The bishop, Dominique Rey, among the most conservative of the French episcopate, announced Thursday that he was forced to postpone the ordination of priests and deacons.
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Thunderbolt in the French ecclesiastical ranks. The bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, Dominique Rey, announced, Thursday, June 2, that at the express request of the Vatican, he was forced to stay the ordination of the four priests and the six deacons planned this year in his diocese.
This totally unusual injunction from Rome is all the more surprising since it comes just a few days before the enthronement mass of new clerics, which traditionally takes place around June 29, day of the Festival of the Apostles Peter and Paul. “We welcome this request both in pain and confidence, aware of the test it represents above all for those who were about to receive ordination,” wrote the prelate in a press release published on the site of his diocese.
The bishop specifies that this instructions fell from the Holy See comes at the end of a “fraternal visit” made in recent months in the diocese, “at the request of Rome”, by Jean-Marc Aveline, the Archbishop Metropolitan de Marseille – which Féjus -Toulon notes – which will be created Cardinal by Pope Francis in August. This “fraternal visit” covers a kind of inspection mission during which the different components of the diocese – lay as clerics or religious are questioned. Several departments of the Roman administration asked “questions” concerning “the restructuring of the seminar and the policy of reception of the diocese”. M gr Rey also spoke on this subject with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Roman congregation for the bishops, in Rome. Ordinations are suspended “pending the consequences of these current exchanges” with the Vatican.
The Castile seminar in the Collimator of Rome
It is in particular the functioning of the Castile seminar (Var) which is in the crosshairs of Rome. Under the impulse of M
gr rey, a reference bishop of the most conservative pole of the French episcopate, this diocesan training center is one of the most productive in terms of ordinations. Installed in a castle bequeathed to the diocese in the 1920s, closed in the 1950s due to the vocations crisis, it reopened in 1983. At the head of the diocese since 2000, Dominique Rey has worked to energize it.
himself from the Emmanuel community, located in the movement of charismatic renewal, he brought new communities (charismatic, missionaries, traditionalists, etc.). A dozen are present, some of which, like the missionaries of divine mercy, observe the extraordinary form of the Roman rite, in other words mass in Latin, whose use Benoît XVI has extended the use but that Pope Francis has just restricted.
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