ROME
Chiesa
In the United States and in Italy the changes are most spectacular. With new “Bergoglio-style” bishops and cardinals. In Belgium, Danneels’s revenge against Ratzinger. The triumph of the St. Gallen club
by Sandro Magister
ROME, November 14, 2015 – Much more than reforming the Vatican curia and finances (to which he is applying himself more out of obligation than out of passion, with no comprehensive plan and too often relying on the wrong men and women), it is clear by now that Pope Francis wants to revolutionize the college of bishops. And he is doing so in a systematic way.
The two talks that he gave this autumn to the bishops of the United States and of Italy will certainly be numbered among those that most distinguish his pontificate from those of his predecessors.
If there were in fact two national episcopates, each more than two hundred men strong, that were putting the guidelines of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger into practice, these were precisely the American and the Italian.
Both have had noteworthy leaders: Cardinal Francis George in the United States and Cardinal Camlllo Ruini in Italy. But while in the first case a tough team of cardinals and bishops united in vision and action had formed around George, in the second case none did.
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