By Tracy Cabrera
Pope Leo XIV designated Luis Antonio Gokim Cardinal Tagle as the dean of the College of Cardinals, making him the first Asian to preside over the body that elects the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
Tagle replaced Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, as announced by the Holy See on Friday, October 9, a day after Pope Leo approved the Filipino Cardinals election by the cardinal-bishops, the highest order of cardinals.
Tagle’s 92-year-old predecessor had held the post since January 2020 until his resignation which was accepted by Pope Leo only this week.
Francis extended Re’s term in January 2025, and Re presided at Francis’s funeral that April. He now becomes dean emeritus.
Although Tagle’s new post is considered as a top post in the Vatican hierarchy, it holds no jurisdictional authority over the other Cardinals, but it designates him as ‘primus inter pares’ (Latin for first among equals).
The main duties of the new dean are centered on the convening of a conclave when a pope dies or resigns, among others. Deans serve five-year terms that can be renewed once, under rules introduced by Pope Francis in 2019. Before that, the post had no fixed term.
Tagle was the archbishop of Manila when he was considered as one of the leading candidates to become pope at the conclave that elected then Cardinal Robert Prevost, the first pope from the United States, who took the papal name Leo XIV.
Actually, before the American archbishop became pontiff, the two had worked in the Vatican’s central administration at the same time: Prevost, served as the head of the dicastery for bishops, while Tagle led the dicastery for evangelization.
At Leo’s inauguration Mass in May 2025, Tagle presented the Fisherman’s Ring to the pope, a task carried out by a cardinal-bishop.
In his pontiffate, Leo initially kept Tagle in the dicastery as pro-prefect of the section for first evangelization (a role which he runs alongside the pope, the department’s formal head).
Leo later assigned Tagle the suburbicarian Diocese of Albano, near Rome, which Leo himself had held as a cardinal. Then in April the current year, Tagle was appointed as a member of the Dicastery for Communication, which runs the Vatican’s media and communications arm.
This was until last month when Tagle represented Leo as papal legate at the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri.
As dean, Tagle also assumes the title of the suburbicarian Church of Ostia, which traditionally goes to the dean, and keeps that of Albano.
Pope Francis brought Tagle to Rome in 2019 to head the Vatican’s missionary department and in 2020 made him the first Filipino cardinal-bishop
