Making cardinals is a tricky business for a pope. They do two things in the church – they elect the next pope, and they concentrate in themselves the organisation's sense of power and self-importance. A traditionalist cardinal with a sense of his own splendour is a magnificent beast, like a mammoth draped in embroidery. But under Pope Francis, they may become an endangered species. The first batch of cardinals he made at the weekend, including Britain's Vincent Nichols, look remarkably businesslike.

Four of them are from the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy itself, which still supplies a third of the 120 voting cardinals. Because there is a tradition that the heads of the really big departments are cardinals, passing over anyone promoted since the last cardinals were created by the old pope, Benedict XVI, would have been a signal that they could safely be dissed in the playground. So the men who run the Vatican's "personnel departments" for bishops and priests were both honoured, as was the secretary of state, or foreign minister, which is traditionally the second most powerful post in the church.

Those three men have all been appointed to their current jobs by Francis. Not so the fourth heavyweight – Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who runs the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the watchdog of orthodoxy. Müller was appointed by his fellow German, Benedict XVI, and has been involved in a public row with the more liberal German bishops' conference, which wants to relax the rules barring divorced and remarried people from communion. Francis is thought to be on the liberal side in this dispute but is clearly not going to make it personal.

There are four Latin Americans, two Asians, and two Africans on the list, no one from the US, and only one Italian from outside the Vatican. This is a gentle corrective to the way that the College of Cardinals has traditionally been packed with people from the countries where the money comes from, rather than from the countries where the Catholics are: the National Catholic Reporter points out that in the last two papal elections cardinals from the United States cast more ballots to elect the next pope than Brazil and the Philippines combined, despite the fact that those two nations together represent roughly four times the Catholic population of the US.

And then there is the parochial news: Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, has finally got his hat. This is in part a reward for loyalty and competence but it will also strengthen his hand in the coming struggles within the English Catholic church. Nichols has been attacked by a traditionalist minority for his tolerant presentation of church teachings and his lack of enthusiasm for the theatrical approach to liturgy. Like the rest of his clergy, he was not at all keen on the ordinariate, Pope Benedict's scheme to attract Anglican clergy who wanted to escape from women priests. There is no sign that Francis has any interest in that group at all.

But Nichols will soon face a real challenge: the church is consulting its members on what they think of such matters as the ban on birth control and the exclusion of remarried couples from communion. We actually already know what most English Catholics think of these teachings: they think they are nonsense and ignore them. But official questionnaires, such as are going the rounds of English parishes now, make the policy of silent compromise much harder. If the laity find their opinions have been solicited, and then once more ignored, this will weaken the church still more.