Pope welcomes like-minded cardinals from Catholicism’s periphery to the Vatican

Pope Francis is putting a personal imprint on the group of men who will choose his successor, tapping like-minded cardinals from some of the world’s smallest, most remote and poverty-wracked nations to help him run the Catholic Church.

Old friends, Vatican bureaucrats and sentimental favourites are also getting red hats on Saturday when Francis presides over his first cardinal-making ceremony to bring 19 new “princes” of the church into the College of Cardinals. Two come from Africa, two from Asia and six from Francis’ native Latin America, which is home to nearly half the world’s Catholics but is grossly under-represented in the church’s hierarchy.

There’s Cardinal-designate Chibly Langlois, who isn’t even an archbishop but rather the 55-year-old bishop of Les Cayes and now Haiti’s first-ever cardinal. Another Caribbean cardinal, Kelvin Edward Felix, was for 25 years the archbishop of tiny Castries, St Lucia, with a population of 163,000.

The archbishop of Managua, Nicaragua, Leopoldo Jose Brenes Solorzano, is an old friend who worked alongside the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in preparing the seminal document of the pope’s vision of a missionary church – the so-called Aparecida Document produced by the 2007 summit of Latin American bishops. Nicaragua’s second cardinal ever, Brenes has made an impression at the Vatican with his unruly gray curls and the blue jeans he donned for the flight to Rome.

Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, archbishop of Seoul, South Korea, has serious Catholic credentials: His ancestors were among the lay people who brought Christianity to the Korean peninsula in the 19th century, and his great-great grandfather and his wife were executed as part of the Joseon Dynasty’s persecution of Christians, Asian Catholic news agency UCANews reported. Of the six children in his immediate family, three became priests.