On Saturday, December 7, the Holy Father held the Ordinary Public Consistory in St. Peter's Basilica to create 21 new Cardinals, including two of our brothers: Archbishop Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera, OFM, of Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Archbishop Jaime Spengler, OFM, Archbishop of Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Pope read the formula of creation and then made the proclamation of the new cardinals. After the profession of faith, the oath of fidelity and obedience to Pope Francis and his successors, the cardinals received from the Pope the Bull of Creation of Cardinals, the zucchetto, the cap and the cardinal's ring.
During his homily, Pope Francis invited the cardinals to walk together on the path of Jesus. "To return to the heart to get back on the same path as Jesus, this is what we need. And today, in particular to you, dear Brothers who receive the Cardinalate, I would like to say: take care to walk the path of Jesus. And what does this mean? To follow the path of Jesus means first of all to return to him and to put him back at the center of everything. In the spiritual life as in the pastoral life, we sometimes risk concentrating on the contours, forgetting the essential... Instead, we always need to return to the centre, to recover the foundation, to strip ourselves of what is superfluous in order to clothe ourselves in Christ (cf. Rom 13:14). Even the word "hinge" reminds us of this, indicating the pivot on which the leaf of a door is inserted: it is a firm point of support, of support. Here, dear brothers: Jesus is the fundamental point of support, the center of gravity of our service, the 'cardinal point' that guides our whole life."
