The secret vote to elect the next Pope, called Conclave, begins on Wednesday (7). Cardinals from around the world gather in the Sistine Chapel to decide who will lead the Catholic Church in the coming years.
Pope Francis “internationalized” the College of Cardinals, gathering increasingly diverse number of nationalities.
Seven Brazilians may vote for this conclave. Among them, we highlight Dom Sérgio da Rocha, current archbishop in Salvador, Bahia. He was close to Pope Francis, as he was part of a group whose task was to help him govern the church.
Who is Dom Sérgio da Rocha
Sérgio da Rocha was born in double, in the interior of São Paulo, on October 21, 1959. He was ordained priest in 1984.
Dom Sérgio holds a master’s degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Faculty of Theology Our Lady of the Assumption in São Paulo, and a doctor from the Alfonsian Academy of the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome.
He was named Coadjuctor Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Teresina by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. A year later, in September 2008, he took over the Archdiocese as a metropolitan archbishop. In 2011, was appointed metropolitan archbishop of Brasilia.
Already in the pontificate of Francisco, on November 19, 2016, Dom Sérgio was proclaimed Cardinal.
On March 11, 2020, he was appointed by Francisco Archbishop of Salvador and Primate of Brazil – a title given by leading the first headquarters of the Church in Brazil.
Among other relevant positions, the cardinal was also president of CNBB, between 2015 and 2019.
In early 2023, Dom Sérgio became the first Brazilian to be nominated to join the Cardinal Council – a group created in 2013 with the task of assisting the Pope in the Catholic Church government and studying a project to revise the Roman Curia (Holy See administrative institutions).
The cardinal evaluated in an interview with CNBB that the initiative was very important, revealing that Francis was able to hear the members of the board “for a long time without interfering.”
This content was originally published in Conclave begins today; Find out who is the most quoted Brazilian to be Pope on CNN Brazil.
Source: CNN Brasil
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