Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales

There is a passage in the canticle of Hannah (1 Samuel 2) that says something like, "From the dust he lifts up the lowly and seats them in the company of princes."  That is the verse that came to my mind when I read in the papers that the Archbishop of Manila, Gaudencio Rosales, had been named a cardinal.  This was the simple unassuming and always cheerful student at San José Seminary who later became the hardworking bishop of the remote mountain diocese of Malaybalay and afterwards the low-profile archbishop of Lipa.  Appointed archbishop of Manila, successor to a famous Cardinal, he said that all he needed for a place to live in was enough room for himself and his dog.

Undoubtedly he has been raised to the cardinalate in consideration of his position as archbishop of Manila.  But then, he became archbishop of Manila not through political patronage but in recognition of personal merit. He was a bishop who considered himself first and foremost a pastor, a shepherd. A bishop who looked on himself not as a master but a servant, not a lord but one who serves.

Students of church history will notice an interesting development in ecclesiastical practice.  In the past cardinals were chosen from the powerful families of Rome and Italy and from the high nobility of Europe.  But in recent times two peasant boys, born and bred in lowly farmhouses, have risen to become not only cardinals but popes.  Both have since been canonized.  One a saint, Pope Pius X.  The other Blessed John XXIII.

An assuming Jesuit priest who used to teach philosophy at the Gregorian University and who every afternoon walked the streets of Rome to hear confessions at the church of San Ignazio, was later honored as Cardinal Dezza. A Jesuit professor in southern France who had been among those who revolutionized modern theology was told he could no longer teach when Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis was published. "Ne doceat";  "Let him not teach." Later a more enlightened Pope elevated him as Cardinal Henri de Lubac. Three Jesuit biblical scholars have been raised to the purple. One was the great Cardinal Augustin Bea. The other the equally great Carlo Maria Martini. The third, the relatively unknown Cardinal Vanhoye.

On March 24 at the consistory in Rome, Gaudencio Rosales and the other new cardinals will be clothed with the red robes and the red biretta of the cardinalate. It was John Henry Newman, in a memorable sermon on a memorable occasion, who explained the meaning of the color red. A cardinal, he said, is "clothed with the robes of empire and of martyrdom."  Red is the color of royalty and of blood.