As synodality summit looms, navigating a papacy’s imperial phase
February 27, 2023
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CWN Editor's Note: John Allen notes several instances of dissonance between Pope Francis’s 2015 call for “healthy decentralization” and more recent Vatican micromanagement.
Allen asks, “What gives? Why is the pope of ‘healthy decentralization’ seemingly presiding over an increasingly imperial papacy?”
“As popes begin to hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near, it becomes less natural to defer to the judgments of a fissiparous and unpredictable body of some 5,000 Catholic bishops around the world, and more tempting simply to rule by decree,” he continued. “A growing cross-section of observers believe we’ve now entered that phase of the Francis era. How this operational dimension of the papacy will be reconciled with the ecclesiological concepts likely to be articulated by the looming Synod on Synodality, therefore, will be fascinating to track.”
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