Making cardinals is a tricky business for a pope. They do two things in the church – they elect the next pope, and they concentrate in themselves the organisation's sense of power and self-importance. A traditionalist cardinal with a sense of his own splendour is a magnificent beast, like a mammoth draped in embroidery. But under Pope Francis, they may become an endangered species. The first batch of cardinals he made at the weekend, including Britain's Vincent Nichols, look remarkably businesslike.
Four of them are from the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy itself, which still supplies a third of the 120 voting cardinals. Because there is a tradition that the heads of the really big departments are cardinals, passing over anyone promoted since the last cardinals were created by the old pope, Benedict XVI, would have been a signal that they could safely be dissed in the playground. So the men who run the Vatican's "personnel departments" for bishops and priests were both honoured, as was the secretary of state, or foreign minister, which is traditionally the second most powerful post in the church.
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