Who is the Rome Diocese’s new vicar general, future Cardinal Baldassare Reina?

Hannah Brockhaus   By Hannah Brockhaus for CNA

October 9, 2024 Catholic News Agency News Briefs 0 Print

 

Rome Bishop Baldassare Reina presides at the closing of the diocesan phase of the investigation into the life and virtues of Chiara Corbella Petrillo in Rome on Friday, June 21, 2024. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 9, 2024 / 10:30 am (CNA).

When Pope Francis announced on Oct. 6 that he would create 21 new cardinals later this year, he also gave the Rome Diocese its new vicar general.

As he listed the names of the new cardinals, the pope named “His Excellency Monsignor Baldassare Reina, who will be, from today on, vicar general for the Diocese of Rome.”

From May 2022, Reina has gone from a priest of Agrigento, Sicily, serving in the Dicastery for the Clergy at the Vatican, to an archbishop and cardinal in charge of the diocese of the bishop of Rome — the pope.

Cardinal-designate Bishop Baldassare Reina has been temporarily in charge of the Diocese of Rome in the absence of a vicar general after Pope Francis transferred Cardinal Angelo De Donatis to a post as head of the Vatican’s apostolic penitentiary in April.

Reina, 53, was Rome’s vice regent, the second in command, from January 2023, when the diocese was restructured under a new constitution.

The promotion came less than one year after Reina had been appointed an auxiliary bishop of Rome with responsibility over the “western sector” of the city.

Reina’s background also includes nine years as rector of the major seminary of Agrigento in the southern part of the Italian island of Sicily.

He also taught classes on sacred Scripture at several educational institutions after receiving a master’s-level degree in biblical theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1998.

The archbishop has been a priest for 29 years. He will be made a cardinal on Dec. 8.

In an Oct. 7 letter to Catholics in Rome, Reina wrote that Pope Francis’ “dedication to the universal Church and the prophecy he has given us in these years of pontificate urge me to work for a transparent and poor Church, capable of releasing and spreading the fragrance of the Gospel.”

Now, Pope Francis will need to nominate a vice regent, the figure who assists the cardinal vicar in the management of the diocese, which he has also recently reconfigured.

In an Oct. 1 document published Tuesday by the Diocese of Rome, the pontiff said he had decided to incorporate the central sector of the diocese into the other four sectors.

Francis explained in the motu proprio La Vera Bellezza (“The True Beauty”) that with the exodus of residents from the historic center, the number of Catholic parishes in that geographic zone has dwindled to 35, many with few parishioners. The high influx of tourists has also had an impact on the pastoral needs of the area.

The Diocese of Rome was divided into five sectors with each of the five sectors being divided into prefectures. Now, the five prefectures of the central sector will be part of the northern, eastern, southern, and western sectors.

“In this view, there is no longer an isolated center and a periphery divided into separate parts but, in a dynamic vision that envisions not walls but bridges, the Diocese of Rome will be conceived as a single center expanding through the four cardinal points,” he said.

The pope added that he hopes this change will dissolve “the bilateral tension that has been ingrained in social and ecclesial perception over time between the historic center and the peripheries” of Rome.

He said the Jubilee Year in 2025, more than just an occasion to welcome pilgrims from around the world, should also be a time of pilgrimage for Romans themselves and an opportunity to rediscover the spiritual riches found in the churches and religious traditions in Rome’s city center.

“I wish to strengthen the unitary and synodal perception of the Diocese of Rome starting from its geographical configuration, so that it can better explicate the authentic sense of its centrality and beauty,” Pope Francis said.

If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.

About Catholic News Agency 12364 Articles
Catholic News Agency (www.catholicnewsagency.com)

Related Articles

No Picture
News Briefs

Vatican transfers task of Ecclesia Dei to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith

January 19, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Vatican City, Jan 19, 2019 / 06:02 am (CNA).- Pope Francis issued a motu proprio Saturday ending the pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei and creating an office within the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith to focus on doctrinal dialogue with traditionalist groups.

For over thirty years, the pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei has “facilitated the full ecclesial communion of priests, seminarians, communities or individual religious linked to Mgr. Marcel Lefebvre’s fraternity, who wished to remain united to the Successor of Peter in the Catholic Church, preserving their spiritual and liturgical traditions,” Pope Francis wrote in the apostolic letter published Jan. 19.

“The institutes and religious communities that usually celebrate in extraordinary form have found today their own stability of number and life,” the pope noted.

Pope Francis stated that the issues dealt with today by the pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei are of  “a predominantly doctrinal nature,” and therefore the complete transfer of the pontifical commission’s task to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith is with the desire that “these aims become more and more evident to the conscience of the ecclesial communities.”

Established in 1988 by St. John Paul II in order to carry on a dialogue with traditionalist parties, Ecclesia Dei was reformed by Benedict XVI in 2009 with the instruction Universae Ecclesiae, linking the commission to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

The closing of Ecclesia Dei is the latest step in the pope’s wider project of reform of the Roman Curia. Administrative matters, including the pontifical commission’s budget, will now be included in the ordinary accounts of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.

The Ordinary Session of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith on November 15, 2017 requested that “the dialogue between the Holy See and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X be conducted directly” by their congregation, the apostolic letter explained.

In November 2018, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, the superior general of the SSPX, met with CDF Prefect Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer and Archbishop Guido Pozzo, secretary of the pontifical commission Ecclesia Dei.

During the meeting “it was recalled that the fundamental problem is actually doctrinal … Because of this irreducible doctrinal divergence, for the past seven years no attempt to compose a draft of a doctrinal statement acceptable to both parties has succeeded. This is why the doctrinal question remains absolutely essential,” according to a SSPX statement.

The SSPX was founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 to form priests, as a response to what he described as errors that had crept into the Church after the Second Vatican Council. Its relations with the Holy See became particularly strained in 1988 when Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer consecrated four bishops without the permission of St. John Paul II.

The illicit episcopal consecrations resulted in the excommunication of the bishops involved. The excommunications of the surviving bishops were lifted in 2009 by Benedict XVI, and since then negotiations “to rediscover full communion with the Church” have continued between the SSPX and the Vatican.

There were indications in recent years of movement towards regularization of the priestly society, which has some 600 priest-members.

In March 2017, Pope Francis gave diocesan bishops or other local ordinaries the authorization to grant priests of the SSPX the ability to celebrate licitly and validly the marriages of the faithful who follow the Society’s pastoral activity.

And in September 2015, the pope announced that the faithful would be able to validly and licitly receive absolution from priests of the SSPX during the Jubilee Year of Mercy. This ability was later extended indefinitely by Francis in his 2016 apostolic letter Misericordia et misera.

[…]

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*