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Pope Francis celebrates the opening Mass of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family at St. Peter's Basilica on October 5, 2014.John-Henry Westen / LifeSiteNews.com

By Maike Hickson, LifeSiteNews, March 3, 2020

They demonstrate how the Pope’s new document is about more than a simple yes or no to married priests and female deacons.

March 3, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In the recent days, several key people who are either closely working with Pope Francis or who are otherwise closely linked to his reform agenda – Cardinal Michael Czerny, Archbishop Víctor Fernández, Austen Ivereigh, and Father Antônio Almeida – have now come out insisting that Pope Francis did not close the door to married priests in the Amazon in his post-synodal exhortation Querida Amazonia.

They go even farther in stating that Pope Francis actually conducted a broader “transformation” than merely admitting married priests: a “new theology of power in the Church,” as  Fernández puts it. This transformation reduces the priesthood to two functions – the administration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist and of Penance – and hands the broader aspects of leadership into the hands of the laity.

Archbishop  Fernández, in his February 26 in-depth analysis of the new papal document, points out that actually the progressivists have missed out on key reformative elements of the Pope’s writings already in 2016, when he published Amoris Laetitia, his post-synodal exhortation on marriage and the family. “At the time,” Fernández writes, “progressive theologians did not sufficiently take advantage of or accompany the new proposals that appears in chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia.” While Francis did “open a door” with regard to “practical proposals” (that is to say, Communion for the “remarried” divorcees), the Argentine prelate adds, that chapter would actually have given occasion for a new “fundamental morality.” However, as the author writes, “few, too few were the articles that accompanied this step and knew how to exploit it.”  ….

Read more here:  https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/francis-closest-collaborators-prove-how-pope-has-reinvented-priesthood-in-amazon-exhortation