Pope Francis has dismissed Cardinal George Pell, who is being prosecuted in Australia for sexual assault on children, and Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz, who was suspected of having committed a pedophile priest in Chile, on Wednesday. the Vatican.
The two high prelates were part of a council of nine cardinal councilors from all continents, called "C9", to help Pope Francis to reform the administration of the Holy See.
No new members planned for now. The pope wrote in late October to the cardinals leaving this body, "thanking them for their work done for five years," said Wednesday the director of the press room of the Vatican, Greg Burke. The appointment of new members is not planned at the moment, he added during a press briefing.
The two men aged 77 and 85 years. The pope had formally made Cardinal Pell temporarily available for eighteen months to defend himself before the Australian courts. He never returned to Rome. Monsignor Pell, 77, remains officially at the head of the powerful secretariat for the economy instituted by Pope Francis to put order in the finances of the Holy See.
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Chilean cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, who has been singled out for his silence by the victims of a pedophile priest in Chile as part of a massive scandal that is tearing the country apart, has also lost his place as a member of the prestigious "C9". He seems to have misguided Pope Francis, whose faulty defense of a Chilean bishop, pilloried by victims of sexual abuse, had turned his trip to Chile into a fiasco in January 2018.
After a meeting in the Vatican with Pope Francis, Cardinal Errazuriz himself announced in mid-November that he had "withdrawn" from the "C9". "It's not a resignation, I retired at the end of the period for which I was appointed," the high prelate insisted in an interview with a Chilean newspaper. The archbishop emeritus of Santiago is 85 years old.