Pope Francis Selects Caloocan Bishop as New Cardinal
His first reaction when news broke out: "Ha?!"
(SPOT.ph) Pope Francis has named Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David as one of the 21 new cardinals—a significant honor that positions him among the key advisors to the pontiff and as a potential future elector of the next pope.
News broke when Bishop David was resting after a busy Synod schedule in Rome on October 6. He recalled in a Facebook post being unaware of the Pope's announcement until a wave of congratulatory messages poured in. At first, he thought it was a joke, but after seeing the confirmation from Vatican News, reality set in.
Funnily enough, he had ignored an international call earlier that day because answering it with his Philippine SIM would have been "very expensive." It wasn’t until later that he realized just how significant that missed call was—now suspecting it had come from the Vatican.
"It felt like being caught in a whirlwind. I put down the phone and did a five-minute breathing exercise, which instantly calmed me down. Now it felt like Elijah standing by the mouth of a cave and feeling a soft breeze that penetrated my soul and prepared me for this new chapter of my life and ministry as a bishop, as a servant of God’s people. I said, ‘Ok, Lord. My life is in your hands,’” Bishop David wrote in the post.
Bishop David's appointment makes him the 10th Filipino to be elevated to the cardinalate. He will join the College of Cardinals—a group often referred to as "princes of the Church"—though Pope Francis has urged cardinals to remain humble and close to the poor.
The consistory, where Bishop David and the other cardinals will be officially elevated, is scheduled for December 8, 2024.
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Who is Pablo Virgilio David?
Bishop David has been a priest for over 40 years. As the president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), he has long been a strong moral voice on issues of human rights and poverty, especially for criticizing the Duterte administration’s controversial war on drugs.
His outspoken stance led to the Philippine National Police–Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (PNP-CIDG) filing multiple charges of sedition, cyber libel, and obstruction of justice against him and other opposition members in 2019. These charges were dropped in 2020.
But Bishop David's journey to becoming the Bishop of Caloocan began long before these events. He was born on March 2, 1959, in Guagua, Pampanga within the Archdiocese of San Fernando. For his studies, he pursued philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University, followed by theology at the Loyola School of Theology.
In 1983, he was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Fernando, where he began his ministry as an assistant parish priest before becoming the director of the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary.
From 1986 to 1991, Bishop David studied in Belgium at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he earned a Licentiate and later a Doctorate in Sacred Theology. Upon returning to the Philippines, he was named auxiliary bishop of San Fernando until his transfer to the Caloocan diocese in 2015.
He served as vice president of the CBCP from 2017 to 2021 before being elected as president in 2021, succeeding former president Romulo Valles.
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