It was completely exceptional for an entire episcopal conference to respond to the Vatican's call for a meeting other than the traditional ad limina visits every five years. There are hardly any precedents, the latest, a call to order to all Chilean bishops due to a major scandal of cover-up of sexual abuse in the country. For this reason, Pope Francis' call to all active Spanish bishops, some eighty prelates, this Tuesday in the hall of the Synod of the Holy See had generated many concerns. The Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) has breathed a sigh of relief after more than two hours speaking with Francisco, in a frank conversation in which the issue of sexual abuse was not addressed. “It has been a cordial dialogue, not a slap on the wrist,” the president of the EEC, the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona, Joan Josep Omella, wanted to emphasize.
The topic of the day was the future of Spanish seminaries, suffering from the lack of vocations in the face of an increasingly secularized Europe. It was already strange that the Vatican decided at the beginning of the year to send two Uruguayan bishops to write a report on the 86 Spanish seminaries, 55 of them with training houses for future priests. But the coincidence in time with the investigations into pedophilia in the Spanish Church, just after the recent publication of the Ombudsman's report – which calculated that around 1.13% of Spanish adults have suffered abuse in a religious setting – and shortly before the investigation commissioned by the EEC to the Cremades office is known
“The Pope has said that he could have come to Spain and not have us come. But for him it is a complication, because of course, it would be a state visit. That has relaxed us a lot because there was no longer that danger that some said that they were going to pull us by the ears. It was not to condemn anyone, but to talk,” Omella insisted, emphasizing – he even joked that he promised it “for Jesus' sake” – that they only talked about seminars, not about the Spanish political situation. “The balloon that said they were going to scold us for something very serious that had happened in Spain has deflated,” she added in a press conference with correspondents in Rome.
The big question now is what happens in the Spanish seminaries that does not happen in other European countries, because no other episcopal conference has been called, at the moment, to the Vatican for this matter. According to the CEE, the call could respond to the fact that the Spanish one is the first episcopal conference that adapted the directives on seminaries, the so-called Ratio Fundamentalis, in 2016, and therefore they wanted to be informed about its implementation. They also believe that perhaps from now on the Dicastery for the Clergy convenes other episcopal conferences for the same reason. It was also very strange that the meeting began with a prayer by Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, in charge of the most important spiritual retreats in the Vatican.
During the first quarter of the year, the two Uruguayan bishops, that of Maldonado-Punta del Este-Minas, Milton Luis Tróccoli; and that of Salto, Arturo Eduardo Fajardo, inspected one by one all the 86 seminaries distributed in various “formation houses”, of which 40 are the classic ones, which host their own seminarians, after which they informed the prefect for the Clergy , the South Korean Lazzaro You Heung-Sik. A total of 29 formation houses are attached to a diocese and 15 are “Redemptoris Mater” seminaries, neocatechumenal, and yesterday the Vatican wanted to determine that they should be governed by the same criteria as the diocesan ones.
But the CEE assures that there is no type of problem other than the one that also affects the rest of the European episcopal conferences, that is, the lack of vocations, and therefore there is a need to bring together seminarians in larger centers. “When I told the bishops that it was to exchange about the report, they were calm, and that's how it was. We come from a complex reality, for example in Pamplona there is a seminary with capacity for 1,000 seminarians, which has grown to fifteen. We must adapt to the new reality we live in, to an era that is being born,” explained the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona.
“We came delighted and we leave happy,” concluded Omella, who also wanted to reassure about the Pope's health – his participation was in jeopardy due to a mild flu: “They had told us that he had a cold and he has not coughed even once.”
