Nearer the papal seat

“Indeed, the magnitude of the task ahead sent Cardinal Tagle to tears as his appointment was read during the Mass last 8 December at the Manila Cathedral.

With the appointment of the Archbishop of Manila, His Excellency Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle, as the Prefect of the Pontifical Congregation on the Evangelization of Peoples by Pope Francis, hopes have soared about the possibility of a Filipino bagging the three-layered tiara or the papal crown in the near future.

In the last 2013 papal elections, where Pope Francis won, Cardinal Tagle was said to have been in the shortlist of papabile.

One can drop Tagle’s name around the Vatican vicinity because he is a familiar name and face in the Petrine square.

He was appointed by Pope St. John Paul II to the International Theological Commission from 1997 to 2001, then under the chairmanship of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI and would consecrate him as a prince of the Church in 2012.

He was later appointed to the editorial board of the “History of Vatican II,” a colossal 2,800-page opus on the Second Vatican Council and a resource speaker in international church conferences and synod of bishops.

So, are we expecting an Asian pope after Pope Francis with this appointment?

Occupants of the Roman Curia’s influential congregations do not necessarily or automatically step into the fisherman’s shoes

In the first place, in recent memory, in the papacies of John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, only Benedict XVI assumed Peter’s office after heading the equally powerful Congregation on Doctrine of the Faith. Even Pope Francis never held any significant office in the Vatican bureaucracy before he got elected.

However, as in the past papal conclaves, it all depends on the workings of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit worked then when, after centuries, the first non-Italian pope from Poland became one of the most beloved popes of the modern era, Pope St. John Paul II. Or someone unexpectedly outside of Europe, the traditional breeder of popes, emerged as the first, namely Pope Francis from Argentina.

However, is the Catholic world prepared for a pope from this far-flung region of the world?

The prospects of an Asian pope could still be a reality buried in the shadows of the Vatican’s politico-religious tapestry. Although, no one is disallowed to dream on.

But the appointment of an Asian cardinal to the crucial post in Rome is prognostically significant, in a sense that this has become a Vatican statement of an ongoing paradigm shift in the Church’s geographical placement, namely, from the “matured churches in Europe and North America” to the “young emerging churches” in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

Pope John Paul II realized this early on in his papacy, hence he set sail to over 129 countries mostly in Asia, Africa, Oceania and South America. Critics chorused that he was “wooing” the Catholics in mostly the Third World countries, because the Catholic Church is losing her foothold among European Catholics.

In his new assignment, Cardinal Tagle would have to face an evangelization dynamic mostly in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean by recommending bishops and programs that would effectively deliver God’s message to these areas.

He will have to deal with the systematic persecution of Catholic missionaries in stations where Catholics are a minority and are prone to potential or actual hostility from the hands of religious fanatics, for instance, those who claim that beheading missionaries is a divine mandate.

He will have to hit the midway between feeding the Word of God to a people with nothing to feed on such as the impoverished countries in Africa and somehow rush to race with “religious competitors” who turn the concept of “ecumenical efforts” into blatant proselytization.

And will Tagle have the personnel and resources to accomplish such a herculean task?

Indeed, the magnitude of the task ahead sent Cardinal Tagle to tears as his appointment was read during the Mass last 8 December at the Manila Cathedral.

Well, if Tagle delivers what is expected of him in this crucial charge, then probably an Asian could be the next pope.