ADOPT A CARDINAL

A cool website that lets normal people be part of the conclave.

This is Cardinal Baselios Cleemis. He is the Major Archbishop of the Archeparchy of Trivandrum in the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church in Thiruvananthapuram, India.

Until today, I had never heard of him, nor of pretty much any of the other terms or places mentioned in that second sentence. (Honestly, beyond the word “archbishop” I got nothing.)

But though I know nothing about him, Cardinal Cleemis and I are getting close. I was randomly assigned his name, along with this photograph, as my cardinal to pray for during the papal conclave, which begins tomorrow!

All of this came about through Friend of the Wow Ellen Ritchey. Last week when I was writing a bunch about Francis, Ellen posted a comment about how, before the last conclave, friends had told her about a website called Adopt a Cardinal where they will give you a random cardinal to pray for during the proceedings. (She got Bergoglio last time!)

Ellen very kindly agreed to do an interview with me about Adopt a Cardinal, which led to me talking to her friend Anne Marie Vencill, who had first suggested Adopt a Cardinal to her, and then to one of the people who helped create it.

I wrote a piece that came out last night for Religion News Services about Ellen and Anne Marie and Adopt a Cardinal. You might like it. (One story I’ve already heard that really moved me: One of my friends got Nigerian Cardinal Peter Ebere Okpaleke, who had to quit his diocese because his priests refused to accept him on account of his ethnic group. Conclave aside, what a gift that there is this service that is enabling people to get to know him and pray for him.

When we talked I asked Ellen what she’s hoping for from the next pope. “The low bar for me is that I hope we don’t go backwards,” she told me. “And my highest hope is that it will be somebody who can pick up where he left off, continue the synodal process, continue looking at all these possibilities, like the diaconate for women, because we need it. A lot of people are not being served by the church because there just aren’t enough workers to go around. There are people here more than ready to step up, and called. It’s not something I’m personally called to, but I know women that are.”

I wondered Ellen what Francis had meant to her. “He has meant hope,” she answered. “He has been in a lot of ways why I’m still here in the Catholic Church. I was a convert, I went through RCIA 35 years ago, so I’ve been here for a while. But lately, it’s been hard, it’s hard to stay in the Catholic Church. Having Francis at the head, it kept me here some days.”

“He was a pastor. He was somebody you could look to and say ‘This man is my spiritual leader or guide.’ He was doing good things—his whole charism, his humility, his concern.”

Let’s hope the next pope is a good pastor, too.