Pope Francis has made his first appointment to the Vatican’s central bureaucracy, choosing a friend who is the head of the Franciscan order to help run the congregation for religious.
Until his appointment as secretary of the congregation, Father José Rodríguez Carballo was in his second term as minister general of the Orders of Friars Minor — the 119th successor of St Francis of Assisi.
The Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, as the congregation is formally known, has responsibility for about 739,000 women religious, 135,000 religious priests and 54,000 religious brothers.
In a March 14 video greeting to the new Pope, Father Carballo recalled their first meeting, when “it seemed to me that I had before me a Franciscan brother, a companion, a friend as if we had known each other all our lives”.
Father Carballo was born in 1953 in Lodoselo, Spain. He speaks Spanish, Galician, Italian, French, English and Portuguese, and also knows Latin, Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew.
He succeeds American Archbishop Joseph Tobin, who was appointed to lead the Indianapolis archdiocese in October 2012.
In his new role Father Carballo will work closely with the head of the congregation, Brazilian Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz.
Together with Cardinal Braz de Aviz, he is expected to play a key role in working to overcome and heal the tensions between the Vatican and the leadership of the umbrella organisation of some 59,000 American women religious, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
In April 2012 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a highly critical doctrinal assessment of the LCWR, accusing it of taking positions that undermine Catholic teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality and of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith”.
In the light of that report, Pope Benedict appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to supervise the reform of the LCWR within five years.
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Image: Ordo Fratrum Minorum