Personnel Is Policy - For Pope Francis

Pope Francis greets bishops during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City on Wednesday.

Pope Francis has joked that he won’t be around forever. But in the two years since being named head of the Roman Catholic Church, he's seen to it that his agenda will outlast his papacy, with a number of important – and at times surprising – personnel decisions.

In a sprawling organization like the Catholic Church, with its 1.2 billion members worldwide, promotions and demotions can have a wide-ranging effect in terms of how leaders shepherd their parishioners and the messages such moves send to the broader church. And the clergy members the pope has chosen to elevate back up the message of inclusion and shifting priorities Francis has propagated through both word and deed.

"Personnel is policy," says John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University.

In Francis’ speech after the announcement of his election, the Argentine previously known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio noted that his “brother cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth” in choosing him as the first non-European pope in more than a millennium. And he has followed their lead: A Pew Research Center report notes that under Francis, European cardinals no longer make up the majority of the Vatican’s cardinal electors, with the latest round of "princes of the church" including cardinals from countries like Ethiopia, Myanmar, Tonga and Vietnam.

The cabinet of church leaders appointed to advise Francis on reforms to the Vatican is similarly diverse, featuring clergy from Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Honduras and India. Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at The Catholic Association, says such promotions show Francis is “challenging the church to look at parts of the church whose voices we haven't heard enough of.”

Along with his promotion of non-Western voices, Francis has staked an interest in reshaping the role the Catholic Church plays in American politics by shifting church leadership in America.