Crowding the conclave

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 26, 2020

The Pope, and the Pope alone, sets the rules for a papal conclave. The Pope, and the Pope alone, can change those rules— whenever he wants, for whatever reason he chooses.

The current rules stipulate that no more than 120 cardinals can participate in a conclave. That rule was set by Pope Paul VI and confirmed by Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis could change the rule, but evidently he has chosen not to do so. Instead he has chosen to break it.

After the November 28 conclave, barring a death, there will be 128 cardinals eligible to take part in a conclave: eight more than the maximum.

Pope Francis is not the first Pontiff to break through the fixed ceiling. St. John Paul II broke his own rule in 2001, when, he too drove the number of cardinal-electors up to 128.

That two Roman Pontiffs would ignore a rule, rather than amend it, is neither a crime nor a scandal. But it is an oddity. Why keep the rule on the books, when it would be so easy to rescind it?

This is, I readily admit, a quibble. The future welfare of the Church will not be endangered by the presence of a few extra seats in the Sistine Chapel. But I can’t help wondering whether it is wise for a Pope to flout the letter of the law. Would we be worse off if the Pope limited himself to the normative number of red hats?

We don’t yet know, of course, what sort of influence the cardinal-electors of the November consistory will bring to the next conclave. But we can look back to the consistory of 2001, and ask whether the universal Church would be in better or worse shape today, if Pope John Paul II had trimmed eight names off the long list of new cardinals created that year. Just imagine, for instance, if the sainted Pontiff had decided not to confer red hats on:

1. Walter Kasper
2. Francisco Javier Errazuriz
3. Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga
4. Karl Lehmann
5. Claudio Hummes
6. Cormac Murphy-O’Connor
7. Jorge Bergoglio
8. Theodore McCarrick