Thanks,I’m not sure the overarching ideas are very new. The following is a report from 2013:
bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25102720
I think the comments by Pope Francis reported are new, but he has said similar things before. Though the national conferences, that wasn’t reported in the BBC article. I wonder what Pope Francis means. Cardinal Arinze has been critical of certain decisions being made by conferences in this interview:Thanks,
I guess the Yahoo article is just reiterating what was previously said by Pope Francis.
Some at the synod have talked about allowing decisions on the divorced and remarried or on homosexuality to be decentralized, made at the level of regional or national bishops’ conferences or by individual bishops. How do you feel about that?
Are you going to tell me that we can have a national bishops’ conference in one country that would approve something which, in another conference, would be seen as sin? Is sin going to change according to national borders? We’d become national churches. Have there not been other religious affiliations in the world that came dangerously near to that?
cruxnow.com/church/2015/10/16/a-synod-conversation-with-catholic-africas-lion-in-winter/National bishops’ conferences are important and should have a clear role, but I don’t think it should include these areas. It looks dangerously like nationalizing right and wrong.