Catalan cardinal known for dialogue could be papal contender

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- As a 79-year-old member of Pope Francis' team of cardinal advisers, a European with missionary experience in Africa and archbishop of a city with more than 2 million baptized Catholics, Cardinal Juan José Omella Omella is well-positioned to draw votes from the pope's allies in the coming conclave.

Pope Francis appointed the Barcelona archbishop to the nine-member Council of Cardinals in 2023. The late pope had established the council 2013 to advise him on church governance and to oversee the reform of the Roman Curia, culminating in the 2022 apostolic constitution, "Praedicate Evangelium" ("Preach the Gospel").

Appointed to Barcelona in 2015, he was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2017.

One of Cardinal Omella's most controversial moments came in 2023 when he criticized media coverage of the results of a Spanish government report on clerical sexual abuse in the country. The study found that that 1.13% of people interviewed had experienced clerical sexual abuse. Many news outlets extrapolated the figure, reporting that 1.13% of Spain's population -- upward of 440,000 people -- suffered abuse in religious environments.

Cardinal Omella called the media's figures "lies" that were "intended to deceive," but many in the media portrayed his comments as a further effort by church leaders to downplay the abuse crisis.

The cardinal also made headlines after the passage of an abortion law in Spain in 2022 allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to get abortions. Cardinal Omella said abortion is an "attack on human life which goes against the entire human person."

Asked in 2022 by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano what the priorities of the church in Spain should be, he responded by highlighting evangelization, ministering to broken or alternate family structures and addressing the country's falling birth rate, which he said results in the faith ceasing to be transmitted across generations.

Since 2015, the cardinal has been archbishop of Barcelona, home to the iconic Basilica of the Sagrada Familia designed by Antoni Gaudí. When a referendum unsanctioned by the Spanish government was held on Catalunya's independence in 2017, resulting in violent clashes between Spanish authorities and pro-independence demonstrators, then-Archbishop Omella was proposed as a mediator between the two sides. He spoke with leaders of the independence movement and met with the Spanish prime minister and Archbishop of Madrid to promote dialogue during the crisis.

Since 2014, he has been a member of the Dicastery for Bishops, the body that helps the pope select bishops, and in 2017 he was appointed to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican tribunal which oversees the administration of justice and handles appeals within the church.

Born in 1946 in a Catalan-speaking region of northeastern Spain, Omella entered the seminary of Zaragoza and was ordained a priest at 24. He spent the following year as a missionary in Zaire. He was then a parish priest and later auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Zaragoza.

In media interviews after Pope Francis' 2013 election to the papacy, then-Bishop Omella said he had met the future pope when then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, was invited to lead spiritual exercises in Madrid. The newly-elected pope, he said, was a "simple" and "spiritual" person concerned about the poor who surprised the others participating in the exercises by eating them with despite being a cardinal.