Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

The cardinals, who were appointed in April by Pope Francis and will confer with him for the first time at the Vatican on Oct. 1-3, were briefed to revise the constitution, known as Pastor Bonus, drawn up in 1988 by Pope John Paul, in a bid to give a great voice to bishops around the world.

But Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the group’s leader, said as the meeting loomed they were planning to go much further that just changing “this and that.”

“No, that constitution is over,” he said in a TV interview. “Now it is something different. We need to write something different,” he added.

“In the past the Vatican has just revised existing rules so this is a rupture after a century of increasing centralization,” said Gerard O’Connell, a Vatican analyst at the Vatican Insider.

“Cardinal Maradiaga is hinting that the Pope is asking the fundamental question: What can be decided in Rome and what at local level? How can the Roman Curia serve bishops instead of being an office of censure and control?”

O’Connell cited Japanese bishops as victims of the Vatican’s centralization.

“They must ask advice from Rome on the correct Japanese to use in their liturgies, yet you would think they would be the best judge.”

On Saturday, Francis gave another clear indication that he sees the Vatican as a hotbed of intrigue and power struggles when he instructed Vatican policemen on Saturday to crack down on gossip within the Vatican’s walls as well as looking out for intruders.

Defining gossip as the devil’s work, “a forbidden language” and “a war waged with the tongue”, he told gendarmes gathered for mass to tell gossipers they caught in the act, “Here there can be none of that: walk out of St. Anne’s Gate. Go outside and talk there! Here you cannot!”