From the Clergy of Rome to a Global College

The cardinalate began as a purely local Roman office: the word derives from a Latin term for a hinge or a fixed point, and the earliest cardinals were the priests and deacons attached to the principal churches of the city of Rome, along with the bishops of nearby sees, who assisted the pope in the liturgy of his own diocese. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 reserved papal elections to the cardinals alone, converting a body of Roman clergy into an electoral college with power over the whole church, and later reforms gradually opened membership to bishops and clergy from far outside Rome.

That process of internationalisation has accelerated sharply in the last century. Popes since the mid twentieth century have deliberately appointed cardinals from Africa, Asia and Latin America to bring the college closer to the geography of the world Catholic population, and recent conclaves have included electors from countries that had never had a cardinal before. The College of Cardinals today is more numerous and more geographically dispersed than at any point in its history, even as the electors are still capped and the practical business of choosing a pope still runs entirely by the ancient rule of the closed conclave.