Cardinal Italian Camillo Ruini, who presided over the International Commission to investigate the veracity of Medjugorje, offers four criteria for the conclave that will choose the successor of Pope Francis.
In a note entitled “Prayer for the Church“, Published in the blog Setimimo del Veteran Vaticanista Italiano Sandro Magister, Ruini offers” four auspices – which are also invocations – for the church of a future that I hope is very close. “
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“I trust a good and charitable church, doctrinally safe, governed according to the law and deeply united internally. These are my intentions of prayer, which I would like to see widely shared,” says the 94 -year -old cardinal.
Cardinal Ruini was a close collaborator of Pope San Juan Paul II, presiding over the Italian Episcopal Conference and being a general vicar of the Diocese of Rome, both charges from 1991 to 2007 and 2008 respectively.
In 2005 he participated in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2010 appointed him president of the Medjugorje Commission, formed by about 20 members between bishops and cardinals; and that presented its final report in 2014. In 2024 the Vatican approved the spiritual experience of Medjugorje without confirming its supernatural character.
1. A good and charitable church
Ruini points out in this first point that “the love led to the effectiveness of life is in fact the supreme law of Christian testimony and, therefore, of the Church. And that is what people, even today, more yearning for.”
“In our style of government, all useless hardness, all meanness and heart aridity must be eliminated,” he says.
2. A doctrinally safe church
The purple Italian then remembers Pope Benedict XVI, who said that “faith today is a flame that threatens to go out.”
In that sense, Ruini points out, “to rekindle this flame is therefore another great priority of the Church. For this, a lot of prayer is necessary, the ability to Christianly respond to today’s intellectual challenges, but also the certainty of the truth and the security of the doctrine.”
“For too many years we are experiencing that, if they weaken, all of us, pastors and faithful, we are severely penalized,”.
3. A church governed according to law
For the Italian cardinal “the Pontificate of Benedict XVI has been undermined for his low ability to govern, and this is a concern for all time, including the near future. In addition, we must not forget that it is the government of that special reality that is the church.”
“Here, as I said, the fundamental law is love: the style of government and the appeal to the law must be as satisfied with this law, which is very demanding for anyone”
4. A united church
Ruini says that “in these years we have perceived some threats – which I do not want to exaggerate – to the unity and the communion of the Church.”
“To overcome them and bring to light what I like to call the ‘Catholic form’ of the Church, it is decisive once again mutual charity, but it is also important to awaken the awareness that the Church, like every social body, has its rules, that no one can ignore impunity.”
“At 94, silence is more appropriate than words. I hope, however, that these lines are a small fruit of the love I have to the Church,” he concludes.
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.