CARDINAL JUAN JOSE OMELLA
The archbishop of Barcelona is a person after Pope Francis’ personal coronary heart. Unassuming and good-natured, he lives a humble life regardless of his lofty title, dedicating his Church profession to pastoral care, selling social justice and embodying a compassionate and inclusive imaginative and prescient of Catholicism.
“We should not see actuality solely by the eyes of those that have probably the most, but additionally by the eyes of the poor,” he advised the Crux information web site in April 2022, in phrases reflecting Pope Francis’ world imaginative and prescient.
He was born in 1946 within the village of Cretas in northeastern Spain. After being ordained in 1970, he served as a priest in plenty of Spanish parishes and likewise spent a yr as a missionary in Zaire, now referred to as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Underscoring his dedication to social causes, he labored intently with Spain’s Manos Unidas charity from 1999 to 2015, which tackles famine, illness and poverty within the growing world.
He turned a bishop in 1996 and was promoted to archbishop of Barcelona in 2015. Only one yr later, Pope Francis gave him a crimson cardinal’s hat – a transfer seen as a transparent endorsement of Omella’s progressive tendencies, which stand in distinction to extra conservative components that after dominated the Spanish Church.
Omella, 79, is a former president of Spain’s bishops’ convention. He needed to cope with the fallout from an impartial fee in 2023 that estimated that greater than 200,000 minors might have been sexually abused by Spanish clergy for many years.
Omella has repeatedly requested for forgiveness for the mismanagement of sexual abuse, however has denied that so many youngsters have been abused, with an inner Church investigation figuring out simply 927 victims for the reason that Nineteen Forties.
“On the finish of the day, numbers don’t get us anyplace. The vital factor is the folks and to make amends so far as attainable,” he mentioned.
“Blaming just isn’t the best way. The issue doesn’t belong to the Church, it belongs to society as a complete.”
In 2023, Pope Francis invited Omella to hitch his nine-member kitchen cupboard of cardinals to advise him on questions of governance.
If the conclave decides the Church wants a brand new method, then this proximity will rely towards Omella.
