The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is hopeful that newly-appointed cardinal Bishop Pablo Virgilio David will bring more marginalized Filipino faithful closer to church.
The CBCP made the statement following the official announcement by Pope Francis of the 21 new cardinals from different nations, including Cardinal David from the Philippines, on Sunday evening.
“The pope’s choice of Bishop David is consistent with his selection of cardinals, who reach out to the peripheries,” CBCP vice president Mylo Hubert Vergara said on Monday.
Bishop David, 65, is the incumbent CBCP president. He serves the Diocese of Caloocan, including the cities of Malabon and Navotas, which have more than 1.3 million parishioners.
The new cardinals will be nominated at a council to be held in Vatican City on December 8. Five of them come from Argentina with representations from India, Indonesia, Japan, Serbia and the Philippines, among other nations.
“I am pleased to announce to you that on December 8 I will hold a consistory for the nomination of new cardinals,” Pope Francis declared as he delivered his Angelus prayer on St Peter’s Square.
“Their provenance expresses the universality of the Church and manifests the indissoluble bond between the seat of St Peter and the wider Churches of the world,” the 87-year-old pontiff added.
Italy will nonetheless take the lion’s share with four new cardinals, although only three will be able to vote in elections for Francis’s successor as the fourth has already passed the age limit for papal ballot eligibility, according to the Vatican.
At 44 years of age, Mykola Bychok, the Ukrainian current archbishop of Melbourne in Australia, is the youngest to be tapped for the high clerical mantle.
Cardinals serve as the pope’s closest advisers and collaborators in the pastoral governance of the worldwide Catholic Church, but their main task is to elect a new pope, according to the CBCP.
Vergara added that Bishop David’s elevation to cardinal is also a recognition of his contributions as CBCP president and his “invaluable work” with the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC).
Cardinal David, along with Vergara and Cardinal Jose Advincula of Manila, is currently in Rome for the second and final session of the global synod on synodality, convened by Pope Francis.
In his intervention on Oct. 4, Cardinal David, who is also part of the communication body of the Vatican synod, emphasized that addressing poverty is essential to building a Church that truly serves the poor.
He explained how “local migration” from rural provinces to cities poses a “big challenge” to traditional parish structures, which typically serve established local parishioners.
“If the poor don’t come to Church, the Church must go to the poor,” Cardinal David said.
