Cardinals of Europe and Africa: comparative analysis of the Catholic elite careers

The article is intended to close the gap in the scientific literature on religious elites, associated with a lack of attention to the “Vatican bureaucracy” and a small number of comparative studies. The article offers an analysis of the biographies of European and African cardinals who are labeled as the Catholic elite according to the positional method. Geographic regions are selected based on the principle of least similarity. The career of cardinals is presented as a promotion through the church hierarchy, where the pre-elite stage is considered to be from ordination a priest to receiving episcopal ordination. The empirical basis of the study is data being gathered from the official website of the Holy See and processed in SPSS. The sample is equal to the general population and includes biographies of 137 hierarchs. The theoretical framework of the study is José Casanova’s concept of global Catholicism and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of religion. The analysis revealed that the careers of the Catholic elite of Europe and Africa, despite the presence of similar parameters, differ considerably. The rise of Europeans up the career ladder is accompanied by a decrease in endogeneity, understood as the coincidence of place of birth and work. This is due to the move to Rome, where dominant positions are concentrated and the “rules of the game” of the religious field are set. On the contrary, among Africans the type of career in which the prelate alternately occupies diocesan positions predominates. In the pre-cardinalate stage, African hierarchs are given leadership positions at the national level. This is due to the need to accumulate religious capital, which is not completed by the church in the African context. A comparative analysis of the biographies of the Catholic elite confirmed the hypothesis that regional differences have a significant impact on the careers of cardinals.