As of next Saturday, Portugal will have six cardinals, four of whom could be elected in the next conclave, with Américo Aguiar, the bishop of Setúbal, reaching the cardinalate before his 50th birthday.
The main face of the organization of World Youth Day, which took place in Lisbon in August, said in a joint interview with the Lusa news agency and the Ecclesia news agency that he had “no expectations whatsoever” regarding his elevation to cardinal, admitting that the first feelings he felt when his appointment was announced on July 9 “were of fear, of incapacity”, of feeling like a “little danoninho”.
But confidence quickly emerged. “I have one thing – which even those who perhaps don’t appreciate me [recognize] – and that is that when I have a challenge I give myself completely to it, I learn and try to match it and it is in this availability that I will respond to the challenge,” he says.
Américo Aguiar saw his appointment to the College of Cardinals as “a gesture of homage to young people, to the young Portuguese involved in the preparation of World Youth Day, for whom the Pope has always shown great affection, great homage, great gratitude in the four years” during which the preparation of the world meeting in Lisbon took place.
Regarding the specific reasons for choosing Francis, the future bishop of Setúbal admits that the frequent contacts he had with the pontiff in Rome in preparation for the Day were crucial.
“In the last four years, we’ve had the grace – and this young man from Leça do Balio never thought he’d meet the Pope. Therefore, I believe and humanly interpret that the fact that I’ve had six, eight, 10, 12 private audiences with the Pope over these four years has led him to look at me and take my measure and conclude and decide what he has decided,” says “Cardinal Américo”, as he was already known in the seminary.
On the other hand, as he himself acknowledged in a recent interview with the newspaper Observador, he is seen by many as “a terrible follower of Francis”. Was this a determining factor in his appointment to the cardinalate?
“I think so. The opposite wouldn’t make sense,” says Américo Aguiar, for whom the Pope, given “his reading of the Church’s current times, of the Church’s challenges, of what the Church’s future challenges are,” will have valued his “availability, synchronization, fidelity” to what Francis means for the future cardinal, but also what Benedict XVI or John Paul II meant.
What he confesses is that he hasn’t yet dared to ask the Pope why he decided to make him a cardinal.
As for what his role as cardinal might be like, Américo Aguiar stresses that he agrees with a phrase he read recently that points to a paradigm shift: from cardinals being “princes of the Church” to cardinals being “princes of the Pope”.
“This is interesting and I think this is what the Pope has reinforced in his latest appointments: it’s not about power, it’s not about fame, it’s nothing like that. It’s those who he calls closer to him, not even geographically, but for what is the government of the Church, in what is having the sensitivities closer, be it age, geography or other circumstances,” he says.
The truth is that, being close to the Pope’s positions, Américo Aguiar has already seen some sectors of the Church being distant from his own positions, such as when before WYD he said that that world meeting wasn’t about “converting young people to Christ or to the Church”.
Criticism immediately “rained down” from sectors seen as more conservative, but the until now auxiliary bishop of Lisbon shrugs it off.
“When we’re at home, with friends, with family, with acquaintances, when we’re at the table, we’re not all in the same position, nor are we all in the same vicinity,” he said, arguing that “in this family that we are, in this humanity that we constitute… I think it’s important – and this is what the Pope has said and we’ve often referred to, even in relation to World Youth Day – that we definitely learn that it’s important to get to know others, to get to know each other and what’s different shouldn’t be an obstacle, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“What’s different should be an opportunity, it should be richness and it should be a way forward together. I feel that,” says Américo Aguiar, who regrets: “we are in the age of freedom of expression, but it seems that when someone expresses themselves differently from what I think, it leads to a war.”
For the future cardinal, who didn’t fail to respond to all the critics who sent him messages about his position a few weeks before WYD, “it’s a strange thing”. On the one hand, we demand respect for freedom of expression and then we react violently when someone thinks differently. (…) At home, sometimes there are reactions that I don’t think are justifiable,” he says in this interview with Lusa and Ecclesia.
