VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Two cardinals-to-be will stand out in a sea of red during a solemn consistory in St. Peter’s Basilica when Pope Francis creates 21 new cardinals Dec. 7.
Cardinals-designate Timothy Radcliffe, a British Dominican theologian, and his confrere, French Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco of Algiers, Algeria, will be wearing the simple white robes of their order and not the formal red dress of a cardinal of the Catholic Church.
“People think I’m being revolutionary, actually I’m just being traditionalist,” Cardinal-designate Radcliffe told reporters Dec. 6, the eve of his induction into the College of Cardinals.
“It’s a very new idea that when you become a cardinal, a religious stops wearing his habit,” he said. The preacher will also not be ordained a bishop, again, according to an older tradition.
“It is normal for religious not to be ordained bishops. In the 19th century, they never were. It’s a very modern idea that when people who are priests become cardinals, they should be ordained bishops,” he said.
It is also “in fidelity to my religious vocation,” he said. “In the depth of my being, I am a brother … and I wish to remain a brother” and to be “at the service of my brothers and sisters in the church.”
The Dominican priest has said when he was attracted to religious life, he was especially drawn to the Dominican order’s motto, “Veritas,” which means truth.
“We have to rediscover our love of truth,” he told reporters in response to a question about the biggest challenge facing the West. “A society which loses a love for truth falls into disintegration.”
“When we meet people who are different from us, with whom we disagree, instead of dismissing them as always wrong, we have to be open to receive the bit of truth that they have from which we can learn,” he said.
After he was ordained to the priesthood in 1971, Cardinal-designate Radcliffe was active in the British peace movement and involved in the pastoral care of people with AIDS. He has long promoted the study of Catholic social doctrine and the intersection of theology and social problems.
He was asked about his work and writings about ministering to LGBTQ+ Catholics and how that work can be done while adhering to the church’s teaching on sexuality and chastity.
When he encountered the LGBTQ+ community through his work with people suffering from AIDS, he said, “that’s when I got to see how much love and compassion there was in that LGBT community.”
“In all my years of working, it’s very rare people raise the issue of chastity. I think most of them know that I stand by the teaching of the church and so they don’t come to me to find easy ways out. What they want in the first place is friendship, welcome and recognition that they are like all of us, fellow disciples seeking to follow the will of the Lord,” he said.
When asked if there needs to be a new pastoral theology of sexuality to minister to LGBT Catholics, the cardinal-designate said, “No. I think that the fundamental wisdom of the Catholic tradition on sexuality is sound and good.”
There is an effort today, he said, to see the church’s teaching “more in Eucharistic terms because at the heart of our faith is our Lord who said, ‘This is my body, and I give it to you.’ And he gave himself once and forever to us to be wounded, but to be accepted as a gift.”
So, while there is no “new sexual ethics,” he said, the church is trying to find “nuances” or new ways to show its teaching “is liberating and good, it’s holy and it’s humane too.”
Asked what the church should do for the LGBTQ+ community, he cautioned against putting people “in boxes” or categories. “They are people like you and like me.”
“I think what the church offers is love and what it has to do is to receive the gifts that each person gives,” he said.
When asked “in which direction” the church should go regarding women, he said, “We have to obviously value the gifts of every person regardless of whether they are men or women.”
“We need to hear the voice of women,” who do have an important voice already as theologians, advisers and administrators, he said. “But I think one priority will be to hear their preaching. We need to hear the preaching of women, who will speak out of all their profound experience.”
An expert in Scripture and theology, the British Dominican served two terms as spiritual adviser to members of the Synod of Bishops on synodality and led retreats for synod members before the assemblies began.
People often underestimated the synod because they saw the meetings “in terms of some particular decisions, ordination of women to the diaconate and so on, which may be important, but the pope is inviting us to a much more fundamental renewal of the church, which is that it becomes truly a community of the baptized in which we are all missionary disciples.”
“For Pope Francis, there are more fundamental issues in the transformation of the church than the ordination of women,” he said. “There is actually a fundamental development of the church, you could say, a return to our origins which we need to make and then we will see.”
Before the synod began, he said that he thought “that the big challenge was the polarization of left and right.”
Polarization is always “a mistake,” he said, because “Catholicism is necessarily both traditional and reaching out to the kingdom.”
However, “what I discovered in that first assembly was that there was a new challenge which I had not understood,” which is how does the church become “a truly intercultural church in which no culture dominates, no culture excludes, not British, not American, not German, but it’s truly a space in which we are able to hear and receive the gifts of every culture.”
“We are in a new world, a multipolar world. China, Russia, India, all sorts of new countries are emerging,” he said. “So, the big challenge for the whole world now is what vision of unity, of human unity will we propose, which will no longer be a Western one.”
“The church has an extraordinary vocation at this moment to be a sign of hope in a world which is ever more filled with war and violence, social disintegration. The church can be a sign of the unity of humanity if we can find the courage to do this wonderful vocation,” he said.
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