By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV has named Cardinal Baldassare Reina grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.
The cardinal succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who turned 80, the Vatican’s mandatory retirement age, April 20. The archbishop had served as grand chancellor since 2016.
Cardinal Reina, as papal vicar for Rome, is automatically the grand chancellor of the Pontifical Lateran University, where the institute is based.
The institute for studies on marriage and the family was established by St. John Paul II in 1982 after the 1980 Synod of Bishops on the family called for the creation of centers devoted to the study of the church’s teaching on marriage and the family.
After the more recent meetings of the Synod of Bishops on the family in 2014 and 2015 called for a more pastoral and missionary approach to modern family life, Pope Francis updated the statutes in 2017. He said there was a need for greater reflection and academic formation in a “pastoral perspective and attention to the wounds of humanity” while keeping the original inspiration for the old institute alive.
By amplifying the institute’s scope in making it a “theological” institute that is also dedicated to human “sciences,” Pope Francis had written, the institute’s work will study — in a “deeper and more rigorous way — the truth of revelation and the wisdom of the tradition of faith.”
The anthropological and cultural changes underway affect every aspect of human life, he wrote, and that calls for a new approach that is not limited to pastoral practices and mission “that reflect forms and models of the past.”
Archbishop Paglia also is president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a position he also is expected to retire from now that he has turned 80.
Pope Francis also updated the statutes of that body in 2016. The main goal of the academy, as founded in 1994 by St. John Paul II, is still “the defense and promotion of the value of human life and the dignity of the person,” according to the new statutes.
The new statutes added, however, that achieving the goal includes studying ways to promote “the care of the dignity of the human person at the different ages of existence, mutual respect between genders and generations, defense of the dignity of each human being, promotion of a quality of human life that integrates its material and spiritual value with a view to an authentic ‘human ecology’ that helps recover the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe.”
