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Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damien Thompson.

This month, Pope Francis named 21 new cardinals, many of whom will be voting in the conclave to elect his successor.

It goes without saying, of course, that we don't know when that will be.

The 86-year-old pontiff is actually looking rather sprightly these days,

and in any case, any new cardinal who's already over the age of 80 isn't qualified to vote.

So that rules out, for example, Monsignor Andrew Loa Cherby, a retired Vatican diplomat who's

well past the deadline.

He's 99 years old.

In contrast, Bishop Mikhailov Bichok can expect to be voting in quite a few conclades to come.

He's only 44.

He's a bishop of Ukraine's Greek Catholic Church, which makes the appointment politically significant,

but also rather hard to interpret, since he's head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Australia,

meaning that Francis has very pointedly passed over, the actual leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Australia, meaning that Francis has very pointedly

passed over, the actual leader of the Ukrainian church, Archbishop Seatoslav Shevchuk,

based in Kiev and a hero to many Ukrainians, whose appointment as a cardinal would have been

a really significant boost to the Catholics of Ukraine. Taken as a whole, it's an interesting and rather puzzling list of new cardinals.

One of them is an Englishman, bringing the number of English cardinals to three,

...