VATICAN CITY
Natonal Catholic Reporter
Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service | Sep. 16, 2015
VATICAN CITY
Pope Francis has asked his international Council of Cardinals to study the way the church vets, identifies and appoints bishops around the world, looking particularly at the qualities needed in a bishop today.
Near the end of the council’s meetings with the pope Sept. 14-16, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, briefed reporters on its work.
While one of the main tasks of the nine-member council is to assist Pope Francis with the ongoing reorganization of the Roman Curia, Lombardi said that from the beginning Pope Francis said he wanted the group to advise him on matters of church governance in general. With more than 150 new bishops being named each year in the Latin-rite church, identifying suitable candidates is a normal part of the governance of the universal church, the spokesman said.
“There is a long process” for naming bishops, Lombardi said. It includes “questionnaires that are sent out to people who may know the candidates and then the information is gathered, usually by the nunciature,” and recommendations are forwarded either to the Congregation for Bishops or, in the case of the church’s mission lands, to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. The congregations make recommendations to the pope.
Obviously, Lombardi said, the key part of the process is formulating the questions and collecting information based on the characteristics essential for a bishop “in the world today, what might be the requirements and, therefore, what questions should one be attentive to in [developing] the questionnaires.”
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