MANILA: Asia’s front-runner for the papacy, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines is a charismatic moderate often dubbed the “Asian Francis”.
Tagle, 67, who shares with Pope Francis a history of advocating for the poor, migrants and other marginalised people, is known for his missionary spirit and pastoral focus.
Wearing glasses with a youthful air and ready smile, the cardinal nicknamed “Chito” is a popular figure among the fervently religious country’s more than 90 million Catholics.
Born into a working-class family near Manila, Tagle was ordained as a priest in 1982 and became archbishop of the nation’s capital in 2011, a politically influential post in one of the largest dioceses in Asia, where Catholicism is growing.
He was made cardinal by former pope Benedict XVI in 2012.
A fluent English speaker, Tagle has been mentioned as a possible papal contender since the last conclave in 2013, when Francis was elected, and his name is on everybody’s lips this time around.
Underscoring the close ties between the late Argentine pontiff and Asia’s most prominent bishop, Tagle was appointed in 2019 head of a key Vatican department, the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.
After Francis reformed the department, he named Tagle “pro-prefect” in 2022, leading the section for “First Evangelisation and New Particular Churches”, with responsibility over new dioceses.
‘Trust God’s knowledge’
As a bishop, Tagle was known for chatting with the faithful after mass and even inviting beggars to dine with him at his residence.
The adjustment to life in Rome and the formalities of the Vatican was not easy — he told theology graduates soon after arriving in 2020 that he “makes the Italians suffer” when he speaks their language.
He also once forgot to wear his clerical collar to a meeting.
An eloquent speaker with a soothing voice, Tagle giggles at his own jokes and injects self-deprecating humour into his homilies.
But he is also known for being outspoken.
As archbishop of Manila, Tagle criticised the bloody war on drugs waged by Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ president at the time.
“We cannot allow the destruction of lives to become normal. We cannot govern the nation by killing,“ Tagle said in a pastoral letter in 2017.
Tagle has called for a humbler Church more open to the concerns of its members, and at a 2019 Vatican summit on fighting child sex abuse he pointed the finger at the Church’s top ranks.
“Wounds have been inflicted by us bishops on victims and in fact the entire body of Christ,“ he told the delegation.
“Our lack of response to the suffering of victims, and yes even to the point of rejecting them and covering up the scandal to protect perpetrators and the institution, has injured our people, leaving a deep wound in our relationship with those we are sent to serve,“ Tagle said.
However, he has been accused of failing to tackle the issue sufficiently in the Philippines.
Questions have also been raised over what he knew about the employment in the Central African Republic of a Belgian priest, Luk Delft, by the Vatican’s Caritas Internationalis charity.
Delft had previously been convicted of child sexual abuse and banned from contact with children for 10 years.
Tagle served as president of Caritas Internationalis, the world’s second-largest charitable association, from 2015 until 2022.
In 2022, Tagle and the rest of the leadership team were removed by Francis after a Vatican-led audit found “deficiencies” in management and procedures.
In June 2023, the pope appointed Tagle as his special envoy to the National Eucharistic Congress of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He carried out a similar role for the pontiff at the General Conference of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) in Bangkok in October 2022.
The cardinal has said he never saw himself as a high-ranking man of the cloth.
“If I were God, I would not choose me to be a bishop or a cardinal,“ he said in a 2018 interview.
“But since I’m not God, God sees something in me probably that I don’t see in myself and I just have to trust God’s knowledge of me.”
