Pope Francis greets new Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after presenting a red hat to him during a consistory in St. Peter’s Basilica Feb. 14. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – In a Valentine’s Day ceremony to create 20 new cardinals, Pope Francis offered a meditation on Christian love and, especially, what it means for those who guide and minister in the church.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI attended the ceremony, sitting in the front row of St. Peter’s Basilica alongside the already existing members of the College of Cardinals.
Pope Francis’ meditation at the ceremony focused on the famous passage about love from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13:4-7), which begins: “Love is patient, love is kind.”
“All of us, myself first,” should be guided by St. Paul’s words, he said, because every Christian ministry “flows from charity, must be exercised in charity and is ordered toward charity.”
The patience Christian love calls for, he said, is a call to catholicity. “It means being able to love without limits, but also to be faithful in particular situations and with practical gestures. It means loving what is great without neglecting what is small.”
St. Paul says love is “not jealous or boastful” and truly being neither, the pope said, “is surely a miracle of love since we humans – all of us, at every stage of our lives – are inclined to jealousy and pride since our nature is wounded by sin.”
Not being “irritable or resentful” can be a challenge for a pastor, especially when dealing with other clerics, Pope Francis told the new cardinals.
“Charity alone frees us” from the temptation of snapping at others and, especially, from “the mortal danger of pent-up anger, of that smoldering anger which makes us brood over wrongs we have received,” he said. “This is unacceptable in a man of the church.”
St. Paul’s statement that love rejoices over what is right, the pope said, means “those called to the service of governance in the church need to have a strong sense of justice, so that any form of injustice becomes unacceptable, even those which might bring gain to himself or to the church.”
The new cardinals and all Christians, he said, can find a synopsis of their calling in St. Paul’s affirmation that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Christians, the pope said, should be “persons always ready to forgive; always ready to trust, because we are full of faith in God; always ready to inspire hope, because we ourselves are full of hope in God; persons ready to bear patiently every situation and each of our brothers and sisters, in union with Christ, who bore with love the burden of our sins.”
After the new cardinals professed their faith by reciting the Creed and formally swore fidelity and obedience to the pope and his successors, they approached Pope Francis one by one to receive their biretta, their cardinal’s ring and the assignment of a “titular” church in Rome, which makes them part of the Roman clergy.
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