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Just before the synod starts, the Pope will play host to another gathering: an unusual three-day business meeting of the entire 150-member College of Cardinals. The purpose is to offer John Paul advice on a proposed reorganization of the Vatican bureaucracy. Most of the reforms to be considered are name changes that, remarks one observer in Rome, would merely "give the Vatican printers and sign painters a lot of work."
Two proposals, however, are freighted with importance. One would place Willebrands' Christian Unity secretariat under the scrutiny of Ratzinger and two other watchdogs to protect against doctrinal deviations. Willebrands has been lobbying hard against the move and appears likely to fend it off. The other proposal would shift supervision of graduate-level seminaries from the Congregation for Catholic Education to the Congregation for Clergy, which stresses piety and spirituality. The clergy office is headed by Silvio Cardinal Oddi, a hard-line conservative. A liberal educator in Rome protests that the quality of priestly training "will drop tremendously" if the shift occurs.
While the synod could issue important new interpretations of Vatican II, it could also produce, in the words of one prelate, nothing more than "a rainfall of ideas." But President Theodore Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame muses that the synod would be an apt prelude to a papal call for a Third Vatican Council: "I don't want to wait another 450 years before there's more change in the church." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Daniela Simpson and Wilton Wynn/Rome, with other bureaus