VATICAN CITY
Chiesa
He has been removed without being able to read the charges against him. He has knocked at the pope’s door without being received. Here is his reconstruction of events, against the dramatic backdrop of the Church in his country
by Sandro Magister
ROME, October 2, 2014 – It is rare for a pope to depose a bishop. It is even more outlandish for a Jesuit pope to kick out a bishop of Opus Dei.
And yet this is what has happened in Ciudad del Este, the diocese of Paraguay overlooking Iguazù Falls on the border with Brazil and Argentina, in the territory that from three to four centuries ago was civilized and Christianized by the Jesuit missionaries of the “Reductions.”
Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, the bishop whom pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio has deposed, had been in Rome for a few days when on September 25 he received the news that he had been removed.
He was told over the telephone by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the congregation for bishops, at the very same time as the nuncio was making it public in Paraguay, shortly before the official Vatican statement.
In a note accompanying the statement, the press office of the Holy See attributed the removal of Livieres to the results of the apostolic visitation conducted in Ciudad del Este during the preceding months.
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