VATICAN CITY
Chiesa
VATICAN CITY, January 14, 2014 – In addition to the appointment of cardinals, Pope Francis is also taking liberties with the selection of bishops.
Above all when it comes to his native Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio often (if not always) neglects to submit the appointment to the judgment of the cardinals and bishops who make up the Vatican congregation set up for this purpose, even though he radically overhauled it before Christmas.
In Argentina, during the first ten months of his pontificate, Francis has made fifteen episcopal appointments: eight “ex novo” and seven with transfers from other positions.
But in one of these Argentine appointments, something must not have gone quite right.
It is that concerning one of the two auxiliaries of Lomas de Zamora appointed by the pope last December 3, the Capuchin Carlos Alberto Novoa de Agustini, 47, who – as stated in the official biography published in the bulletin of the Holy See on that date – in May of 1996 had “received priestly ordination from the then-auxiliary of Buenos Aires, Bishop Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.”
It happened, in fact, that on the subsequent December 14 a statement from the diocese said that Novoa de Agustini would not be consecrated bishop because “after mature discernment” he had “requested from the Holy Father Francis a dispensation from his appointment, which he had granted to him.” No details were given on the reasons for this reversal.
It is somewhat rare for a bishop to resign the position between the announcement of his appointment and his consecration. The last conspicuous case was that of the auxiliary bishop of Linz, in Austria, the conservative Gerhard Wagner, who asked for the dispensation from Benedict XVI, who had appointed him on January 31, 2009, after the noisy progressive component of the clergy rebelled at his appointment without the other Austrian bishops coming to his defense. Wagner announced his resignation on February 15, while on March 2 the Holy See made public in the official bulletin – something that was not done in the recent Argentine case – the fact that the pope had dispensed him from accepting the appointment.
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