Cardinal

Cardinals form the Pope's most senior body of counselors and, collectively as the College of Cardinals, the constitutional mechanism by which the Roman Catholic Church elects a new pope. The rank is not a sacramental order; a cardinal's underlying priestly or episcopal ordination is unaffected by elevation to the cardinalate, and a small number of appointees in history, though not in modern practice, received the honor without prior episcopal consecration. Historically, cardinals were divided into three ranks, cardinal bishops, cardinal priests and cardinal deacons, reflecting the office's origin in the senior clergy attached to Rome's own suburbicarian dioceses and the city's principal churches, the titular churches, or tituli, still symbolically assigned to each cardinal today.

Modern cardinals typically head major archdioceses, senior Vatican offices, dicasteries, within the Roman Curia, or hold emeritus status after such service, giving the College a working structure that spans the Church's central government and its largest local churches simultaneously. Paul VI's 1970 decree limiting conclave voting rights to cardinals under eighty formalized a distinction between active elector cardinals and older cardinals who retain the honor and most advisory functions but cannot vote for a new pope, a change intended to keep the electing body from growing indefinitely as life expectancy increased.

The cardinalate developed gradually from the clergy attached to Rome's own parishes and suburban dioceses, whose senior members advised the Bishop of Rome on local church business well before the office carried its later international significance. The term cardinal derives from the Latin cardo, hinge, reflecting the sense of clergy hinged, or incardinated, to a specific Roman church. Popes began appointing cardinals from outside Italy in growing numbers from the thirteenth century onward, and by the modern era the College had become genuinely global, with Pope Francis and his predecessors deliberately elevating bishops from regions, including much of Africa, Asia and Oceania, that had rarely or never held a cardinal's hat.

A cardinal is created by the Pope alone, announced at a consistory, a formal gathering of the existing College, and receives the distinctive red biretta and cassock trim symbolizing a willingness to shed blood, martyrdom, in defense of the faith, language retained from the Church's early centuries even though modern cardinals rarely face that literal risk. Sede vacante, the period between a pope's death or resignation and the election of a successor, is governed by detailed provisions in canon law and papal constitutions specifying which of the College's ordinary powers continue and which are suspended, a body of procedural law developed particularly since the 1268 to 1271 conclave crisis at Viterbo.