VATICAN CITY (RNS) — With less than two days left before they sequester themselves in the Vatican’s ornate Sistine Chapel to cast their first votes for the next pope, cardinals said they are still narrowing the possible candidates as they get to know each other and get a sense of their respective visions for the future of Catholicism.
“We are still reflecting on the affairs of the universal church and also searching for a major person to follow the pontificate,” Cardinal Baselios Cleemis, head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, an Eastern rite church in communion with Rome, told Religion News Service as he left a pre-conclave meeting of cardinals on Monday (May 5).
Like other cardinals in recent days, Cleemis, who is based in India, emphasized that the cardinals will not be making a choice based on nationality or ethnicity, despite the diversity of the college of cardinals and the emphasis Pope Francis, who elevated many of them to the cardinalate, placed on including the church’s far-flung “peripheries.”
“Right now we are in prayer, and we need to remain calm,” said Cardinal Giorgio Marengo, an Italian prelate tapped by Francis to head the church’s missionary jurisdiction in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Marengo is the first occupant of his post to …