It Looks the Pope Will Be Making Cardinals!!

As Whispers calls it this is of course a coordinated leak to the biggest Italian jouranlist that covewr the Vatican.

He has a excellent post on this at Red Dawn... Come Fall?

The big name for Americans is of curse the expected elevation of Archbishop of New York(who by the way has had some noce glowing press the last few days). Also the Church's first American "chief justice," Archbishop Raymond Burke os on the list

For the American Church , as well as world wide, Whispers points out the next two years will be big

In their reports, all three scribes heavily emphasized the "magic number" of 19 -- the number of nominees that would return the College of Cardinals to its full voting complement of 120 in the event of a conclave, and a figure Pope Benedict has (unlike his predecessor) committed himself to maintaining; the college's maximum largely kept at 70 electors since the 16th century, the limit was last formally raised by Paul VI in 1975. While 111 red-hats would be able to vote in a papal election as of today, ten more "princes of the church" reach the ineligibility age of 80 before mid-November, as do another 12 between January 2011 and April 2012; as previously noted, among the soon-to-be seniores are six of the US' 12 voting cardinals -- an unprecedented figure in such a short period of time.

Bottom line: the next 27 months will deal Benedict a staggeringly broad hand to choose another quarter of the electoral college which would choose his successor -- add in the 30 electors he's already elevated, and, on age-wrought openings alone, just over half the voters in a hypothetical 2012 or later conclave would be his picks. What's more, unlike B16's prior porporati -- many of whom were named to cardinalatial posts in the twilight of John Paul II's 27-year reign -- almost all of the likelies still to enter the "Pope's Senate" were given their current slots in this pontificate and, as a result, passed the enhanced quality-control checks Joseph Ratzinger applies to his appointments.

Read the whole thing.