page_title: Carlo Maria Martini
section_title: Episcopate and cardinalate
hierarchical_section_title: Carlo Maria Martini / Episcopate and cardinalate
caption_attribution_description: Español: Jesuita
context_page_description: Carlo Maria Martini SJ was an Italian Jesuit and cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was Archbishop of Milan from 1980 to 2002 and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1983. A towering intellectual figure of the Roman Catholic Church, Martini was the liberal contender for the Papacy in the 2005 conclave, following the death of Pope John Paul II. According to highly placed Vatican sources, Martini received more votes in the first round than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the conservative candidate: 40 to 38. Ratzinger ended up with more votes in subsequent rounds and was elected Pope Benedict XVI.
  Martini entered the Society of Jesus in 1944 and was ordained a priest in 1952. His appointment as Archbishop of Milan in 1980 was an unusual circumstance, as Jesuits are not traditionally named bishops. He was on the liberal wing of the church hierarchy. Suffering from a rare form of Parkinson's disease, he retired as archbishop in 2002 and moved to the Pontifical Institute in Jerusalem. He died at the Jesuit Aloisianum College in Gallarate near Milan.
context_section_description: On 29 December 1979, Pope John Paul II appointed Martini as Archbishop of Milan, receiving his episcopal consecration from the Pope himself the following 6 January, with Archbishop Eduardo Martínez Somalo and Bishop Ferdinando Maggioni serving as co-consecrators. Thus his first diocesan appointment was to one of the largest and most prominent sees. In the consistory of 2 February 1983, he was assigned the title of Cardinal-Priest of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. The motto he chose for his coat of arms is translated as "For the love of truth, dare to choose adverse situations".
  Martini served as Relator of the 6th General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 1983, and as President of the European Bishops' Conference between 1987 and 1993.
  In 1987, he began the socalled "cathedra of non-believers" (in Italian: cattedra dei non credenti) which was conceived together with the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. It was a series of public dialogues hel in Milan with some gnostic or atheist scientists and intellectuals on the matters of bioethics, the social doctrine of the Church and the reasons to believe in God.
  In 1996, Martini was presented with an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences. In Spain in October 2000, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. Martini was admitted as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in November 2000.
  Martini was one of a group of like-minded prelates who met annually from 1995 to 2006 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, to discuss reforms with respect to the appointment of bishops, collegiality, bishops' conferences, the primacy of the papacy, and sexual morality; they differed among themselves, but shared the view that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was not the sort of candidate they hoped to see elected at the next conclave.
  In 2002, Martini reached the Catholic Church's mandatory retirement age of 75 and was succeeded in Milan by Dionigi Tettamanzi. At the time of the 2005 conclave, he was 78 years old and hence eligible to vote for the new Pope (being under 80). For years many "progressive" Catholics harboured hopes that he might eventually ascend to the papacy, but when John Paul II died, most commentators believed that his election was unlikely, given his liberal reputation and apparent frailty.  Nevertheless, according to La Stampa (an Italian newspaper), he obtained more votes than Joseph Ratzinger during the first round of the election (40 vs. 38). Conversely, an anonymous cardinal's diary stated that he never mustered more than a dozen or so votes, in contrast to another Jesuit cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, and quickly withdrew his candidacy.  Upon reaching the age of 80 on 15 February 2007, Martini lost his right to vote in future conclaves.
  In June 2012, when Pope Benedict XVI was contemplating retirement and was being urged not to retire by some of his closest confidants, Martini, suffering himself from Parkinson's, urged him to follow through on his decision to resign. 
  After his retirement, Martini moved to the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem to continue his work as a biblical scholar. He returned to Milan in 2008 where he spent his final years in a Jesuit house.
caption: Martini in 2006
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