Tag: Christianity

Today the Church celebrates St. Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus Christ. In every account of Jesus’ Passion and Death in the Gospels, St. Joseph is named. 

After Christ was crucified, Joseph, a member of the Jewish council, went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Once he received permission, Joseph had Jesus’ body laid in a tomb. 

The Gospels call Joseph a devout and just man who was waiting for the kingdom of God. He followed Jesus’ public ministry, but feared retaliation from other members of the Jewish council. 

Your attitude towards The Meaning and Significance of FastingFasting is a necessary means for success in the spiritual life and for attaining salvation; for fasting—depriving the flesh of excessive food and drink—weakens the force of sensual drives.

“>fasting is one of the criteria for evaluating your faith.

Of course, it is true that you are not your own judge. We cannot give a fair self-assessment or an assessment of our neighbor. Therefore, thorough, true judgment of us belongs to God alone, and we were commanded: Judge not (Matt. 7:1). But our attitude towards fasting is still a criterion of whether we love the Church as a mother or not, whether we have experienced the benefits of abstinence or not, whether we cling to worldly customs or value our inner freedom—all this is manifested in our attitude towards fasting.

A train in which a young lady is traveling from afar to her beloved boyfriend has not pulled into the station yet, but the fellow is already walking to and fro on the platform, looking at his watch. His heart now misses a beat, now suddenly beats very, very fast in his chest. The young man is waiting. His state is called longing, a foretaste and anticipation of happiness. You should greet Lent in the same state.

Spring Cleaning of the SoulFasting is a type of service of God, where the main goal is not to kill the flesh, but to subdue the insatiable body to the soul, rising it up and bringing it closer to Christ.

“>The spring of the soul, the labor of cleansing undertaken for the sake of a worthy Paschal celebration—that is what fasting is. It is self-crucifixion, the voluntary mortification of your proud and crafty being for the sake of participation in the Resurrection of Christ. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts (Gal. 5:24).

To approach Lent with a feeling of increasing inner Let Us Enter the Fast With JoyThis pledge of love is expected and required, and even lovingly entreated of us by Christ—the Divine lover of our souls!

“>joy means to feel the fragrance of the Paschal triumphant cry: “Christ is Risen!”, and to strive consciously for the Paradise from where this fragrance pours forth. Because of the savour of Thy good ointments Thy name is as ointment poured forth (Cant. 1:2).

A civilization that grew out of Christianity and received the prefix “post-” is a civilization corroded by individualism. The attitude towards everything in the world is determined by our “personal choice” and “private opinion”. “I want it that way”, and “I think so,” people say on any occasion. Strangely enough, in such conditions people have less and less ability to make well thought-out personal judgments. They think the same things more and more often, because they get information from the same TV programs. The triumph of individualism actually leads to the triumph of monotony and inexpressiveness. In relation to religion, this dull amorphousness hides behind commonplaces like, “Don’t mess with my soul”, “Faith is a personal matter for everyone”, and so on.

Why do we touch upon these subjects in talking about fasting? Because the Truth exists objectively, and if that so, then it must be served. A believer strives to serve the incarnate Truth, Christ, while people around him keep singing him the same song, although to different melodies: “There is no Truth”; “Religion is a private matter”; “Every man to his own taste”; and the like. Behind these songs lies only one motive: “Have a lot of fun!”, and the same demonic prayer: “My will be done.” In such conditions, a believer is called to battle by his very life and confession of the faith. The visor has been lowered, his name has been announced, the drums have started beating, and the stands have frozen.

It goes without saying that although we are all called to battle, not all of us are soldiers at heart. Where can we look for a way out and a solution to the conflict? In a sense of conciliarity!

We should warm up and cultivate a sense of belonging to the Universal Church in our hearts. No matter how few people are fasting and praying around us, we are nevertheless fasting together and simultaneously with millions of believers. The Creed that I profess is not a personal one that I have composed. This is the faith of the Apostolic Church, the faith in which millions of souls have already been saved and millions more are being saved. The great feasts that we celebrate concern not only those whom we see around us in church, but also multitudes of people singing the praises of the Lord in different languages simultaneously. The same applies to Lent. You do not fast for your personal whims, but for Christ’s sake. You don’t fast when you want to, but when the Church blesses you to. You don’t fast alone, but together with a great many brothers and sisters, whose invisible labors strengthen your weak soul in loneliness.

The sense of conciliarity is that of connection with the Church scattered on the Earth and with the general assembly and Church of the firstborn, which are written in Heaven (Heb. 12:23). And if so, then everything is much calmer and more joyful than it seems at first glance at the sight of vulgarity in everyday life.

We can pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, through the prayers of all those who repent before Thee, accept my repentance”; “Through the prayers of all those who fast sincerely and humble their hearts before Thee, teach me to fast too.”

In this way we will enter into spiritual contact not just with those whom we habitually call “brothers and sisters”, but with real brothers and sisters in the spirit of prayer and repentance, with real kin of a large church family.

We can and should pray not only for mercy for ourselves through their prayers, but also ask the Lord, Lord, accept all those who turn their hearts to Thee. Listen to people’s entreaties and petitions. Forgive the sins of all who weep over their sins.” Since the prayer of faith is never in vain, we will support at least one soul if only for a moment in this way.

Such prayers are true conciliarity and a real victory over petty egoism and moldy individualism, which have stuck in the minds of our contemporaries like the haunting melody of a vulgar smash hit. They are similar to the prayers that are offered up on Saturday on the eve of Forgiveness Sunday. On this day the Church commemorates all the men and women who have attained true holiness through fasting and prayer. These are the monastic fathers and mothers and the holy “fools-for-Christ”. The Church seeks to secure their prayerful help so that those who put the devil to shame with the weapon of fasting can help us in a similar struggle.

So, none of us are lone warriors. On the contrary, each one of us must take his place in the ranks of a disciplined army, obedient to the commander (even if each individual warrior is far from a “universal soldier”). Such an army, in whose ranks every fighter is a brave man and a hero, will always defeat the enemy. But there is no general discipline and unity in it.

A sense of spiritual fellowship and a sense of belonging to the great host, led by Jesus Christ, Who is Risen from the Dead, will be able to turn our personal weakness into conciliar power. And what has been impossible to change in your feeble soul for years before fasting and without fasting will be changed by the power of grace bestowed by God on the fasting Church.

So go forward, warriors of Christ, to meet the Risen One! “Behold, through the Cross joy hath come to all the world”! Go forward, strengthening and encouraging each other, and don’t show your back to the enemy! Let us mentally add three words to the Creed for the period of Lent: “I believe in one Holy, Catholic, which has entered into the feat of fasting, and Apostolic Church!”

Several hours after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed into the Patapsco River March 26, more than 200 people, many of them still in a state of shock, gathered in prayer at a 5:30 p.m. Mass at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore.

The bridge collapsed about 1:30 a.m. after a 900-foot container ship seemed to have problems with its power and collided into one of the bridge’s support pilings.

Six construction workers who had been working on the bridge at the time of its collapse are missing and presumed dead. Two other construction workers were rescued, one of them hospitalized. There were also several cars that plunged into the river.

In his homily at the somber liturgy, Archbishop William E. Lori encouraged prayers for those whose lives were lost, their survivors and all whose lives and livelihoods will be impacted by the collapse. He also encouraged the congregation to resolve to love those God has placed in their lives and to let them know how much they are loved.

“Our minds turn first and foremost to those whose lives were lost and the loved ones who are facing this unthinkable and unexpected news,” Archbishop Lori said. “While we know that our lives are fragile, a moment such as this reminds us what can change in but an instant. In the charity of our prayers tonight, we lift up these souls, those who have gone and those who remain, to the Lord of life and love.”

The archbishop noted that in the days and weeks ahead, many others will be affected by the tragedy.

“Seafarers from across the globe, people who already labor under very difficult conditions, are now stranded in the Port of Baltimore,” he said. “Many men and women throughout our region whose livelihoods depend on our port are filled with fear and uncertainty as they look at the road that lies ahead.”

The archbishop said communities across the region will be “impacted by the severing of this vital transportation link.” He emphasized that the days ahead will demand “ongoing concern, love and generosity” in support of those affected by the collapse.

“It is often the case that when tragedy strikes, we are shaken from our normal way of seeing things; our hearts are moved to think of those who are impacted and suffering,” he said. “But as time goes by and the normal demands of daily life impose themselves upon us, it is easy for us to forget this experience and to forget those whose lives will not go back to normal.”

Auxiliary Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, who concelebrated the Mass along with Auxiliary Bishop Adam J. Parker, told the Catholic Review, Baltimore’s archdiocesan news outlet, that Redemptorist Father Ako Walker was with the families of the six construction workers as they awaited news about their loved ones. The U.S. Coast Guard announced late in the day it had ended its search-and-rescue operation. Father Walker is the bilingual pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus-Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood. The construction workers are all believed to be Hispanic.

“He’s there and offering prayer and presence,” Bishop Lewandowski said. “It’s a very sad situation. It’s good that he can be there and, through him, the church can offer comfort and reassurance to the families. I just can’t imagine what they must be going through.”

The bishop said the church has offered whatever support it can through the Esperanza Center, a Catholic Charities operation in East Baltimore that supports immigrant communities. In the event that families will need churches for funerals, Bishop Lewandowski said, that also will be made available.

The Catholic Church has been working with Giuliana Valencia-Banks, Baltimore County’s immigrant affairs outreach coordinator and a former employee of the Esperanza Center, to help coordinate support to families.

Bishop Lewandowski noted that Catholic leaders also have been in touch with people they know in the Hispanic community who do high-level bridge construction work to check on their safety since many of them are parishioners of Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“Some called back and some did not,” he said.

Andy Middleton, director of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Apostleship of the Sea ministry to seafarers at the Port of Baltimore, offered one of the readings at the cathedral Mass.

Middleton told the Catholic Review that Apostleship of the Sea had ministered to members of the crew of the cargo ship Dali March 24 and 25, delivering Easter boxes to the ship’s crew. He had been in touch with one of the crew members on the disabled cargo ship “four or five times” after the bridge collapse, he said.

“It’s a matter of staying in contact with them,” he said, noting that everyone on the ship was safe and uninjured. “They know that we are praying with them.”

Lora Hargrove, a parishioner of St. Bernardine in West Baltimore and the interfaith outreach director for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, represented the governor at the cathedral liturgy.

Following the Mass, she told the Catholic Review it was important for her to be present “to represent all faiths together so that we can watch each other, watch over each other — pray with each other.”

Father Kevin Ewing, pastor of the Catholic Community of South Baltimore, told the Catholic Review earlier in the day that many of his parishioners, their family members and others are associated with the Port of Baltimore as ship workers or stevedores. The parish offered a 7 p.m. Mass March 26 at Our Lady of Good Counsel to pray for all those affected by the tragedy.

“We’ve heard from family members in that regard who just want to come together to pray,” he said. “It’s a chance for us to try and see how we can help them navigate however their lives or their livelihood is impacted.”

The Catholic Community of South Baltimore, made up of Our Lady of Good Counsel, St. Mary Star of the Sea and Holy Cross, has been in touch with Apostleship of the Sea to provide whatever material support or accompaniment that may be needed in the months to come, Father Ewing said.

According to a March 26 statement from the Port of Baltimore, vessel traffic into and out of the port has been suspended until further notice.

In an afternoon briefing at the White House, President Joe Biden pledged to use federal resources to rebuild the bridge. He noted that the Port of Baltimore is one of the nation’s largest shipping hubs, handling a record amount of cargo last year.

He said that 15,000 jobs “depend on that port. And we’re going to do everything we can to protect those jobs and help those workers.” The bridge is important to the entire Northeast Corridor, with more than 30,000 vehicles crossing it every day, he added.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was constructed between 1972 and 1977 at a cost of $60.3 million. The four-lane bridge had covered 1.6 miles and had a traffic volume of 11.3 million vehicles annually.

The pews may be a bit more crowded at Mass this Easter — but on balance, regular church attendance in the U.S. continues to decline across the board, particularly among Catholics.

Gallup poll results released March 25 show that just three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services regularly, 21% every week and 9% almost every week.

A reported 11% attend religious services about once a month, while 25% seldom and 31% never attend.

The survey was based on cell and landline telephone interviews from a number of Gallup polls conducted in 2021-2023 among 32,445 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Topping the list of the most observant adherents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), with two-thirds saying they attend church weekly or almost weekly.

Forty-four percent of Protestant and nondenominational Christians attend services regularly, followed by 38% of Muslims and 33% of Catholics.

Gallup said that “majorities of Jewish, Orthodox, Buddhist and Hindu Americans say they seldom or never attend religious services.”

Twenty years ago, “an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week,” said Gallup.

The polling firm also observed that “among religious groups, Catholics show one of the larger drops in attendance (over the past two decades), from 45% to 33%, while there are slightly smaller decreases among Orthodox (9 percentage points) and Hindu followers ( 8 points).”

Gallup said the general decline in religious service attendance among U.S. residents “is largely driven by the increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation — 9% in 2000-2003 versus 21% in 2021-2023 — almost all of whom do not attend services regularly.”

At the same time, “Muslim and Jewish Americans have shown slight increases in religious service attendance over the past two decades,” said Gallup, with the former rising from 34% to 38% and the latter from 15% to 22%.

Gallup predicts that “church attendance will likely continue to decline in the future, given younger Americans’ weaker attachments to religion.”

Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 35% say they have no religious preference or affiliation, with 32% identifying themselves as Protestant and just 19% as Catholic. Regardless of their affiliation or lack thereof, young adults are “much less likely” as a whole to attend religious services, with 22% — eight points below the national average — doing so.

Gallup said the trends it observed in this poll “are consistent with other Gallup indicators of religious beliefs and practices, including the importance of religion to Americans and formal membership in churches and other houses of worship.”

Odessa, Odessa Province, Ukraine, March 28, 2024

Photo: Odessa Diocese (YouTube)     

The Odessa Diocese of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church made an important donation to the oncohemtaology department of the local children’s hospital this week.

With the blessing of His Eminence Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa, the diocese handed over a platelet incubator and medicine on Tuesday, the diocese reports.

The funds were raised at church fairs in honor of the feast of the Meeting of the Lord and World Cancer Day.

The charitable activities of the Odessa Diocese can be supported at

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Just before some 1,500 priests, bishops and cardinals renewed their priestly promises, Pope Francis asked them to embrace “compunction,” which he said was “an aspect of the spiritual life that has been somewhat neglected yet remains essential.”

Looking at its etymology, he said that “compunction is ‘a piercing of the heart’ that is painful and evokes tears of repentance,” but it also is the only path to spiritual growth and to a merciful ministry to others.

Presiding over the chrism Mass March 28 in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis ended his lengthy homily by thanking the priests present and, by extension, those around the world.

“Thank you, dear priests, for your open and docile hearts. Thank you for all your hard work and your tears. Thank you, because you bring the miracle of God’s mercy to our brothers and sisters in today’s world,” he said. “May the Lord console you, strengthen you and reward you.”

Pope Francis preached for more than 20 minutes without apparent difficulty. While he presided over the chrism Mass, which is named after the olive oil mixed with balsam that is blessed during the liturgy, the principal concelebrant at the altar was Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, the pope’s vicar for Rome.

The Holy Week Mass was the first major liturgical celebration in the basilica since the towering baldachin over the main altar was wrapped in scaffolding for a 10-month restoration project funded by the Knights of Columbus.

Some 40 cardinals, 40 bishops and 1,500 priests concelebrated the liturgy.

After the homily, the clergy present renewed the promises made to their bishop at their ordinations and pledged to strive to be more united to Christ, “faithful stewards” of the sacraments and zealous pastors of souls.

Twelve deacons then wheeled large silver urns of oil down the center aisle of St. Peter’s Basilica for the pope’s blessing. The blessed oils will be distributed to Rome parishes and used for the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, ordination and the anointing of the sick in the coming year.

In his homily, Pope Francis said that compunction is “not a sense of guilt that makes us discouraged or obsessed with our unworthiness, but a beneficial ‘piercing’ that purifies and heals the heart” and often leads to the gift of tears, which are “the holiest waters after those of baptism.”

Christians who feel compunction, he said, “increasingly feel themselves brothers and sisters to all the sinners of the world, setting aside airs of superiority and harsh judgments” and are “filled with a burning desire to show love and make reparation.”

“Dear brother priests, from us, his shepherds, the Lord desires not harshness but love, and tears for those who have strayed,” the pope said. “How greatly we need to be set free from harshness and recrimination, selfishness and ambition, rigidity and frustration, in order to entrust ourselves completely to God and to find in him the calm that shields us from the storms raging all around us.”

In increasingly secular societies, Pope Francis said, priests and other church workers can be tempted to be “hyperactive” and yet feel completely inadequate.

“When that happens, we can become bitter and prickly,” he said. But “if bitterness and compunction are directed not to the world but to our own hearts, the Lord will not fail to visit us and raise us up.”

Compunction, Pope Francis said, should promote “a spirit of repentance,” but one motivated by love for the Lord and certain of the Lord’s love always.

“Let us rediscover our need to cultivate prayer that is not obligatory and functional, but freely chosen, tranquil and prolonged,” he told the priests. “Let us return to adoration and the prayer of the heart. Let us repeat: Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Let us sense God’s grandeur even as we contemplate our own sinfulness and open our hearts to the healing power of his gaze.”

Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania, March 28, 2024

Photo: mitropolia-ardealului.ro     

In honor of the feast of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos, the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Sibiu offered gifts to mothers at the local maternity hospital on Sunday.

The Basilica News Agency’s report refers to the Annunciation as “Christian Mother’s Day.”

The gifts included diapers, hygiene products, and baby food.

“The Good News reminds all mothers, all Christian women, that the Mother of God is their protector and model, that they are called to service and a holy sacrifice, to bear fruit and make new branches of the Church and society,” said Fr. Adrian Roman, head of the diocese’s social-philanthropic department.

“We assure them that they can always find encouragement and support in the Church, because there are not a few delicate situations such as a pregnancy crisis or the precariousness of the material means of raising newborns,” the priest added.

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Now, on Easter, is the cause of a Christian’s joy made manifest — the resurrection of Our Lord!

If Jesus Christ really defeated death by rising from a dank tomb, as he promised, then it is possible for Christians to live in steady joy. Even during the recurring seasons of sadness and perplexity, the resurrection miracle preserves room in our hearts for gladness, or at least the glow of its near promise.

But the resurrection of Christ also has something special to say to the cynicism that seems to have taken hold of our society. 

Modern secular man’s great despair, whose fruits we see all around us in the dysfunction and hopelessness of too many people in our society, may be attributed to his disbelief in miracles. This man is taught from childhood to consider the natural, material world the entire sum of existence. When his life is just a series of natural occurrences, he is unable to look higher and think about life very seriously.  

This man is unable to embrace a supernatural outlook, in which the natural world is only a part of an open system, a system in which things operate by natural law most of the time but are interrupted and redirected by the hand of God. These interruptions are called miracles. And the greatest miracle is the empty tomb in the garden of Golgotha.

We can’t blame people for not believing in miracles. Even the Christian establishment and its teachers have, for some time, been poo-pooing them, perhaps maintaining a belief in the Resurrection or the True Presence but putting forth psychological/material explanations for “minor” phenomena. There are those, for example, who give sermons about the Gospel accounts of Jesus feeding 5,000 people that slide right past the simple divine act of multiplication, suggesting instead that the only miracle was that the Sermon on the Mount inspired a kind of radical sharing.

This downgrading of belief has had a pernicious effect. The gift of Christianity, with all the firm happiness and peace that it implies, calls us to embrace the whole gamut of Christian beliefs. And God, especially in the person of Jesus, performed miracle upon miracle, astounding and amazing the people who witnessed them. 

They were not, as some have postulated, ignorant and superstitious, ready to believe where educated modern man is skeptical. They knew that lepers didn’t recover, and that Lazarus had been long enough in the tomb to warn there would be a stench of rotting flesh when the rock was rolled back. Perhaps, in fact, they were more in touch with the natural world and its laws than we are, removed as we are by modern conveniences and man-made elaborations.

But these people believed because they saw — and then they soon forgot. The palm-laying, adoring crowds of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem are very quickly transformed into the jeering, jabbering throngs along the uphill Via Dolorosa. Having seen him make the leper’s skin as pure as that of an infant and seen him return a living son to the widow of Nain, still they turn on him and the joy of having seen the mercy of God. On the day of his passion the moments of compassion are so rare that they are described in loving detail: Veronica’s tender wiping of dripping sweat and blood, the crying of a group of women of Jerusalem.

It’s not as though we are not surrounded by miracles, confronted by miracles, bathed in miracles. We are just jaded and cynical, tired and grumpy, and we soon forget. Jesus turned water into wine at Cana, and we say, well, I’d sure like to see that! But, as St. Augustine pointed out, “We take for granted the slow miracle whereby water in the irrigation of a vineyard becomes wine. It is only when Christ turns water into wine, in a quick motion, as it were, that we stand amazed.”  Yes, the water on God’s good earth turns into wine, and the breast milk turns into tender flesh on your beloved infant, and the ordinary love of a man and his wife generates an immortal soul.

The empty tomb in the garden of Golgotha. The defeat of the great dread of our lives, the demolishing of the giant obstacle between despair and joy is the miracle of miracles. It is God with one decisive, majestic hand turning the whole sad saga of each human life into a tale of romance and adventure, in which the happy ending is assured.

The cause of our joy, indeed.

South Canaan, Pennsylvania, March 28, 2024

New icon of St. Nikolai in repose, adorning the St. Nikolai Chapel at St. Tikhon’s Seminary In 2021, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, launched an annual series of talks dedicated to St. Nikolai (Velimirović).

St. Nikolai is one of the greatest saints of the 20th century. Known as the New Chrysostom for his penetrating preaching, St. Nikolai brought much comfort to the suffering Serbian Church during the years of the Second World War. He too suffered, being imprisoned for two years at the Dachau concentration camp.

St. Nikolai also served the Church in America, living at St. Tikhon’s Monastery from 1951 until 1956 and teaching at the seminary, for which he served as rector in the 1955-1956 school year. It was in the St. Tikhon’s Seminary building that this giant of Orthodoxy reposed on March 18, 1956, under suspect circumstances. The seminary chapel is dedicated to his memory.

This year’s talk was offered by Fr. Yaroslav Sudick, a priest of 65 years, who was close to St. Nikolai during his time as a seminarian at St. Tikhon’s:

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“You’ll never see a guy like that again. There’s only one,” Fr. Yaroslav said.

Last year’s talk was offered by Fr. Daniel Geeza, who also knew St. Nikolai during his time at the seminary:

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ROME — With the death March 15 of German Cardinal Paul Cordes, a longtime stalwart of the papacies of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the total number of cardinals fell to 238. Because Cordes was 89, the number of cardinals under 80, and thus eligible to participate in the next conclave, remains unchanged at 129.

In all, there are still a robust total of 73 cardinals over the age of 80 who were appointed by either John Paul or Benedict, meaning the institutional memory of those papacies is still very much alive within the college.

Even among those cardinals under 80, there’s still a healthy 34 Princes of the Church who date from the two papacies prior to Pope Francis — eight appointed by John Paul, and the remaining 26 by Benedict. The longest-serving of that group is Cardinal Vinko Puljić, the retired archbishop of Sarajevo, who was given his red hat by John Paul in 1994, and who today is 78.

(The cohort of voting-age cardinals named by previous popes will fall to 32 in June, when both Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet and American Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston turn 80.)

The youngest member of the group is Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, head of India’s Syro-Malankara church, who’s just 64, and who was made a cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2012. As a result, Francis theoretically would have to reign another 16 years, to the highly unlikely age of 103, before the body of cardinal-electors would be composed entirely of his selections.

The last time a papal election took place, in 2013, the roster was uniformly made up of cardinals named by either John Paul or Benedict, in large part because John Paul had such a long papacy at almost 27 years.

Surveying the lineup of voting-age cardinals who are holdovers from previous administrations, what seems most striking is how they seem to run the gamut from enthusiastic allies and supporters of Francis to plausible alternatives when the time comes to make a choice between continuity and change.

Among cardinals appointed by previous popes who nonetheless seem identified with this one, there’s Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, for example, a longtime member of Francis’ council of cardinal advisers, and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, who emerged as a forceful defender of Francis’ cautious opening to Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics in 2016’s Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”).

Also in this group would be Argentinian Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, former head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Eastern Churches and currently the vice-dean of the College of Cardinals. Named a cardinal by Benedict in 2007, Sandri also has been a reliable ally of Francis, and today serves on a jury in Abu Dhabi that awards an annual prize named for “human fraternity,” the key concept in a joint document signed by Francis and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, in 2019.

Probably the best examples, however, of cardinals who rose up under previous popes but who’ve thoroughly embraced the new regime would be Cardinal Luis Antonio “Chito” Tagle of the Philippines, currently pro-prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, and Cardinal João Bráz de Aviz of Brazil, who heads the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, better known as the “Dicastery for Religious.”

Honestly, it’s difficult even for seasoned Vatican-watchers to recall that Tagle and Bráz were both named cardinals by Benedict, so identified are they with the vision and outlook of the Francis era. Indeed, some observers regard the 66-year-old Tagle as a plausible candidate for the papacy himself among those cardinals wishing to continue the Francis agenda.

(Actually, the single best choice for a cardinal named by a previous pope who’s completely identified himself with Francis is Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, the longtime coordinator of the council of cardinals, but he’s now 81.)

On the other hand, there are several figures among the holdover cardinals who are perceived to represent a somewhat more conservative and traditionally minded option in Catholicism, some of whom continue to be important points of reference in Church affairs.

That group includes Cardinal Péter Erdő of Budapest, who was named a cardinal by John Paul in 2003. A canon lawyer by training, Erdő recently led the Hungarian bishops in essentially rejecting the Vatican document Fiducia Supplicans (“Supplicating Trust”), which authorized nonliturgical blessings of same-sex unions. A Dec. 27 statement from the bishops instructed priests to avoid blessing same-sex couples.

There’s also Cardinal Cardinal Wim Eijk of Utrecht in the Netherlands, a noted conservative who helped lead the opposition to Amoris Laetitia in 2016, and who also scolded Francis in 2018 for failing to reprimand the German bishops for a draft proposal that would allow Protestants to receive the Eucharist under certain circumstances. By failing to publicly reject the idea, Eijk warned, Francis was promoting “a drift towards apostasy.”

Like Erdő, Eijk also recently joined his fellow Dutch bishops in distancing themselves from Fiducia Supplicans.

One might also point to Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith of Sri Lanka, who served as the No. 2 official in the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments from 2005 to 2009, where he was known as il piccolo Ratzinger (“Little Ratzinger”), in part for his short stature and in part for his affinity with Benedict. Ranjith has largely stayed out of the controversies during the Francis era, but those who remember his time in Rome haven’t forgotten his provenance.

Also among the holdovers are figures even more clearly identified with the opposition to Francis, including Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States and Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, both elected to the college by Benedict in the same consistory in November 2010.

So, what can we conclude from this survey of cardinals named by previous popes who nevertheless remain important players today?

If nothing else, probably this: Just because a cardinal was appointed by one pope doesn’t mean he’s automatically going to favor a photocopy as that pope’s successor. Some will want continuity, while others will embrace change. Therefore, don’t get too comfortable with the idea that since Francis has named a preponderance of the cardinals who will elect his successor, we can guess the result.

It has never been thus, and there’s no special reason to assume it will be this time either.