...“I told him that as bishop of Brazil’s largest diocese with 800 church communities and 700,000 faithful I only had 27 priests, which means that our communities can only celebrate the Eucharist twice or three times a year at the most,” Bishop Kräutler said. “The Pope explained that he could not take everything in hand personally from Rome. We local bishops, who are best acquainted with the needs of our faithful, should be corajudos, that is ‘courageous’ in Spanish, and make concrete suggestions,” he explained. A bishop should not act alone, the Pope told Kräutler. He indicated that “regional and national bishops’ conferences should seek and find consensus on reform and we should then bring up our suggestions for reform in Rome,” Kräutler said.Read the rest here.
Asked whether he had raised the question of ordaining married men at the audience, Bishop Kräutler replied: “The ordination of viri probati, that is of proven married men who could be ordained to the priesthood, came up when we were discussing the plight of our communities. The Pope himself told me about a diocese in Mexico in which each community had a deacon but many had no priest. There were 300 deacons there who naturally could not celebrate the Eucharist. The question was how things could continue in such a situation.
"It was up to the bishops to make suggestions, the Pope said again.”
Note: The source is a publication with a well known liberal bias. Take it for what it's worth.
The idea that suggestions are what the bishops should be providing is somewhat annoying. If the reporting is accurate, then the Pope already knows what should be done, and that would include rolling back the power of the Vatican and letting the local bishops ordain married men.
ReplyDeleteThere should be a sense of emergency here, and a struggle to care for the people, but the clergy seem willing to entertain themselves with baubles while folks just sort of give up and walk out the door.