“He would be able to nominate Tucho,” was a common joke in the Vatican during these months of names to succeed Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer at the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The theme implied was, of course, the Pope.
In the end, that’s exactly what happened: the exaggeration became reality and Víctor Manuel Fernández is the new Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and President of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and the International Theological Commission, and will take office in mid-September. An appointment that can be interpreted as a challenge to those members of the Sacred College who, in Santa Marta, had privately expressed their opposition to the hypothesis of the appointment of Monsignor Heiner Wilmer, Bishop of Hildesheim and great supporter of the German Synodal Way agenda .
The Nuova Bussola Quotidiana could reveal that the appointment of the Dehonian bishop to the former Holy Office should be halted It was the last battle Cardinal George Pell fought before his sudden death. However, not reading Wilmer’s name in the Bulletin would be a Pyrrhic victory for the Australian cardinal, as the choice fell on an even more controversial profile.
“When there are conflicts in the Church, it is not always bad,” wrote Archbishop Fernández in the volume The Popes of the Councils of Modern Times. Art, history, religion and culture. By choosing him instead of Joseph Ratzinger with a programmatic address of clear break with the past, which he penned in a public letter, Bergoglio seems to have shown that he thinks the same way, aware that he is the Further dissatisfied with the prelates they had left in recent months, he had written to ask him not to mention Wilmer and to leave the doctrinal department in more balanced hands.
Monsignor Fernández arrives at the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio due to his reputation as a loyal Pope whose ghostwriter he was already in the crucial experience of the Aparecida conference of 2007. Fernández recalled those days he spent together and said he admired in his mentor the belief that “rather than having immediate results, it is necessary to establish processes in motion» (Clarín) . Tucho’s appointment as the Curia’s most important dicastery seems to indicate that Bergoglian’s pontificate has lasted long enough to move directly from the initiation of legal proceedings to immediate results. The Pope is increasingly relying on the faithful.
Recently, it is becoming increasingly clear how much personal knowledge of the Pope or membership in the Society of Jesus are now a kind of X-factor, taking on roles of great responsibility in the church. The first appointment of his pontificate concerned his successor in Buenos Aires, for whom he designated the then auxiliary bishop Mario Aurelio Poli, later cardinal, as a naturaliter. Ten years later, the latter was retired with a stroke in ’75 and replaced by Jorge Ignacio García Cuerva, a young priest whom then-Cardinal Bergoglio came to know and appreciate for his involvement in the slums of the nearby Diocese of San Isidro, whose suffragan bishopric was Buenos aires Bergoglio appointed him bishop at the age of just 49, while another Cura Villero, Gustavo Oscar Carrara, was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Porteña, to whom he later preferred a profile very similar to that of García Cuerva. Dynamics that allow us to imagine how crucial papal preference is as a criterion for awarding or not awarding a commission.
Speaking from Fabio Fazio to Che tempo che fa, Francesco said he had few but true friends. In Argentina, the Pope showed during his pontificate that he is counting on them above all to reorganize the national episcopacy, which he considers too conservative. Suffice it to say that since 2017 the President of the Bishops’ Conference has been Monsignor Oscar Vicente Ojea Quintana, a man very close to Bergoglio, who ordained him bishop, had him as auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires and then as a neighbor when he was bishop of San Isidro became . Given the great opposition to his name, it is no secret that the papal will was decisive in the election of Ojea Quintana as head of Argentina’s bishops. Monsignor Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta is also Argentinian, whom Bergoglio met in 2001 and whom he appointed acting undersecretary of state of the CEA in 2008, during his presidency.
As in the case of Manuel Fernández, so does Zanchetta He received episcopal ordination a few months after the election of Francis, but at the head of the Diocese of Orán, with his sudden resignation in 2017 and his appointment to the APSA in the Vatican, he has been the protagonist of one of the most discussed pages of the current pontificate in the for him ad hoc role as expert witness until 2021. While in Rome for this post, Zanchetta became the first bishop in Argentina to be tried for sexual abuse after two seminarians whom the judges believed charged and sentenced him served four and a half years in prison.
The compatriots who are friends of the Pope include not only consecrated people: Lay, for example, is the far-left politician Giovanni Grabois, who is currently a candidate for the 2023 presidential elections and is also a member of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, to which he has been an adviser since 2016.
Francesco has never set foot in Argentina since 2013 But the relationships, the disappointments and the convictions that have matured during the experience in his homeland have strongly influenced the decisions of this pontificate. The appointment of a personality like Fernández as head of the same body, which delayed his appointment (prompted by then Cardinal Bergoglio) by two years to the head of the Universidad Católica Argentina due to doubts, is a tangible sign of how this process works together through the recourse to the shop stewards of the Society of Jesus – could experience a further acceleration.