Tagle: from Manila to the world, among the poor as a way of mission
Francis picked the archbishop emeritus of Manila as pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation. The 67-year-old Philippine cardinal has been one of the foremost figures of Asian Catholicism for more than 20 years. A brilliant preacher for years, he has commented on the Gospel every week in a very popular TV programme. For him, “The Church is renewed in her identity when she is missionary, that is, when she bears witness to the Kingdom of God in dialogue with cultures, religions”.
Milan (AsiaNews) – Philippine cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle is a theologian valued by three different pontiffs, who assigned him positions of great responsibility. Despite his 67 years, he has been a leading figure in the Church in Asia for at least 20 years. As a former president of Caritas Internationalis and pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation, he has met Catholic communities in every corner of the world.
All this should be enough to end the (rather animated) chatter on social media that has surrounded the cardinal in the past few days. Like with all the other profiles published over the past few days, AsiaNews is not interested in guessing if Tagle will be the next successor of Peter.
Instead, it is more important to help people understand who the prelate is. Millions of Filipinos around the world are already very familiar with him, preaching the Gospel for years in his very popular weekly television broadcast The Word Exposed. With a smile, he invites them to be acknowledged as Easter people bearing Christian witness.
Bishop "Chito," as he is popularly known in the Philippines, was born in 1957 in Imus, Metro Manila, into a Catholic family with an immigrant Chinese grandmother.
The future cardinal was 13 when Paul VI visited Manila in November 1970. “I stretched my neck and focused my eyes in order to see him as the car in which he was riding passed in front of us,” Card Tagle writes in the preface to a book dedicated to Paul VI’s travels. “And finally, a man dressed in white arrived, a face that radiated peace, joy and serenity."
At the time, that kid could not imagine how much the magisterium of Paul VI would profoundly mark his theological studies.
Ordained a priest for the Diocese of Imus in 1982, his bishop sent him three years later to the Catholic University of America in Washington where he dedicated his doctoral dissertation precisely to the theme of episcopal collegiality in the magisterium and action of Pope Paul VI.
In 1997 Pope John Paul II appointed him at the age of only 40 to the International Theological Commission, chaired by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The following year, he participated as an expert in the Special Assembly of the Synod for Asia, the first of many synods in which he was one of the players.
In October 2001, John Paul II appointed him as bishop of Imus, his ordination personally presided over by Cardinal Jaime Sin. In 2009 during his first episcopal ministry, he hosted in his diocese Asian Youth Day, which periodically brings together young Catholics from all over the continent.
Benedict XVI – who knew him well, having worked with him in the International Theological Commission – chose him in 2011 to serve as archbishop of Manila, and made him a cardinal in his last consistory in November 2012.
An engaging preacher, Tagle is a man who also knows how to speak through gestures; in 2016, for example, he celebrated Epiphany in the shantytown of Tondo, which Paul VI had visited in his historic 1970 visit.
A few months later, on the eve of the election that would see Rodrigo Duterte win, he washed the feet of the president of the Commission on Elections on Holy Thursday to raise awareness of the problem of election fraud.
In 2015 he welcomed Pope Francis to Manila on a visit marked by the huge crowds gathered for Mass at Luneta Park.
Elected that same year by the Assembly of Caritas Internationalis as its president, he led the federation of more than 160 Catholic charities until November 2022, when Pope Francis named a temporary administrator “to revise the statutes and the regulations,” and so the assembly elect Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi.
In the meantime, Francis had already called Tagle to Rome in 2019 for the crucial role of prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Vatican dicastery that oversees the dioceses in the so-called mission territories, in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania.
He is the first to say that the mission, today, goes far beyond any geographical location. “The ‘peoples’ are no longer in distant places. They can be our family members, work colleagues, digital followers,” he said just a few weeks ago, speaking at PIME.
He noted that his own experience in Asia shows that, “The Church is renewed in her identity when she is missionary, that is, when she bears witness to the Kingdom of God in dialogue with cultures, religions and the poor of the world. When she is a small flock among the great religions and religious traditions and in a young and poor people, the Church seeks the renewal that Jesus offers.”
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04/08/2017 17:14
