THE Vatican has announced the creation of a new office to fight secularisation and "re-evangelise" Europe. The move is being seen as an acknowledgment by Pope Benedict that his attempts to re-invigorate Christianity in Europe haven’t succeeded and need a boost.
The Pope announced the new office during a vespers’ service on Monday and said that while parts of the world were still missionary territory, in other places like Europe, Christianity has existed for centuries yet "the process of secularisation has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church".
The new pontifical council, he said, would "promote a renewed evangelisation" in countries where the Church has long existed "but which are living a progressive secularisation of society and a sort of ‘eclipse of the sense of God.’"
Pope Benedict did not say who would head the new office, but Italian media have suggested he would look to Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who as head of the Pontifical Academy for Life is the Vatican’s top bioethics official.
Fisichella created a minor uproar last year when he defended Brazilian doctors who aborted the twin foetuses of a 9-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather.
His call for mercy sparked heated criticism from some hard line conservative members of the Pontifical Academy.
The pontiff is also expected to name a new head of the Vatican’s evangelisation office for missionary work, the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, since its current head Cardinal Ivan Dias, 74, is in poor health.
The office is currently in the spotlight because Dias’ predecessor, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, is under investigation by Italian prosecutors in a sprawling corruption scandal involving his business transactions at the congregation, which owns millions of dollars in Roman real estate.
Prosecutors are trying to untangle an alleged web of kickbacks involving billions of euro worth of contracts for projects such as preparing 2000 Holy Year events, the 2009 Group of Eight summit and rebuilding the quake-shattered town of L’Aquila.
Sepe’s real estate transactions are under scrutiny since they involved some of the key figures implicated in the probe, including Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s disaster chief Guido Bertolaso.
On Monday, the Vatican sought to clarify the role of the Congregation, acknowledging that with such a complicated portfolio of real estate there could be "errors of valuation and fluctuations in the international market."
In a statement, the Vatican said it had over the years realised the need to improve profitability and run the office more professionally and with higher standards.
Sepe has denied wrongdoing and insisted he acted for the good of the church in his transactions. He has denied point-by-point the three main accusations against him concerning his 2001-2006 tenure at the congregation and three deals involving the sale, renovation and renting of congregation-owned properties.