Bishop Sebastian Fran-cis of Penang (Malaysia) is among the 21 new cardi-nals created by the pontiff on 30 September during a ceremony held in St Peter’s Square.
Speaking to AsiaNews, he said, “Pope Francis told me to concentrate and focus my mission on the inculturation of the faith” in his country, promoting the path of evange-lisation in the local culture and “work for the universality, not uniformity of the Church.”
In his view, “These fa-ctors are the starting points of my mission in a new context, but always linked to the direction indicated by the pope, which we must follow.”
Card Francis was born on 11 November 1951 in what was then the Feder-ation of Malaya, the son of migrant pare-nts from Kerala (India).
Appointed as bishop of Penang in 2011, he is the second Malaysian in the country’s history to become cardinal after Archbishop Anthony Soter Fernandez of Kuala Lumpur, a former bishop of Penang (1977-1983) who passed away in 2020 at the age of 88.
About a hundred people – members of his family, priests and nuns, as well as people from his diocese and the capital – travelled to Rome to attend the ceremony that saw him elevated to the rank of cardinal.
With respect to evangelisation, the cardinal explained, “both Malaysia and the Asian continent as a whole are still young,” with a low average age and a youthful population in several countries.