On June 6, 2013, Pope Francis had an audience with the presiding board of the CLAR (see photo), the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women – Confederación Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Religiosos y Religiosas). A transcript of the private audience was provided by the attendees to the Chilean ultra-progressive website Reflexión y Liberación (Reflection and Liberation).
According to the report, the Pope complained about a group who offered him a spiritual bouquet of rosaries as a gift upon his election:
I share with you [my] concerns. One is the Pelagian current that there is in the Church at this moment. There are some restorationist groups. I know some, it fell upon me to receive them in Buenos Aires. And one feels as if one goes back 60 years! Before the Council…One feels in 1940… An anecdote, just to illustrate this, it is not to laugh at it, I took it with respect, but it concerns me; when I was elected, I received a letter from one of these groups, and they said: “Your Holiness, we offer you this spiritual treasure: 3,525 rosaries.” Why don’t they say, “we pray for you, we ask…”, but this thing of counting… And these groups return to practices and to disciplines that I lived through – not you, because you are not old – to disciplines, to things that in that moment took place, but not now, they do not exist today…