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Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle is the new dean of the College of Cardinals. Pope Leo XIV approved his election on Thursday, and the Holy See Press Office announced it this morning, along with the pope’s acceptance of the resignation of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who has held the post since January 2020.
The cardinal bishops, the highest of the college’s three orders, chose Tagle from among themselves. At 69, the Filipino cardinal becomes the first Asian ever to hold the office.
Few saw this coming. Re is 92, and Pope Francis renewed his mandate in January 2025 even though, as the Giornale di Brescia recalled today, the Italian cardinal had already said he wanted to retire.
As far as I can tell, neither his impending resignation nor the probable vote count among the cardinal bishops leaked before the bulletin dropped this morning.
The job is mostly ceremonial until a pope dies. When the Chair of Peter falls vacant, the dean convokes the conclave, and if he is under 80, he presides over it inside the Sistine Chapel. Joseph Ratzinger held this office when John Paul II died in 2005, and the cardinals elected him pope.
This is a standout moment for Tagle, and it gives us a chance to reintroduce him to the global Church. Of all the men in that college, he is the one Leo trusts most. I have written before about “Bob and Chito”, and everything I have learned since says the friendship runs deeper than the cameras show.
A piece of candy in the Sistine Chapel
Tagle sat beside Cardinal Robert Prevost on May 8, 2025, as the ballots that would make him pope were counted. Days later, sitting with Filipino journalists in Rome, Tagle told the story in Tagalog (the translation below is mine).
He had learned in 2013 that conclaves run long, so he always carries sweets. As the tally climbed toward Prevost, the American next to him began to breathe heavily. “Do you want some candy?” Tagle asked. Prevost said yes. “There it is,” Tagle recalled telling him, “my first act of charity to the new pope.”
There was a second gift. Prevost had asked Tagle a question as the votes were read, and Tagle wrote his answer in the back of the prayer booklet every cardinal carries. Prevost tore the page out and handed Tagle his own booklet in exchange. Once the white smoke rose, Tagle told the new pope he owed him something and asked him to sign it. Leo did, and called it his first signature as pope. Tagle says he has kept it ever since.
Ten days later, Tagle placed the Fisherman’s Ring on Leo’s finger at his inauguration Mass. Within a week, Leo gave Tagle his own former title as cardinal bishop of Albano, the diocese in the hills outside Rome that includes Castel Gandolfo. Tagle keeps Albano today and adds Ostia, the see that belongs to every dean.
Francis’s cardinal, and America’s
Pope Francis loved this man. He pulled Tagle out of Manila in 2019 to run the Vatican’s missionary office, once known as Propaganda Fide, and the next year made him the first Filipino cardinal bishop in history.
The press in Rome took to calling him the “Asian Francis,” and he arrived at the 2025 conclave as one of the most talked-about candidates in the world.
American Catholics know him better than most. Francis sent him as his special envoy to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in July 2024, where he celebrated the closing Mass at Lucas Oil Stadium and asked the crowd a hard question: “Is it possible that we disciples contribute to the departure of others from Jesus?”
Two weeks ago, Leo sent him back. Tagle served as the pope’s delegate at the beatification of Fulton Sheen in St. Louis on Sept. 24, where he preached to roughly 50,000 pilgrims and the leadership of the American Church. He mentioned the poor fourteen times and communism not once.
The sharpest passage was aimed at his brother priests. St. Paul, Tagle told them, “does not preach himself, but rather Jesus Christ as Lord.” A few lines later he described the alternative: “To be self-sufficient and self-affirming, ‘congratulations to myself,’ that is a bad sign.” In an American Church where a handful of clergy have built media brands around their own faces, the line landed in the Dome like a homily within the homily.
Why the right went after him
Tagle has always preached a Gospel with consequences. In August 2013, the cardinal archbishop of Manila made a surprise appearance at the Million People March in Rizal Park, where tens of thousands of Filipinos rallied against a corruption scheme that let politicians pocket public money.
Five years earlier, as a young bishop of Imus, he spoke at the International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City, one day after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires gave his own catechesis there. Tagle’s talk circulated widely online during the 2025 conclave.
“How many factory workers are being denied the right wages for the god of profit?” he asked. He named women sacrificed to the god of domination and the poor sacrificed to the god of greed (the full text sits on the Vatican’s website).
The other viral clip made traditionalists furious. In 2019, Tagle took a stage and sang a shortened version of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” one that dropped the lines about heaven and religion.
During the run-up to the conclave, LifeSiteNews posted it on April 24, 2025, asking whether the performance was “a betrayal of Catholic teaching.” A Community Note on X corrected the post, and defenders quoted in the National Catholic Reporter said what any Filipino could have told them, which is that karaoke is practically a national pastime. The irony is hard to miss: the Vatican announced his new post on Oct. 9, which would have been John Lennon’s 86th birthday.
Tagle received fewer than ten votes in the conclave, according to the book on Leo’s election by two Vatican correspondents. His friend from Chicago walked out onto the loggia instead, and today that friend handed Tagle the most senior post in the college.
A Church moving forward
Look at what Leo has done in seventeen months. He confirmed a man the online right spent a spring trying to destroy, and he has given him the ring, his old diocese, the Sheen beatification, and now the deanship. Leo is telling the Church which way it is going.
Tagle will turn 80 in June 2037. Until then, he would convoke and preside over any conclave the Church faces. Leo is 71, and none of us knows how long his pontificate will run, though I pray it runs long. Tagle may well be in his 80s when it ends, and that would not disqualify him from anything. His father, Manuel, died last month at 96, after 70 years of marriage to Tagle’s mother, Milagros.
Benedict XVI was 78 when the cardinals chose him. The cardinal who smuggled caramels into the Sistine Chapel may yet hear his own name read aloud in that room, and if that day comes, this community will be standing with him.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Cardinal Tagle and with every Catholic who believes the Gospel has something to say about a worker’s wages and the poor who carry the cost of our idols.
He has spent four decades preaching that God will not be bought, and the men who mocked him for a karaoke song never answered that charge.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people want a Church that looks like the one Tagle and Leo are building together. Too many of them have been told that mercy is weakness. What they are hungry for is a shepherd who will pass a frightened friend a piece of candy and still walk into a crowd of protesters when the poor are being robbed.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
The sharpest passage was aimed at his brother priests. St. Paul, Tagle told them, “does not preach himself, but rather Jesus Christ as Lord.”
Wow- another shot at MAGA Barron -the discredited small town Bishop whose love affair with a fat, orange pedophile causes MAGA Barron to daily break the first commandment.
Tagle understands the poor. So did Francis. We can smell the sheep on both of them.
Congratulations to Cardinal Tagle. 🙏✝️☮️