Pope Francis met with members of the College of Cardinals at the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City on July 1, 2024. (Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images)
The College of Cardinals will soon convene to vote for a successor to Pope Francis, the first-ever Latin American pontiff, who died on April 21.
Over the course of his 12-year papacy, Francis’ picks for the College of Cardinals tilted the leadership structure of the Roman Catholic Church away from its historic European base and toward countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East-North Africa region.
How we did this
This analysis looks at the regional distribution of Pope Francis’ selections for new cardinals (since 2014, the year after he became pope). It looks only at the 135 cardinals who are under 80 years old and therefore eligible to vote in the upcoming papal election. The data in this analysis comes from the Vatican website and from other websites that maintain databases of cardinals, including gcatholic.org and catholic-hierarchy.org.
For the analysis, each cardinal is assigned a single geographic region from among the following: Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America-Caribbean, Middle East-North Africa, North America and sub-Saharan Africa. Most often this is the same as their region of birth, but there are some exceptions. For instance, cardinals who lead an archdiocese are counted as being associated with the region of the world where that archdiocese is located, even if they were born in a different region. One example is Cardinal Cristobal Lopez Romero, who was born in Spain but is counted as representing the Middle East-North Africa region because he worked for the church in Morocco from 2003 through 2011 and became an archbishop there in 2017.
Cardinals who hold or have held Vatican positions are generally counted as being from the region of the world where they spent most of their years in the clergy prior to working at the Vatican.
Some decisions on cardinals’ regions are less clear-cut. For example, Cardinal Fabio Baggio was born in Italy in 1965 and worked with a missionary order there before being ordained a priest in 1992. From 1995 to 2002 he held church positions in Chile and Argentina (not as a bishop), and from 1999 to 2010 he held teaching and other positions in Latin America, Europe and Asia, before working full time at the Vatican in 2017. He became a cardinal in 2024. We classify him as representing Europe (his birth region) since his pre-Vatican clerical career could not be easily associated with a single region.
Cardinal George Koovakad, who was born in India, is counted as representing Asia even though more of his clerical career was spent in Latin America than in other regions, because that service in Latin America consisted of work in Vatican embassies (called nunciatures) as opposed to leading a diocese.
(In previous versions of this post, our analyses tended to favor a cardinals’ birth region over where they worked. As a result, figures for the 2013 breakdown of cardinals are slightly different – by 1 percentage point – for Europe, Latin America-Caribbean, Asia-Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa than they were in previous versions of this post.)
The analysis also uses data on national breakdowns of the worldwide Catholic population compiled by the Vatican in the 2013 and 2022 editions of its annual yearbook, “Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesaie,” or “Statistical Yearbook of the Church.” The Vatican figures are based on the number of baptized Catholics in each country. (Previous versions of this post used 2010 survey data from Pew Research Center’s demographic study “The Global Catholic Population.”)
There are 135 cardinals who are under 80 years old and thus eligible to vote in the coming papal election. Here’s a look at the regional breakdown of voting cardinals, compared with when Francis became pope in 2013:
The Asia-Pacific region accounts for 18% of voting-age cardinals, up from 10% in 2013.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 12% of cardinals, up from 8%.
The Latin America-Caribbean region has 18%, up from 17%.
The Middle East-North Africa region has 3%, up from 2%.
Europe has 40%, down from 51%.
North America accounts for 10%, down from 12%.
A look at Francis’ picks over time
Francis, an Argentine who was the first pope from outside Europe since the eighth century, still picked more cardinals from Europe than from any other region.
Of the 108 cardinals who were appointed by Francis and are currently eligible to vote, 38% are from Europe, 19% are from Latin America and the Caribbean, 19% are from the Asia-Pacific region, 12% are from sub-Saharan Africa, 7% are from North America and 4% are from the Middle East and North Africa.
Altogether, cardinals appointed by Francis make up 80% of the 135 voting members of the College of Cardinals. The remainder were appointed by Pope Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II.
Cardinals and the world Catholic population
Vatican data from 2022 shows that 21% of the global Catholic population lives in Europe, so the continent remains heavily overrepresented among all voting cardinals (40% of whom are from Europe). By this measure, the most underrepresented region within the church’s leadership – even with Francis’ picks – is the Latin America-Caribbean region, which was home to 41% of the worldwide Catholic population as of 2022 but has only 18% of the voting cardinals.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published Nov. 17, 2016.
