VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider
Archbishop Marchetto comments on the creation of a mini-synod of eight cardinals appointed to advise the pope and help reform the Curia
Andrea Tornielli
Vatican City
It is fair to say that Pope Francis’s decision to set up a permanent group of cardinals hailing from the five continents to help him govern the Church and reform the Roman Curia is a ‘daughter’ of the Second Vatican Council. This is what archbishop Agostino Marchetto – a diplomat for the Holy See and former Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, as well as a scholar specialising in the history of the Second Vatican Council – maintains in this interview with Vatican Insider.
What does the pope’s decision to appoint a group of eight cardinals to advise him in governing the Church and reforming the Curia mean? Is it a novelty from an historic point of view?
“The pope’s decision expresses the wish to proceed collatis consiliis along a process of ecclesiastical renewal, with loyalty, that takes into account the episcopal collegiality expressed by a representative council qualified to govern the church and in view of the approaching reform of the Curia. It is an instrument designed to exercise papal primacy in an authentic and proper collegial context. I wouldn’t say that it’s an unprecedented move, given the historical variety in relations between the episcopacy and papal primacy, which are both very complex and in constant evolution, even though a certain level of continental representation, which seems to have been deliberate, gives it its own particular character.”
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