The head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has chosen 13 new cardinals, including experts on dialogue with Islam and people who are committed to migrants.
Each election of new cardinals is seen as an additional step in forming a college of cardinals who share the pope's views and will be tasked with choosing his successor. Maybe the next pope will be one of them.
Out of a total of 225 cardinals, there are now 128 under the age of 80, and they will be able to vote at the eventual conclave - the election of a new pope. Among them, 52 percent chose Francis, one third Benedict XVI and 16 percent John Paul II.
Half of the new cardinals have "missionary" profiles, said one of those chosen, Miguel Ángel Ajuho Guizot, a discreet 67-year-old Spaniard who is president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
Guizot, a missionary himself, is a great expert on Islam and lived for a long time in Egypt and Sudan.
The Spanish Archbishop of Rabat, Cristobal Lopes Romero, was also elected cardinal, who considers his election as an encouragement to the "almost invisible" Catholic communities in North Africa.
Another prominent new cardinal is the Canadian Jesuit of Czech origin, Michael Cerny, who is the undersecretary of the department for migrants and refugees headed by the pope himself.
In his selection, Francis took care to include all continents. He chose as cardinals the archbishops of Jakarta, Kinshasa and Havana.
The youngest cardinal is a 53-year-old Portuguese, José Tolentino Medonça, who is atypical because he is an archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church.
The Pope has chosen three cardinals who will not be able to participate in the conclave because they are over 80 years old.
They are the British Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald, former ambassador of the Vatican and a great expert on Islam, then the Italian missionary in Angola Eugenio Dal Corso and the Lithuanian Jesuit Sigitas Tamkevicius who was in a Soviet prison for writing a secret diary about the persecution of Catholics.
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