This April will mark five years since the resignation of Tomas A. Camacho as bishop of the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa, yet the long and seemingly arduous process to find his successor is back to \u201csquare one,\u201d according to the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the weekly meeting of the Rotary Club of Saipan on Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency Saipan, Fr. Ryan Jimenez asked for the public\u2019s continued patience in the selection of the next bishop.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a long and difficult process. I sometimes think that even [I] who is in charge of the administration process don\u2019t know exactly what\u2019s going on,\u201d said Jimenez.<\/p>\n
Jimenez said the selection process started even before Camacho\u2019s resignation when the bishop was asked by the Vatican to submit recommendations on what qualities his successor needs to have and if there are priests in the region\u2014the CNMI, Guam, Pohnpei, Chuuk, and Marshall Islands\u2014who suit these qualities.<\/p>\n
He said the process also lies heavily in the hands of the apostolic delegate or nuncio, the pope\u2019s representative based in New Zealand. He said the nuncio does all the \u201cpreliminaries\u201d based on his study and consultation with Rome.<\/p>\n
The nuncio will then select three names, which is called terna, which he will then submit to Rome where an office in the Vatican called propaganda fidae wil go over the names and look carefully at each candidates\u2019 background.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened was and in our case\u2014and this is no secret because it was relayed to me last year\u2014there were already names. But sometime last year the previous nuncio in New Zealand mentioned to me [that] those three names were not accepted in Rome. So we\u2019re back to square one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jimenez said the rejection of the terna by the propaganda fidae wil seldom happens but does happen. Since then, he hasn\u2019t heard any development on the selection of a new bishop.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t heard anything. I don\u2019t know where we are. I basically stopped asking because, you know, someone even said \u2018Maybe they\u2019re waiting for Jesus to come back because he\u2019s the only person qualified.\u2019 If there\u2019s no one here who is qualified then who would that be? It will happen but we just don\u2019t know when. Sometimes our timeframe is not God\u2019s timeframe,\u201d said Jimenez.<\/p>\n
Camacho stepped down as the highest-ranking prelate in the CNMI when he turned 75 on Sept. 18, 2008, based on the Canon Law that requires a diocesan bishop who reaches that age to offer his resignation to the Holy Father in Rome. Jimenez took on his new role after Camacho\u2019s resignation became official in April 2009. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This April will mark five years since the resignation of Tomas A. Camacho as bishop of the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa, yet the long and seemingly arduous process to find his successor is back to \u201csquare one,\u201d according to the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Chalan Kanoa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}