3 Filipino cardinals participating in papal conclave

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May 2, 2025 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines —  The 2025 papal conclave will have the most number of participating Filipino cardinals.

According to CBCPNews, the official news service provider of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, three Filipino cardinals will be participating in the conclave that begins on May 7 – Luis Antonio Tagle, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization; Jose Advincula of Manila, and Pablo Virgilio David of Kalookan.

Having three Filipino cardinal-electors reportedly underscores the Philippines’ rising influence in the universal Church.

They are currently in Rome to prepare to select the successor of Pope Francis. At the conclave, they would cast their ballots in the closed-door voting held beneath Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

In previous papal elections there were only one or two Filipino “princes of the Church.”

From the lone vote of Manila Archbishop Rufino Santos—the first Filipino cardinal—in 1963, to two electors in the 1978 conclaves (Jaime Sin of Manila and Julio Rosales of Cebu), and back to single representation in 2005 (Ricardo Vidal of Cebu) and 2013 (Tagle of Manila), Filipino participation in papal elections has been relatively modest.

In the 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis, Italians had the largest bloc with 28 electors, followed by Americans with 11. The Europeans accounted for half of the 115 cardinal electors under age 80.

The 2025 conclave, however, reflects a shift toward the Church’s “peripheries,” initiated by Francis, who reshaped the College of Cardinals to better reflect global diversity. This year, Europeans make up just 39 percent of electors, while Asians account for 17 percent, outnumbering North Americans at 14 percent.

The Philippines is already home to the third-largest Catholic population in the world after Brazil and Mexico, and the Filipino diaspora had been credited by the late pope himself for being “contrabandistas de la fe” (smugglers of the faith) wherever they migrated or worked.

Leading the Filipino delegation is Tagle, 67, who holds a key post at the Vatican. When he was archbishop of Manila in 2012, Tagle was named cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI. In 2019, the Jesuit-trained and American-educated cleric was called by Pope Francis to serve at the Vatican bureaucracy. As he combines diocesan and Curia experience plus charisma as a sought-after speaker, Tagle often made the list of “papabile” or electable cardinals. This is Tagle’s second time to join a conclave.

Advincula, 73, succeeded Tagle as archbishop of Manila. A surprise appointment to the College of Cardinals in 2020 while still archbishop of Capiz—a non-cardinatial see—Advincula is the first product of the Ecclesiastical Faculties of the University of Santo Tomas, the pontifical institution of the Dominican Order in Manila that is always visited by popes, to enter a conclave.