This is about Ian’s Staff Report on “How Does One Become Pope?” http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpope.html , which has been referenced in threads in other SDMB forums, but doesn’t seem to have been addressed in here yet.
First, according to JPII’s write-up on how to choose a pope, all that is required is to be a baptized Catholic. If you aren’t a bishop, priest, or deacon yet, you get ordained one before being enthroned as Pope. (Hopefully Tom~, who seemingly has this stuff at his fingertips, will comment on this and link to the proper Vatican writeup on it.)
But what provoked me to post to this is the “Cardinal Priests and Cardinal Deacons” comment:
Actually, most of the red-clad church dignitaries who have converged on Rome are, technically, “Cardinal Priests.” The terms don’t mean what they sound like, and the distinction lies in a legal fiction.
The Pope is, of course, the Bishop of Rome. While that sounds like restating the obvious, it has a very significant application to the theory and practice of being a Cardinal.
The Catholic Church is, of course, a worldwide organization, with Bishops and Archbishops on every continent (well, except Antarctica, but you know what I mean!). The leading Archbishops are, of course, named Cardinals.
But a Cardinal is not merely an additional honorific bestowed on an Archbishop that gives him a Pope-electing franchise. It also has a historical meaning.
The Bishop of Rome is head of the Archdiocese of Rome in the same way as the Archbishop of Sydney, Wolverhampton, or Kansas City is head of that archdiocese, separately from his capacity as Pope to be head of the worldwide church.
So each Cardinal is also a titular official of something in the Archdiocese of Rome.
The seven Cardinal Bishops are heads of the “suburban sees” – the seven cities in the Rome metropolitan area that had suffragan bishops under the Archbishop of Rome from earliest times. Usually this is, like the British Lord Privy Seal and similar jobs, something of a sinecure for an elderly Cardinal whose expertise is desired, with an assistant bishop doing most of the “bishing” for the diocese.
The Cardinal Deacons, of whom I think there are six, are the heads of the Congregations which make rules and decisions in the Vatican Curia. They are analagous to deacons in a diocese, sent out by the bishop to perform particular ministries and answerable to him. In this case, they do the Pope’s work of passing on issues brought to that Congregation, making decisions and teaching, according to what their particular Congregation’s task is.
The rest of the Cardinals are Cardinal Priests. And each Cardinal, in addition to being Archbishop of Manila, Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, or wherever, is also officially a priest of one of the historic churches in Rome, principally in a strictly titular sense, though he’s expected to celebrate Mass at that church when convenient when he’s in Rome.
But the whole idea is to parallel the worldwide structure of Catholicism within the single diocesan system of Rome, making real the sense in which the Pope is both head of the Church worldwide and Bishop of Rome, through the dual roles of the Cardinals.
