Vatican City, 12 February, 2022 / 1:10 pm (ACI Africa).
The Vatican has named a papal delegate to oversee an international association co-founded by the French mystic Marthe Robin.
In a decree dated Feb. 3, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life, appointed Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard as the pontifical delegate of the Foyers de Charité.
The Foyers de Charité said in a Feb. 10 press release that the decree gave Ricard, the retired archbishop of Bordeaux, southwestern France, the “mission is to govern the association, temporarily, with full governmental powers.”
The decree explained that the 77-year-old French cardinal “will accompany the members of the association in a review of the charism and a clarification of the ecclesiology that underlies the vocation of the Foyers, along with a consequent reform of the life, the formation and the government of the association at statutory level.”
The Vatican typically appoints pontifical delegates to oversee reforms of Catholic communities on behalf of the pope. For example, Benedict XVI appointed the then Archbishop Velasio De Paolis as the pontifical delegate to the crisis-hit Legionaries of Christ in 2010.