, who, imploring peace, kissed the feet of the new country’s contentious leaders during a conference in Rome.
Spanish Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero became archbishop of Rabat in Morocco in 2018 and was created a cardinal the following year. Elevated to the College of Cardinals just last year, Archbishop Dominique Mathieu, a Belgian missionary, leads the small Catholic community in the Archdiocese of Tehran-Ispahan in Iran. Serbia’s first cardinal, Archbishop Ladislav Nemet of Belgrade, was also created in 2024.
Italian-born Cardinal Giorgio Marengo has served the church in Mongolia since 2001, attending to a total community of about 1,500 Catholics, perhaps enough to crowd a parking lot on a given Sunday in a New York parish. Nevertheless, he was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope Francis in 2022 after serving as the apostolic prefect of Ulaanbaatar. Like several other cardinals created by Francis, including Pope Leo XIV, who has served in Peru, it was his missionary work that drew the late pope’s attention.
Among the cardinal contenders at the beginning of this year’s conclave had been a number of the late pope’s “periphery” cardinals, including arguably the new pope, who, though American-born, had served as an Augustinian missionary and diocesan bishop in Peru. Other papal possibilities included Cardinal Anders Arborelius, the leader of a tiny Catholic community in a largely Lutheran nation, who converted to Catholicism as a young man and has become Sweden’s (and Scandinavia’s) first cardinal. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa is a Franciscan and the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, the archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo, resides in a nation that may be distant from Rome, but he leads an archdiocese that has the largest number of Catholics on the African continent.
In a nod to a different sort of periphery that Francis had drawn closer to Rome, there were 33 members of religious orders, including: five Salesians, four Jesuits, four Franciscans and three Conventual Franciscans.
Thanks to Pope Francis, Asia was better-represented this year in the College of Cardinals than ever before. It boasted 24 electors, or almost 18 percent of the total at the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV. There were 23 cardinal-electors representing Latin America—17 percent of the College. Africa, where the church is growing fastest, was represented by 17 electors. North America had 14, and Oceania had four voting-age cardinals, 3 percent of the total.
But holding nearly 40 percent of the vote-eligible cardinals at this conclave, the church in Europe remained a force to contend with, though much diminished from previous conclaves when European cardinals regularly represented 50 percent or more of the voting participants. As the voting began this week, there had been some speculation that the Italian and other European cardinals might be considering returning the papal throne to an Italian after three non-Italian popes in a row.
Could these cardinals from the margins have formed a strong enough voting bloc to play the determining role in the selection of Leo XIV? That possibility was clearly not imagined by the scriptwriters of last year’s unexpected hit film “Conclave.” The cardinals meeting in odd, hushed corners of Vatican attics and stairwells in that drama—scheming European or American players—remained for the most part right out of central ecclesial casting.
Who can say? Given the conclave’s historic ecclesial, geographic and political diversity, Francis, the pope of surprises, may have laid the groundwork at the margins for one final surprise.
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