Within the Church, the southern hemisphere is rising

Francis continues restructuring the Curia and making sure the universality of the Church shines through.

With the upcoming Consistory Francis is continuing along the path he set out on a year ago: restructuring the Curia and focusing on the peripheries whilst doing away with automatically assigned titles.

More than the statistics and percentage analyses, it was the pronouncement of the names of the new cardinals that really signalled change in the upcoming Consistory: most of the choices made came as a complete surprise and were totally unexpected. Pastors from the peripheries of the world, in many cases bishops of dioceses that had never had a cardinal before.

This is a sign that Pope Francis intends to continue along the path he set out on a year ago: cutting down on the number of cardinals who are members of the Curia (on 14 February their number will drop from 30 percent to 27 percent); stopping the Cardinalate from being automatically connected to certainsees, that is the unwritten tradition of naming cardinals the archbishops of certain sees considered "cardinalatial sees"; and above all giving a voice to the southern part of the world, thereby allowing the true universality of the Church to increasingly shine through.

Source: Vatican Insider