> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction. I don't think that

> Francis spent the last couple of years creating new cardinals to stack the College in what - he hoped - was a more progressive direction. I don't think that was necessarily what he was doing. He tried to rebalance it to include a lot more cardinals from the developing world–who on average tend to be more conservative, at least on some issues. He arguably avoided the more outspoken conservatives, but he would have caught up a lot of quieter conservatives in the process. Whereas, if he just wanted to stack it with progressives, he would have focused on adding cardinals from the developed world, where Catholic progressivism is arguably the strongest.