A few days before announcing the creation of 21 cardinals on 13 October, Francis told the Jesuits in Belgium on 28 September:
"Synodality is not easy, no, and sometimes because there are authority figures who do not encourage dialogue. A parish priest can make decisions alone, but he can make them with his council. So can a bishop, so can the Pope. Synodality in the Church is a grace! Authority is exercised in synodality".
The Vatican expert Luis Badilla has tough questions: "How much of this 'synodality' has been applied in the selection and creation of cardinals, especially these last 21 clerics?"
It has been said that the "new" criteria for the selection of cardinals are "internationalisation" and "the peripheries" which for Badilla is a word "so arbitrarily used that it now communicates little or nothing".
The fact that a cardinal is created for dioceses with a percentage of faithful close to zero [the new "Cardinal of Tehran" leads a diocese where there is not a single diocesan priest], while at the same time denying a purple to dioceses that are among the largest in the world, is for Badilla "an error that greatly damages the Church and has nothing to do with the very right choice of bringing the papacy closer to the peripheries".
For Badilla, this approach deconstructs the history of the Church, in which dioceses are essential to understanding the Church itself.
He notes that, to date, almost all the cardinals created by Francis (163 as of 7 December) are people who behave like clones of Bergoglio, or rather, as has been written in recent days, "they are copy/paste cardinals".
This way of making nominations homologates everything and everyone, because it reduces the choice to the criteria of loyalty and discards those of competence. Any "healthy and creative dissent" is stifled.
This encourages the fear of speaking out, suppresses honesty and coherence of thought, authorises and encourages hypocrisy and legitimises papolatry, "a sin that has caused immense and irreparable damage in the history of the Church".
Thus, a significant part of the Church created by Francis "is considered by large sectors of the Church as not up to the mission and the task". Many appear as "people of mediocre or poor formation and without charisma".
"Some of the cardinals created in recent years are considered divisive and presumptuous, often the protagonists of a poorly concealed Bergoglian imitation (gestures, language, documents, and guidelines), but clearly incompetent."
Picture: © Mazur, CC BY-NC-ND, #newsHrcqmdniew
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