Pope Benedict XVI creates 24 new Cardinals

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI elevated 24 new cardinals in a festive ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, bestowing quadrangular red hats on the new members of a group that will one day elect his successor.

Two Americans were among the newly elected. Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, D.C., is seen as a bridge-builder and was greeted with waves of applause from the hundreds of supporters who came for Saturday’s ceremony. Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, a former archbishop of St. Louis, is now the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, a Vatican court, and is known for his outspoken criticism of President Obama and of Catholics who are abortion rights supporters.

Dressed in heavy golden vestments, Benedict called on the new cardinals to devote themselves entirely to humble service to the church, whose force, he said, is “not the logic of supremacy, of power according to human criteria, but the logic of bowing down to wash feet, the logic of service, the logic of the cross which is at the base of every exercise of power.”

Cardinals from around the world had come to Rome for Saturday’s consistory, and on Friday they convened for a daylong meeting to discuss pressing issues facing the church, including the sexual abuse crisis, religious liberty, the liturgy and a new rite for allowing Anglicans to convert en masse to Catholicism.

At the meeting, Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that the Vatican would soon issue new guidelines to help local bishops’ conferences deal with abuse cases, taking into consideration the need to protect children and cooperate with civil authorities.

The guidelines have not been completed, but it appears that they will be a significant step toward clarifying longstanding and widespread confusion about the Vatican’s own rules for handling abuse cases.

The cardinals devoted half of their daylong meeting to issues of religious liberty, a particularly pressing issue after it emerged last week that China planned to ordain a bishop without the pope’s consent on Saturday, its first such ordination since 2006.

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