Four Italians. On December 7, Francis will create 21 new cardinals, including four from Italy, a country traditionally well represented in what was previously called the Sacred College – the group of cardinals under the age of 80 responsible for electing the pope. in the event of a conclave.
During the Angelus on Sunday October 6, Francis announced the creation as cardinal of the Sicilian Mgr Baldassare Reina, well known to the Romans, of the Turin theologian Roberto Repole – one of the thinkers of a theme dear to him, synodality – and finally from the migration expert at the Vatican, Mgr Fabio Baggio. On November 4, he added to the list of his future close collaborators the archbishop of Naples engaged in the social field, Mgr Domenico Battaglia, after the withdrawal of the Indonesian bishop Paskalis Bruno Syukur.
Result of these choices: in the event of a conclave after December 7, the Italian cardinal electors, 17 in number, will be as numerous as all of their counterparts on the African continent, only reinforced this winter by their entry into the College of Cardinals. of the archbishops of Algiers (Algeria) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Mgr Jean-Paul Vesco and Mgr Ignace Bessi Dogbo.
Overrepresentation of the Old Continent and Asians
The weight of Italians (12% of voters) has certainly decreased since the previous conclave, in 2013: they then represented a quarter of the voters. Despite this, and after more than ten years of a pontificate marked by diplomacy oriented towards the South, Europeans remain over-represented in the college of voters.
Out of 140 cardinal electors (as of December 7), 55 will be European. The latter will therefore represent 39.3% of the college called to meet in the Sistine Chapel. However, at the global level, the Catholics of the Old Continent, in decline, only represent 20.6% of the 1.3 billion Catholics, according to statistics from the Catholic Church published in 2024 (2022 figures).
On the French side, if a conclave were convened, five could participate: Mgr Dominique Mamberti, prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature, in Rome; but also Jean-Marc Aveline (Marseille), Philippe Barbarin, François Bustillo (Ajaccio) and Christophe Pierre (nuncio to the United States).
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, former archbishop of Bordeaux, accused of sexual violence against a minor, reached the age of 80 on September 25, and is therefore no longer a voter. In Europe, the French represent the third largest contingent after the Italians and the Spanish (six voters).
Under-representation of the American and African continents
This over-representation of Europeans is mainly to the detriment of Americans and Africans. In the world, almost one in two Catholics lives in Latin America, the United States or Canada (47.9%). However, the cardinals from this continent do not even represent a third of the voters (27.9%).
It is Africa which is experiencing the greatest increase in baptisms between 2021 and 2022. But despite this increase of 7.2 million faithful, and the fact that they now represent 19.6% of Catholics in the world, their Cardinals still represent only 12.1% of the electorate.
On the contrary, Asian Catholics – also on the rise – represent no more than 11.1% of the world’s Catholics. But 25 cardinals under the age of 80 come from this continent, where Francis made the longest trip of his pontificate in September. They thus represent 17.9% of voters. Oceanians are also slightly over-represented (0.8% of Catholics, 4% of cardinal electors).
These different levels of representativeness are not only due to the weight of the past. The cardinal electors created by John Paul II are now only six, and those created by Benedict XVI, twenty-four. This means that Francis will have directly chosen more than three quarters (78.6%) of the men of the Church responsible for electing his successor, as of December 7. But the Jesuit Pope undoubtedly has other recruitment criteria than statistics.