The archbishop of New York or Chicago is always, in practice, going to be a Cardinal. But how formally does this system work? Is it codified anywhere that, say, St. Louis will have a Cardinal archibishop, Dallas won’t?
Do the Popes ever do a one-off Cardinal when there is a bishop they really like in, say, Vancouver or Tulsa, but they don’t want to create a permanent Tulsa slot? Obviously there must be room for creating new slots, I know JPII did it, esp. when, say, Ouagadougu is experiencing big Church growth but has never had a Cardinal before.
When’s the last time a “slot” was added or subtracted in the U.S.?
Do the geographic dedicated slots work similarly in, e.g., Europe? Are the dozens of Italian Cardinals (other than the ones working out of the Vatican itself) all in “safe seats” scattered around Italy, or do the cities rotate?
There is absolutely no standard which the Pope has to follow when creating Cardinals, except that the official “Ordinary” (CEO bishop) of each of the seven “suburban sees” in greater Rome is ipso facto a Cardinal.
That said, there are a lot of customs that have come to be expected:
Every moderate-sized country with a substantial Catholic population gets at least one Cardinal.
The bishops of the largest metropolises are nearly always named Cardinals.
There are a number of sees other than the above which historically are entitled to Cardinals; the one which comes to mind, since I’m American, is Baltimore, historically the first U.S. see city. Westminster (London, England, hence #2 is sort of applicable) is I believe another traditional one. Milan and Venice are other “absolutes.”
The Archdiocese of St. Louis seems to be on the downside of cardinal-worthiness. While it’s a very old see (IIRC, either second or third after Baltimore) it didn’t have it’s first cardinal named until 1947. Then there were three in a row who were elevated to cardinal. The last three archibishops were not appointed cardinal, although the most recent one, Justin Rigali, was appointed archbishop of Philadelphia and then named to be a cardinal.
This has caused some Catholic watchers to suspect there’s a limit to the number of U.S. cardinals a Pope will appoint, and they’ll likely shift from the older, slower-growing areas to areas of faster growth.
When Cardinal Law left Boston, he was replaced with a Bishop who (so far) has not been elevated to Cardinal. With a very large Catholic population, Boston has usually had a Cardinal as its archbishop, but apparently not always.
Considering the trouble that the Boston Archdiocese got into under Law (even though he was then “kicked upstairs” to a prestigious ceremonial post in the Vatican), I suppose the Church authorities did not feel it was proper to give the red hat to the new guy right away.
Around here, the very first elevation to Cardinal of an Archbishop of San Juan happened in the mid-1970s, under Paul VI. Archbishop Cardinal Aponte had to retire for age reasons in 1999 and was replaced by Archbishop Gonzalez in 2000. He has not been made a Cardinal, and there are comments that as this is a relatively young Metropolitan See (the diocese was founded 1511, but only became ARCHdiocese last century), and Gonzalez is well to the left of Benny-16, AND is a former associate of Cardinal Law’s, he may have to cool his heels for a while.
Nah, ipso facto. It is in the nature of holding one of those sees that a man is always elevated to the title of Cardinal. If it was de facto, then being named to one of those sees would mean that he functioned as a cardinal even if he never got the title. In point of fact, without the title, you don’t get invited to conclaves or other neat Cardinal events, so it is not a de facto situation.
John Dearden of Detroit was “punished” for being too liberal for years. He was made archbishop just after Pope John XIII was elected, but about the time that he was due to be elevated to Cardinal, he was involved with a lot of the Vatican II discussions and his elevation was postponed for three or four years. When he was finally elevated in 1969, he then had to function with a only two or three auxiliary bishops for the next decade while smaller archdiocese (with more conservative archbishops) were given five or six auxiliaries.
Maybe it would be worth mentioning here (though I’m sure it’s been said repeatedly in other Cardinal threads) that the Cardinality roughly recreates for the Holy See the structure of any other archdiocese.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore has an archbishop. There are a number of neighboring sees related to it: Arlington, Richmond, Wheeling-Charleston, and Wilmington, each with their own regular bishop. Churches have their pastors, and there are a number of deacons who help run things.
The Archdiocese of Rome has an archbishop, the pope. There were a number of neighboring sees (well, still are, but the Cardinality that used to attach has become strictly titular in the 1960s): Albano, Frascati, Palestrina, Porto e Santa Ruffina, Sabina e Poggio Mirteto, and Velletri e Segni. The titular bishops of these are the Cardinal-Bishops. There formerly was one of Ostia, but that had even earlier become titular and assigned to one of the other Cardinal-Bishops, since historically the bishop of Ostia had been the dean of the college of Cardinals, annointed the Roman Emperor, and so on. Nowadays it seems to always be assigned to the Cardinal-Bishop of Velletri-Segni, though technically they’re two separate titles.
Each now has a regular bishop as ordinary, since the Cardinal-Bishop is more occupied with affairs in Rome than actually running the diocese. For instance, though Cardinal Arinze was appointed Cardinal-Bishop of Segni-Velletri the ordinary of the actual see is Bishop Andrea Maria Erba.
Anyhow, what we usually think of as Cardinals are Cardinal-Priests. William Cardinal Keeler is Cardinal-Priest of S. Maria degli Angeli, a church in Rome. Of course, he’s usually in Baltimore, so the actual day-to-day affairs are run by a local pastor. This is standard for “foreign cardinals”, though I’m not sure that there aren’t some Roman Cardinal-Priests who actually do still act as head priest of their named church. Then there are Cardinal-Deacons, which were historically sort of administrative posts in running the diocese of Rome.