Pope wants to decentralise the Church

[Ben K.]

Last month Pope Francis held his first meeting with a special group of cardinals to consider ways to reform the Vatican bureaucracy after saying in a newspaper interview that the Vatican had become too self-interested and needed to be inclusive.
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Pope Francis
"Excessive centralisation, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church's life and her missionary outreach," he says in the latest document.
He also says he does not believe that the papacy "should be expected to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world".
This month the Vatican launched an unprecedented survey of the views of lay Catholics on modern family life and sexual ethics.
The document does restate the Church's opposition to abortion but concedes that "it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations,... especially when the life developing within them is the result of rape or a situation of extreme poverty".

BBC News - Pope Francis calls for power to move away from Vatican

I wonder to what extent this decentralisation of powers will occur. Certainly, the Church's biggest blind spots have been universal policies that relatively unproblematic in one part of the world but extraordinarily damaging in other parts.

I'm doubt we'll be returning to the days of the early Church where things like Celtic Catholicism allowed priests to marry and people to divorce.

 

[joG]

BBC News - Pope Francis calls for power to move away from Vatican

I wonder to what extent this decentralisation of powers will occur. Certainly, the Church's biggest blind spots have been universal policies that relatively unproblematic in one part of the world but extraordinarily damaging in other parts.

I'm doubt we'll be returning to the days of the early Church where things like Celtic Catholicism allowed priests to marry and people to divorce.

As I understand it, Roman Catholic ethics are logically well structured and internally consistent. Changing the ethics is therefore a large job, as everything relates to everything else and all must be adjusted to a change anywhere else in the system. If you start allowing this or that, inconsistencies arise and put the whole edifice at risk of contradiction.

This does not mean that every decision should go to the center. It just means, there is an increased danger that actions taken on the periphery will have to be revised more often. There would be more heretics and the like.

Whether it is a good idea to decentralize is hard to say though and I suppose the Vatican is/has been thinking it through rather rigorously. After all, it is the oldest and most successful organization around and they must have done a few things right to survive this long and well.

 

[Ben K.]

As I understand it, Roman Catholic ethics are logically well structured and internally consistent. Changing the ethics is therefore a large job, as everything relates to everything else and all must be adjusted to a change anywhere else in the system. If you start allowing this or that, inconsistencies arise and put the whole edifice at risk of contradiction.

This does not mean that every decision should go to the center. It just means, there is an increased danger that actions taken on the periphery will have to be revised more often. There would be more heretics and the like.

Whether it is a good idea to decentralize is hard to say though and I suppose the Vatican is/has been thinking it through rather rigorously. After all, it is the oldest and most successful organization around and they must have done a few things right to survive this long and well.

It spread all over Europe due to decentralisation, adapting to individual pagan cultures. It depends on whether you believe the first millennium or the second millennium was better for the Church.