Cardinal

The cardinal is, above all, an elector: the office exists chiefly so that there is a defined body of men who choose the next pope.

The conclave

The central and defining function of the cardinals is to elect the Bishop of Rome, which they do gathered in conclave on the death or resignation of a pope, and since the twentieth century the right to vote has been limited to those under the age of eighty. Around this function the cardinals also serve as the chief counsellors of the pope and hold the most senior administrative offices of the church, so the college is at once the electorate and the senior council of the Catholic Church, its members drawn from bishops around the world.

Appointment and rank

A cardinal is created by the pope, who names those he chooses to the college, so entry to the office is by papal appointment alone, and almost all cardinals are already bishops. The rank is one of dignity and function within the church rather than a grade of holy orders, the cardinalate being an office attached to the Roman church rather than a further ordination. The distinctive scarlet, worn from the cassock to the zucchetto, marks the rank at sight and signifies, by tradition, a readiness to shed blood for the faith. The office has no true parallel outside the Catholic Church, being bound up with the particular institution of the papacy.

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.