Pope Francis delivering a short homily during a Mass where 32 babies were baptised in the Sistine chapel at the Vatican yesterday. Photo: Reuters/Osservatore RomanoPope Francis delivering a short homily during a Mass where 32 babies were baptised in the Sistine chapel at the Vatican yesterday. Photo: Reuters/Osservatore Romano

Pope Francis put his first stamp on the group at the top of the Roman Catholic hierarchy yesterday, naming 19 new cardinals from around the world and emphasising his concern for poor countries.

Sixteen of them are “cardinal electors” under 80 and eligible to enter a conclave to elect a Pope. They come from Italy, Germany, Britain, Nicaragua, Canada, Ivory Coast, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Chile, Burkina Faso, the Philippines and Haiti. Half of them are non-Europeans, indicating the importance Pope Francis attaches to the developing world.

Pope Francis is the first Latin American Pope and the first non-European pontiff in some 1,300 years.

Pontiff offered a brief homily of some 300 words

Cardinals are the Pope’s closest advisers in the Vatican and around the world.

Apart from being church leaders in their home countries, those who are not based in the Vatican are members of key committees in Rome that decide policies that can affect the lives of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.

The new cardinal electors are aged from 55 to 74. From Latin America are Archbishop Aurelio Poli, 66, Pope Francis’s successor in the Argentine capital, and the archbishops of Managua in Nicaragua, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Santiago in Chile.

Two are from Africa – the archbishops of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and Abidjan in Ivory Coast. From Asia are the archbishops of Seoul in South Korea and Cotabato in the Philippines.

Archbishop Chibly Langlois, 55, is the first cardinal from Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, where according to the World Bank some 80 per cent of the rural population lives in abject poverty. The Philippines, Nicaragua, Ivory Coast and Brazil also have high rates of poverty.

The Pope, who made the announcement to tens of thousands of people in St Peter’s Square for his Sunday blessing, has often said since his election on March 13, that he wants a church that “is poor and for the poor”.

Only four of the cardinal electors are Vatican officials, chief among them Italian Archbishop Pietro Parolin, 58, Pope Francis’s new Secretary of State, and Archbishop Gerhard Mueller, 66, the German head of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation.

Meanwhile in another apparent first for the Vatican, Pope Francis baptised 32 babies in the Sistine Chapel yesterday, including one born to a couple who was married in a civil service rather than in Church.

The Pope has said several times since his election that the Church must not make children of couples in irregular situations feel like second-class faithful, and he agreed to baptise Giulia Scardia into the faith.

The parents of the seven-month-old girl were married in a town hall – meaning their marriage is technically not recognised by the Catholic Church.

Unlike his predecessors, who usually delivered long and theology-laden homilies at the yearly baptism event, Pope Francis offered a brief, improvised homily of some 300 words centred on the children.

Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are some of the world’s most celebrated works of art. The ceiling depicts the creation of man and the altar wall shows a severe God at the Last Judgement.

But the Pope told the mothers not to feel intimidated by the surroundings and insisted he had no qualms about breastfeeding the children there.

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