The Council of Cardinals’ 23rd Session Wraps up in Rome at the end of February

Greg Burke, director of the Holy See Press Office, presented the three-day session to journalists. The eight cardinals – Australian George Pell was absent, as legal proceedings made it impossible for him to leave his country – listened to a report delivered by Archbishop Jan Pawlowski. As head of the recently created Third Section of the Secretariat of State, he is in charge of selecting and forming the diplomatic staff of the Holy See.

The protection of minors was also discussed. An option suggested by the C9 was granting the ecclesiastic legal authority the ability to process cases of child abuse in a shorter amount of time.

Cardinal Marx spoke as President of the Council for the Economy: he pleaded for better management of the staff and outlined a program for containment of costs and reduction of the deficit of the Holy See.

Another, more worrisome, subject considered was the decentralization of the Church. The Council of Cardinals discussed the “theological status of the episcopal conferences” based on paragraph 32 of the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (November 24, 2013), according to which a “genuine doctrinal authority” is to be attributed to the local episcopates in the name of the collegiality so dear to Vatican Council II and of the new forms of the Petrine ministry that Pope John Paul II called for in 1995. 

While the development of these reflections remains completely unclear and nothing has yet been decided, one may well fear an even greater dispersal of the magisterial authority of the Church. Take for example the way access to sacramental Communion for the divorced and civilly “remarried” has been treated by the various episcopal conferences ever since the publication of the post-synodal Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. All that can come of confusion is chaos.