Having been summoned to Rome, Spain’s bishops met with Pope Francis and officials of the Dicastery for the Clergy on November 28.
The meeting followed an apostolic visitation of the nation’s seminaries, conducted earlier this year by two bishops from Uruguay.
Denying that the Pontiff was “chewing them out or condemning anyone,” Cardinal Juan José Omella of Barcelona, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, said during a subsequent press conference that the extraordinary meeting’s purpose “was to see how we can improve. We are in a change of eras, and in some way we have to prepare.”