9 December—It appears that our once and future president isn’t the only head of state to go outside the box in choosing cabinet members and other powerful government functionaries to execute his personal agenda for better or worse. Of course not. Liberal (for the Roman Catholic Church) Pope Francis also has been doing it. And when the pope does it you know it must be for better. Or you risk going to hell—or, even worse, excommunication.

Just a couple of days ago, 83 years to the day after Japan’s infamous air raid on Pearl Harbor, Pope Francis installed 21 new cardinals. It’s out of the box—canon law being the box—for cardinals to be selected from the non-episcopacy, but the pope can pretty much do as he pleases. So two of his new cardinals weren’t even bishops at their selection and one was a very recently anointed bishop.

In addition to being clerical head of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is secular head of the Vatican City State, which is a theocratic (no surprise) elective absolute monarchy. The pope is considered to be king of the church and the Vatican is an elective monarchy like the comic-strip Kingdom of Id. (It’s not commonly known, by the way, that Alexander Hamilton believed the United States should be an elective monarchy, with the president having rather more power than the Constitution bestows. Something to look forward to?)

The Vatican’s pseudo-secular legislative body is the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State. Its president (yes, president, presiding officer) and seven commissioners are all cardinals appointed by the pope and effectively subservient to him. It’s a star chamber as opposed to a cabinet. The Roman Catholic Church is not a democratic institution, after all. Religions—churches—are not, nor have they ever been, democratic institutions. In all events, it’s good to be the pope.

The College of Cardinals is supposed to be a cabinet of advisors to the pope. It currently numbers 253 holy cabinet members, about ten times the size of an American presidential cabinet. But unlike the American one, the Sacred College of Cardinals is empowered to elect a new leader, the pope. It’s said by some, in fact, that choosing a new pope is the main purpose of the College of Cardinals.

But only 140 cardinals are chosen to be electors for a new pope. The primary factor that keeps cardinals from being electors is age discrimination. Since Pope Paul VI’s arbitrary decision updated by Pope John Paul II, those princes of the church over 80 are deemed to be too old to vote for a new pope. (The rationale is ageism pure and simple.) So an incumbent—reigning—pope can stack the deck, as it were, by strategically selecting cardinals of the right age as well as political—whoops, clerical—disposition.

Several of the new cardinals, although soul mates of Pope Francis, are thus ineligible to be electors. The oldest recipient of the scarlet yarmulke—sorry, zucchetto—on Saturday was 99. He’ll be 100 in September.

Pope Francis himself will turn 88 next week and isn’t in great health, so he may decide to retire before too long. With his new additions to the electors, Francis will have appointed 110 of the 140 cardinals eligible to vote. It takes only a two-thirds majority of a papal conclave in the magnificent Sistine Chapel to elect a pope. So do the arithmetic.

You wonder, then, what does all this really have to do with God?