Confusion Concerning The Title of "cardinal"
It is perhaps commonplace to think that the title of "cardinal" is the next order after "bishop" to which a man may be ordained, as "bishop" comes after "priest" and "priest" after "deacon". In fact, however, the position of cardinal is not an order to which one can be ordained, but simply a honorific office in the Church.
The original "cardinals" in the first Christian centuries were friends and counsellors of the Bishop of Rome. Some were ordained deacons or priests and some were not. In those days of persecution these men took on the duty of standing at the door of the house where the agapē feast, as the Mass was then called, was being celebrated. They admitted or rejected people hoping to attend the Sacred Liturgy. They also kept watch for soldiers or informers who might interrupt the gathering. Since the word for "hinge" in Latin is cardo they became known as 'hingemen" - cardinals. Soon many bishops called their advisors "cardinals" but, in time, the Pope decreed that only the advisors of the Bishop of Rome could be known by the title "cardinal".
Read more about this topic: Lay Cardinal
Famous quotes containing the words confusion, title and/or cardinal:
“Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has parlor, bedroom,
And dining room thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In nothing was slavery so savage and relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the Negro race in America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)