Thumbnail bios of new cardinals

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The following are brief biographies of some of the 21 new cardinals who will be created by Pope Francis Sept. 30 at the Vatican:

-- Cardinal-designate Robert F. Prevost

Cardinal-designate Robert F. Prevost, 67, is prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, the Vatican body responsible for recommending to the pope candidates to fill the office of bishop in many of the Latin-rite dioceses of the world. He also oversees the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, where nearly 40% of the world's Catholics reside.
A Chicago native, he also served as prior general of the Augustinians and spent a total of little more than two decades serving in Peru, first as an Augustinian missionary and later as bishop of Chiclayo.
Soon after coming to Rome to head the dicastery, he told Vatican News that bishops have a special mission of promoting the unity of the church.

"The lack of unity is a wound that the church suffers, a very painful one," he said May 4, 2023. "Divisions and polemics in the church do not help anything. We bishops especially must accelerate this movement toward unity, toward communion in the church."

The cardinal-designate was born Sept. 14, 1955 in Chicago, Illinois, to a father of French and Italian descent and mother of Spanish descent.

He holds degrees from Villanova University in Pennsylvania and the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and a doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. An Augustinian friar, he joined the Augustinian mission in Peru in 1985 and largely worked in the country until 1999 when he was elected head of the Augustinians' Chicago-based province. From 2001 to 2013, he served as prior general of the worldwide order. In 2014, Pope Francis named him bishop of Chiclayo, in northern Peru and the pope asked him also to be apostolic administrator of Callao, Peru, from April 2020 to May 2021.

He was re-elected second vice-president of Peru's Bishops' Conference in 2022 and the pope then appointed him to succeed the retiring Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in early 2023.

Cardinal-designate Prevost speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and can read Latin and German.

-- Cardinal-designate Claudio Gugerotti

Italian Cardinal-designate Claudio Gugerotti, 67, is prefect of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches and has years of experience working closely with Eastern Catholics and Orthodox leaders and faithful, especially in the Caucasus region and Eastern Europe, where he served as a papal nuncio.

As nuncio, he was the Vatican's diplomatic representative to Georgia during the run-up to and aftermath of the 2008 Georgian attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia followed by a Russian invasion of Georgia. The five-day conflict left at least 800 people dead and tens of thousands more fled their homes.

He had long warned that the poverty, political instability and major energy resources found in the Caucasus region made it a potential "powder keg" for violence, he said in 2004 when he was nuncio to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Ethnic and religious differences, independence movements and the fight for territorial control had sparked "a confrontation without limits and without morality," he had said after a three-day siege by terrorists of a school in Beslan in Russia's North Ossetia province, which ended with the deaths of 333 children and adults.

Religious leaders have a serious responsibility to educate their communities in the region for peace, dialogue and respect for others, and to "reinforce positive values ... and curb the risks of manipulating religion, which some try to do, finding easy success amid ignorance and poverty," he had said.

Born in Verona, Italy, Oct. 7, 1955, he earned degrees in Oriental languages and literature and in liturgy. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1982 and taught patristics and Eastern theology and liturgy at institutes in Verona until 1985.

He began working at the then-Congregation for Eastern Churches in 1985 and was named undersecretary in 1997, also teaching patristics and Armenian literature and language at Rome's Pontifical Oriental Institute.

He was nuncio to Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan from 2002 to 2011, nuncio to Belarus from 2011 to 2015, nuncio to Ukraine from 2015 to 2020 and nuncio to Great Britain from 2020 to 2022 when Pope Francis appointed him to head the Vatican dicastery that assists all the Eastern Catholic churches -- most of which are based in the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine -- as well as the Latin-rite church across North Africa and the Middle East.

Fluent in Italian, he also is familiar with English, French, Kurdish, classical and modern Armenian, Latin and Greek, according to the Vatican.

-- Cardinal-designate Víctor Fernández

Argentine Cardinal-designate Víctor Fernández, who will be 61 July 18, is prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the first Latin American to head this office in its nearly 500-year history. He has had a long close relationship with his fellow countryman, Pope Francis, and is familiar with the thought and vision of the pope; he has been credited for contributing to several significant texts of his pontificate.

Cardinal-designate Fernández was a key collaborator in 2007 of then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in drafting the Latin American bishops' Aparecida document, which offers a pastoral vision and guidelines for the region's church and which, in turn, has been a blueprint for his pontificate.

Pope Francis promptly named him an archbishop after his election to the papacy in 2013 and, at the Vatican, the cardinal-designate was a member of the drafting committees for the final documents of the 2014 and 2015 Synods of Bishops.

Responding to reporters' questions during the synod on the family in 2014, the then-archbishop said synod members who support pastoral flexibility in dealing with people in irregular situations are not promoting "marriage-lite" or a weakening of the lifelong bond of marriage, they want to meet those people, support them and, hopefully, lead them closer to holiness.

The Gospel, he said, also should arrive at the places "where the biggest sinners are" -- that's the example Jesus gave his followers.
Born July 18, 1962, near Córdoba, he studied theology with a specialization in biblical studies at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and obtained a doctorate from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina.

He spent years as a parish priest, a director of catechesis and an adviser of lay movements. He founded and was rector of an educational institute for teachers and a diocesan institute for lay formation. He was formator and director of studies at the seminary of Río Cuarto and was dean of the faculty of theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. The future Pope Francis, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, nominated then-Father Fernández to become rector of the pontifical university in 2009, a position he held until 2018.

Before his July appointment to lead the doctrinal dicastery, he had been president of the doctrine commission of Argentina's bishops' conference since 2017 and archbishop of La Plata since 2018. His new role at the Vatican also includes serving as president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and president of the International Theological Commission.

-- Swiss Cardinal-designate Emil P. Tscherrig

Swiss Cardinal-designate Emil P. Tscherrig, 76, has spent the past three decades serving as a Vatican diplomat, and became the first non-Italian papal nuncio to Italy and the Republic of San Marino when Pope Francis appointed him in 2017.

Pope Francis got to personally know him when the Swiss prelate was appointed papal nuncio to Argentina in January 2012. In fact, the night then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was elected pope in 2013, the new pope phoned the Vatican ambassador and asked him to tell the country's bishops and faithful not to feel obliged to come to Rome for his installation, but instead give the money to the poor and pray for his new ministry.

Then-Archbishop Tscherrig wrote to all the bishops March 14 conveying the Argentine pope's sentiments, expressing to the faithful "his gratitude for your prayers and expressions of love, affection and charity" and requesting they accompany their spiritual closeness "with some act of charity toward those in need."

Born Feb. 3, 1947, in Unterems, Switzerland, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1974. He earned his doctorate in canon law from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and began his diplomatic studies at the Vatican in 1978.

He worked at the Vatican Secretariat of State for many years, helping plan then-Pope John Paul II's many foreign trips. He served as support staff at nunciatures in Uganda, South Korea, Mongolia and Bangladesh, and with his episcopal ordination, he received his first assignment as papal nuncio in 1996 to Burundi where lingering ethnic violent conflict among Hutu and Tutsi armed militants and the army had plunged the country into a civil war.

He was then appointed to the West Indies and some other Central and South American mainland nations whose coasts line the Caribbean starting in 2000 and 2001. He became papal nuncio to Korea and Mongolia in 2004, and then to Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway in 2008. He served as apostolic nuncio to Argentina from 2012 to 2017.

-- Cardinal-designate Sebastian Francis

Cardinal-designate Sebastian Francis, 71, is bishop of Penang, Malaysia, and president of the bishops' conference of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.

After his nomination the cardinal wrote that together with the cardinals from southeast Asia created before him "we give a common witness to the universality of the Catholic Church and the apostolic continuity of the mission entrusted by the Risen Christ to St. Peter, the apostles and their successors."

The cardinal-designate descends from Indian grandparents who migrated to modern-day Malaysia in 1890. When he visited the city of Kerala, India, where his family originated, he shared how his father ran an Indian restaurant still operated today by the cardinal-designate's brother in Kuala Lumpur.

In an interview with AsiaNews he discussed the impact of his migrant roots: "Migrants do all the heavy work that locals tend to ignore and help the economy of developed and developing countries," he said. "They also bring with them cultural and spiritual treasures that give new dynamism to many countries."

The cardinal-designate was born Nov. 11, 1951, in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and was ordained a priest in 1977. He earned a licentiate in dogmatic theology from Rome's University of St. Thomas Aquinas and a degree in justice and peace from the Maryknoll School of Theology in New York.

Pope Benedict XVI named him bishop of Penang in 2012 and since 2017 he has been president of the bishops' conference of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.

He will be the second cardinal from Malaysia, but the first to join the pool of cardinal electors.

-- Cardinal-designate Stephen Chow Sau-Yan

Chinese Jesuit Cardinal-designate Stephen Chow Sau-Yan, 63, is bishop of Hong Kong.

He was born Aug. 7, 1959, in Hong Kong and he studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Minnesota, earning a master's degree in educational psychology before joining the Jesuits in 1984. Cardinal-designate Chow was ordained a priest in Hong Kong in 1994. He received a degree in organizational development from Loyola University in Chicago and earned a doctorate in human development and psychology from Harvard University. In 2018, the cardinal-designate was appointed provincial superior of the China province of the Jesuits.

Pope Francis appointed him to lead Hong Kong's 404,000 Catholics as their bishop in 2021, a role Cardinal-designate Chow told local press that he had initially turned down but later accepted after receiving a handwritten letter from the pope. As bishop, he made the first trip to Beijing by a Hong Kong bishop in nearly three decades.

The cardinal-designate has expressed his desire for those arrested during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong against a Chinese extradition bill to be treated with leniency. After his nomination as cardinal, he expressed his hope that "there will be more reconciliation" in Hong Kong and that "more hope can be given to young people."

The Vatican has had increasingly strained relations with China primarily due to apparent violations of an agreement between the two countries which outlines procedures for the appointment of bishops. However, in May 2023, Cardinal-designate Chow said that he did not believe the agreement was "dead."

He will become Hong Kong's fourth cardinal.

-- Cardinal-designate François-Xavier Bustillo

Spanish-born Franciscan Cardinal-designate François-Xavier Bustillo, 54, is bishop of Ajaccio, France.

Born Nov. 23, 1968, in Pamplona, Spain, he was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1994, when he founded a convent with other Franciscans in southern France. He earned a master's in theology from the Catholic Institute of Toulouse in France. From 2018 until his ordination as bishop, he oversaw the St. Maximilian Kolbe convent in Lourdes and was episcopal delegate to the shrine at Lourdes and for the protection of minors.

In 2021, Pope Francis named him bishop of Ajaccio on the French island of Corsica off the coast of Italy.

Cardinal-designate Bustillo is the author of a book published by the Vatican's publishing house titled, "Witnesses Not Officials: The Priest in a Changing Age," which he said was not a "manual for becoming a good priest" but a sort of pastoral letter to fellow priests. Pope Francis gave copies of the book to priests at the chrism Mass on Holy Thursday in 2022 and on other occasions.

In his book, the cardinal-designate reflects on the risk of transforming the parish into administrative offices and isolating the laity. He calls for a conversion among the clergy that is "not cosmetic" but "a true conversion from the head to the feet."

"Today the motor of our Western society is led by finance and politics. Knowledge, power and appearances dominate the way in which we exist in the world," he wrote. "Should this logic be promoted in the church?"

-- Cardinal-designate Manuel Alves Aguiar

Portuguese Cardinal-designate Manuel Alves Aguiar, 49, is auxiliary bishop of Lisbon, Portugal, president of the World Youth Day Lisbon 2023 Foundation and director of communications for the Patriarchate of Lisbon.

Born Dec. 12, 1973, outside of Porto, the future cardinal was described as a "radical environmentalist" in his youth by the Portuguese press for defending his town's river from pollution, and he was reportedly very active in the Portuguese socialist party.
Growing up, the cardinal-designate was a catechist, reader at Mass, altar server and boy scout. He earned a degree in theology and later a master's degree in communication sciences from the Catholic University of Portugal.

At 49, Cardinal-designate Aguiar will be the second member of the college of cardinals under 50, joining Italian-born Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, apostolic prefect of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, who is six months his junior.

He was ordained to the priesthood in 2001 and began serving as a parish priest before becoming head of communications for the Diocese of Porto from 2002-2015. Since 2016, he has been chairman of the Renascença media group, funded by the Patriarchate of Lisbon and the Portuguese bishops' conference, which owns several popular radio stations throughout the country.

From 2016 to 2019 Cardinal-designate Aguiar was national director of the secretariat for church social communications of the Portuguese bishops' conference.

Pope Francis named him auxiliary bishop of Lisbon in 2019. He is responsible for organizing World Youth Day 2023, which was scheduled to take place in Lisbon Aug. 1-6.

-- Cardinal-designate Ángel Fernández Artime

Spanish Cardinal-designate Ángel Fernández Artime, 62, is rector general of the Salesians of St. John Bosco, his religious order. He was born Aug. 21, 1960, to a fishing family in Gozón-Luanco, northern Spain.

A local newspaper noted his "marked maritime accent" in a profile on the cardinal-designate that was written after he was elected to lead the Salesian congregation in 2014. It said that for five generations his family had dedicated themselves to fishing. "I thank God for being a small-town boy," he said then.

He made his first vows to join the Salesians at 18 years old and was eventually ordained in 1987 at 26. He holds a degree in pastoral theology, a licentiate in philosophy and pedagogy, and, as a priest, he worked in Salesian schools both in teaching and administration.
The cardinal-designate was a provincial delegate for youth ministry in Leon, Spain, and later served as provincial superior from 2000-2006. In 2009, he was appointed provincial superior of southern Argentina. Working in Buenos Aires, Cardinal-designate Fernández got to know and work personally with then-Archbishop Jorge  Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who would become Pope Francis four years later.

Asked about his relationship to Pope Francis for the 2014 newspaper profile, the cardinal-designate said that this pope "is a gift to the church."

In 2014, he was elected rector major of the Salesians and the 10th successor of Don Bosco, a role he was re-elected to in 2020 to extend his term to 2026. He is the first Spaniard to hold the role and only the third non-Italian.

-- Cardinal-designate Agostino Marchetto

Italian Cardinal-designate Agostino Marchetto, 82, is a former apostolic nuncio and the former secretary, from 2001 to 2010, of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, which was merged into the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in 2016. 

Pope Francis has called him "the greatest hermeneutic of the Second Vatican Council," according to a Vatican biography of Cardinal-designate Marchetto. In his books on Vatican II, Archbishop Marchetto has argued that the council was a continuation and not a break from the history of the Catholic Church.

As a member of the College of Cardinals who is over 80 years old, he will not be eligible to vote in a future conclave. Pope Francis recognized him as one of the three new cardinals over 80 "who have distinguished themselves for their service to the church."

Cardinal-designate Marchetto was born Aug. 28, 1940, in Vincenza in northern Italy where he was ordained in 1964. In 1985, he was ordained a bishop and named apostolic nuncio to Madagascar and Mauritius. He became nuncio to Tanzania in 1990 and Belarus in 1994, before moving to Rome in 1999 to work in the Vatican Secretariat of State.

St. John Paul II appointed him secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People in 2001, from which he retired in 2010 at age 70 to dedicate himself to study -- particularly on Vatican II.

-- Cardinal-designate Diego Rafael Padrón Sánchez

Venezuelan Cardinal-designate Diego Rafael Padrón Sánchez, 84, is the retired archbishop of Cumaná, Venezuela, and a former president of the Venezuelan bishops' conference.

Cardinal-designate Padrón has been an outspoken advocate for freeing political prisoners in Venezuela. "Political prisoners are typical of dictatorships; amnesty can contribute to reconciling the country," he told local media in support of laws to free political prisoners in Venezuela.

As a member of the college of cardinals who is over 80 years old, Cardinal-designate Padrón will not be eligible to vote in a future conclave.

Born May 17, 1939, in Montalbán in northern Venezuela, he was ordained to the priesthood in his hometown in 1963. He became a parish priest and a Latin and biblical Greek professor. He holds a degree in biblical theology from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and a diploma in Eastern biblical sciences from the Jerusalem-based faculty of biblical sciences of Rome's Pontifical Antonianum University.

In 1990, St. John Paul II named him auxiliary bishop of Caracas. He became bishop of Maturín in 1994 and archbishop of Cumaná in 2002.

He was previously the president of catechesis for the Latin American bishops' council and was twice elected president of the Venezuelan bishops' conference, serving in that role from 2012-2018.

-- Cardinal-designate Luis Dri

Argentinian Cardinal-designate Luis Dri, 96, has been a model for Pope Francis' philosophy toward confession.

The Capuchin priest, born April 17, 1927, in Federación, Argentina, has dedicated himself to hearing confessions in his soundproof confessional every morning and evening since he retired from active ministry in 2007 and has often been cited by the pope when he speaks about confession.

The cardinal-designate entered the minor seminary in 1938 at the age of 11 and was ordained a priest in 1952 in Montevideo, Uruguay, before beginning a long career as a parish priest. He was sent to Buenos Aires in 2000.

During a meeting with priests from the Diocese of Rome in March 2014, Pope Francis recalled an interaction he had with Father Dri while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. The confessor, who always had long lines of mostly priests at his confessional, told the future pope that he felt scrupulous about forgiving too much. Yet when he felt this way, he would pray before the tabernacle and tell God: "You are to blame, because you have been a bad example for me!"

"This is a beautiful prayer of mercy!" the pope said in the meeting with priests. "If one, in confession, lives (mercy) toward himself he can also give it to others."

The cardinal-designate told Vatican News that he does not deserve the nomination since he is a simple friar, "but life has taught me a lot, life has marked me, and since I was born very poor I feel I must always have a word of mercy, of help, of closeness, for anyone who comes here" for confession.

He said that he learned a lot from St. Pio of Pietrelcina, known as Padre Pio, to whom he confessed to in 1960.