VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
by Barbie Latza Nadeau Oct 3, 2013
As his global popularity soars, the pope is meeting with eight cardinals charged with solving the church’s crises. Barbie Latza Nadeau on what Francis might decide to fix.
While the picturesque Umbrian hamlet of Assisi prepares for what will surely be an epic love-fest when Pope Francis follows the footsteps of his papal namesake St. Francis in Assisi on Friday, a quiet storm is brewing back in Rome.
This week, Francis called his group of eight reformist cardinals to the Holy See for their inaugural summit on reform. The pope appointed the eight in April, tasking them with the tough job of prioritizing the Vatican’s many woes. The group is made up of Sean O’Malley of the United States, Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, Giuseppe Bertello of Italy, Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa of Chile, Reinhard Marx of Germany, Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of the Congo, George Pell of Australia and Oswald Gracias of India. They have been interviewing church leaders and clergy in their home continents to bring what should be a comprehensive list of problems to the pope’s table.
In July, O’Malley told National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen he was interviewing cardinals in the United States and Canada to “get ideas for reform.” Allen, who has his pulse on the Vatican heartbeat like few others, says the so-called G-8 cardinals will have far more reach than as just advisors, even though it remains to be seen whether they will just be “a kitchen cabinet that doesn’t appear anywhere on formal Vatican flowcharts,” he wrote in his recent column on the summit. “The pope takes the G-8 seriously, which means everybody else in the Vatican is obliged to do so as well.”
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