Cardinals 

Next Saturday, September 30, Pope Francis will install 21 new members of the College of Cardinals. A Cardinal of the Church is a senior member of the Catholic clergy whose most important responsibility is to elect a new pope when the reigning pontiff dies or resigns.  Most Cardinals are bishops, though not all.  Popes occasionally name to the College of Cardinals priests who have served the Church in a special way, but these appointments typically happen after the priest has reached 80 years old, and thus no longer qualifies to vote in a papal conclave.   

The office of Cardinal is ancient, having been enshrined in Church law since the Council of Rome in 499 A.D. The first Cardinals were the head priests of 28 churches in the Diocese of Rome that were specially designated as places where people would go to receive the sacraments of baptism and penance.  Because of their pivotal importance, they were referred to as “hinge parishes,” in Latin tituli cardinales. This is where the name “Cardinal” comes from. 

One can recognize a Cardinal of the Church by the red cassock he wears along with his red hat, called a biretta.  If the Cardinal is wearing a black cassock, it will be adorned with special red piping and red buttons. Interestingly, the birds that we call cardinals receive their name from the blood-red color that they share with these Princes of the Church. Over the centuries, the red color has come to signify the willingness that the Cardinal must demonstrate, by his manner of life, to offer himself as a witness to the gospel – even to the point of the shedding of his blood. In the 2000-year history of the Church, however, only one member of the College of Cardinals has died a martyr. St. John Fisher was the Bishop of Rochester during the reign of King Henry VIII. When King Henry declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England, assuming for himself the power to declare null his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Fisher refused to join Henry in his act of schism from the Catholic Church and affirmed his allegiance to the Pope. For this he was sent to the Tower of London in 1534. While imprisoned, Pope Paul III named him a Cardinal, which provoked King Henry to sentence John Fisher to death. He was beheaded on June 22, 1535 

Although there is only one Cardinal among the martyr saints of the Church, many Cardinals have suffered for the faith. In fact, one of them spent the final years of his life here in Stamford. Ignatius Kung was the bishop of Shanghai, China from 1950 until his death in 2000. He was arrested by China’s Communist regime in 1955 and spent 30 years in prison for his resistance to state control of the Church. While imprisoned, Pope John Paul II secretly named him to the College of Cardinals in 1979. He only learned that he was a Cardinal of the Church during a meeting with the pope in 1988, two years after his release from prison. That same year, Cardinal Kung came to live in Stamford at the retired priests residence wing at St. Joseph Hospital, joining members of his family who had made their home in town years earlier.  

As they prepare to “receive the red hat,” we should remember to pray for these 21 new members of the College of Cardinals, that they might discharge well their responsibilities as servant Princes of the Church, living courageously holy lives for the sake of the Gospel. 

posted 9/23/23