Vatican Diary / The “Bergoglio effect” on the bishops of Italy and Spain

VATICAN CITY
Chiesa

VATICAN CITY, November 26, 2013 – As has already taken place in the United States, the episcopates of Italy and Spain also have significant changes in their leadership under way.

And the observers of ecclesiastical questions, but not only they, have gone to work to interpret these changes in the context of the new pontificate.

They want to understand the impact of the “Bergoglio effect” on the corps of Catholic hierarchies profoundly shaped by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

IN SPAIN

In Madrid, after two five-year mandates and with the statutory impossibility of being reelected, Bishop Antonio Martínez Camino was on his way out as secretary and spokesman of the episcopal conference.

An anomalous Jesuit – hardly Bergoglian in style – and an ironclad conservative, Martinez was a staunch ally of cardinal of Madrid Antonio María Rouco Varela, no Bergoglian himself, “dominus” of the Iberian episcopate over the past two decades with an iron fist in opposing internal ecclesial dissent, the political separatist impulses present also in sectors of the Church, and the secularist tendency personified by socialist leader José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero.

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