Italian diocesan unions may not continue: papal conversation with bishops
May 22, 2024
» Continue to this story on L'Osservatore Romano (Italian)
CWN Editor's Note: The marked recent trend of uniting Italian dioceses in the person of a bishop may not continue, according to the Vatican newspaper’s coverage of a 90-minute conversation between Pope Francis and the nation’s bishops.
“In recent years there have been 22 Italian dioceses unified in persona episcopi,” L’Osservatore Romano reported. “But it is not a given that we will continue on this path, this is what emerged in the dialogue between the Pope and the bishops: a rethinking of this procedure is in fact possible.”
“One proposal is to unify the structures more than anything else, including the regional seminaries themselves (often populated by a small group of aspiring priests), as urged by the Pope himself on several occasions in the past,” the newspaper continued.
During the May 20 meeting, which took place in the Vatican’s Synod Hall, the Pope and the bishops also discussed migration, a decline in priestly vocations, and synodality, which the Pope said should become a paradigm for dioceses.
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