Pope Francis reforms the government of the Church with a new Constitution

Pope Francis promulgated, this Saturday, March 19, a new constitution that reorganizes the governing body of the Vatican introduces more financial transparency and is open to women and laity, which represents the fulfillment of the promise that the religious made before his election in 2013.

The new Constitution, which will enter into force on June 5, reforms parts of the Roman Curia (the Vatican government), which will replace the “Pastor bonus”, promulgated in 1988 by John Paul II and which was partially reformed by Benedict XVI in 2011.

Among the main changes are the possibility of lay people and Catholic women heading Vatican departments, as well as the addition of the advisory commission on sexual abuse to the Curia.

The dicasteries (ministries) of the Curia, which had functioned with opaque financing and behind closed doors for decades, were initially reluctant to accept a more centralized management, now enshrined in the new Magna Carta.

The document incorporates many reforms already applied by the Argentine pope, but it also contains some novelties, such as the desire to expand Catholicism beyond its 1.3 billion faithful.

The new Constitution “Praedicate evangelium”, of 52 pages, creates in this sense a new “dicastery” for evangelization, which will be presided over by Francis himself.

By becoming “chief evangelizer,” the pope is effecting a “tectonic shift toward a more pastoral and missionary church,” David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center for Religion and Culture, said on Twitter.

Along these lines, the Pope assures that any baptized Christian is a missionary.

“You cannot fail to take this into account when updating the Curia, whose reform must guarantee the participation of the laity and of women, even in functions of government and responsibility,” he said.

“Pope Francis has been working on a new organizational structure for the Vatican for nine years. It is an important aspect of his legacy,” Joshua McElwee of the National Catholic Reporter said on Twitter.

The text, which was published on the ninth anniversary of Francis’ pontificate, also adds the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors – a papal advisory body – to the dicastery that oversees canonical investigations of clergy sexual abuse cases.

According to Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads the Commission, it is a “significant advance” that will give institutional weight to the fight against a scourge that has devastated the Church worldwide.

But for Marie Collins, an Irish survivor of clerical abuse who was on the commission before resigning in 2017 over the church’s handling of the crisis, it is a setback.

“The Commission has officially lost any semblance of independence,” he remarked on Twitter.

With information from AFP

Source-larepublica.pe