Restoring collegiality new popes first
task
By JOHN
WILKINS
I have not regretted becoming a Catholic. The church nourishes me.
But part of the vision that many saw at the time I made my move into the church
-- shortly after John XXIIIs Second Vatican Council -- has faded.
At the end of the second millennium, Pope John Paul II has
governed the Catholic church in the style of Pius XII rather than in that of
John XXIII. The Vatican II doctrine of collegiality -- that the bishops, with
the pope, govern the church as a college in succession to the apostles -- has
been interpreted by this pope as meaning that the team is being collegial if
they say the same thing as the captain.
Meanwhile the curia -- the papal civil service -- has tended once
more to take over the role of the churchs central government, whereas in
fact their proper function is to be a papal instrument. The curia treat
us as altar boys, one English-speaking cardinal said to me in Rome.
Will future observers from the vantage point of the third
millennium judge John XXIII and his council to have been a blip on the screen
of history?
Pope John Paul towers over the church. It is as though the papal
office were on a level of its own, with bishops, priests and lay people
subjected to it. The bishops own voices are subordinate even though they
are declared by Vatican II to be themselves vicars of Christ in their own
dioceses. This pope is certainly one of the greatest men of the 20th century
and very possibly a saint. The lives of millions have been touched by him.
Saints can be hard to live with, however.
The secular Western world sees John Paul II as a hero, but warms
to the singer rather than to the song. Yet the song is magnificent. Do
not be afraid. Christ knows what is in man. He alone knows
it. In Christ is the truth about what it means to be human; to be
contrary to Christ is to be contrary to the truth.
What prevents the song from being more widely heard? This pope,
who was so successful in the first phase of his pontificate, when he shook the
rotten tree of communism to such effect, became more pessimistic in the second
phase, when he rode out against the permissive relativism of the developed
West. Sometimes he has shown his anger. He urged a third way for Poland between
communism and capitalism and it was not forthcoming. He hoped that
Europes Eastern half would re-evangelize its Western half and it did not
happen.
Catholic believers, for their part, will be modern in their own
way. Quietly, many have renegotiated the terms of their membership. They widely
believe, for example, that the use of contraception to plan their families is
licit. They are not going to be driven out of the church for this reason,
although John Paul II has reasserted the ban on contraception in such strong
terms as to suggest that anyone who infringes it is denying the sovereignty of
God.
The credibility gap
It is bad for Catholic authority when some doctrines that are
advocated so strongly by the pope are widely rejected. The credibility gap on
these issues is dangerous, and the laitys loss of confidence extends to
the whole hierarchy. People do not expect bishops to speak their minds on
contraception, optional celibacy and women priests: They know their pastors
have to toe the party line, for otherwise they will not survive. They see that
issues such as the reception of Communion by divorced persons remarried without
an annulment are not allowed to be discussed.
A more pluralistic format allowing a genuinely collegial approach
would make a dialogue possible. Paul VIs encyclical reaffirming the ban
on contraception, Humanae Vitae, was not a collegial act. How much
greater would have been its authority, Cardinal Leo Suenens pointed out, if it
had been -- but it would then also have been different.
Which way will the popes of the third millennium tilt the
balance? The documents and intention of the Second Vatican Council remain
determinative. If future popes decide to opt for greater pluralism, there is
only one way to start: with the bishops. And if they want to counterbalance the
curia, they will have to give collegiality a stronger expression.
That is what the Second Vatican Council did not do. It set out
the doctrine of collegiality in the third chapter of its beautiful constitution
on the church, then left it side by side with the restated doctrine of absolute
papal primacy. There was now a moral obligation on the pope to govern
collegially -- but he did not have to.
To close the gap between theory and practice, Paul VI instituted
the synod of bishops. It was meant to perpetuate the conciliar experience, but
has instead become a rubber stamp. One synod that stands out as an example was
called in 1980 -- the first of John Paul IIs papacy -- to discuss
marriage and the family. All the lay couples invited were ardent supporters of
Humanae Vitae, and the synods proceedings and recommendations were
manipulated thoroughly. When the papal document subsequently appeared, it could
have been written without the bishops ever having gone to Rome; but the pope
could now appeal to their consensus.
Pope John Paul II has ruled like this because he judged that the
Catholic church needed it. He thought there was an emergency. But emergencies
cannot go on forever. There will come a pope who will make changes. It seems to
me certain that they will be in the direction of greater pluralism.
But how could such a pope proceed without breaking up the church?
An ultramontane liberal could do what is necessary, but then there could be the
same polarization, only in the opposite direction as with Pope John Paul II,
who has governed the church from the right.
A reforming pope
A reforming pope would need to enlist the bishops majority
support. Where might he begin? The key is the Code of Canon Law, the instrument
of centralization in the hands of Eugenio Pacelli. In helping to draft the
code, the future Pius XII knew exactly what he was doing when he had a canon
inserted for the first time claiming that the right to appoint all bishops
everywhere belonged to the bishop of Rome in virtue of the primacy he
exercised. Until the 19th century, by contrast, the appointment of bishops was
left in the vast majority of cases to the local church.
A canon that is comparatively recent and breaks with tradition
could obviously be revised. A reforming pope might first announce that he was
convening a gathering of the senior metropolitan archbishops to help him work
out how to give the synod of bishops a more deliberative function, with careful
safeguards to preserve his own position.
I need help, he might say. I cannot, like Atlas,
take the whole world on my shoulders. To strengthen myself, I have to
strengthen my brothers. They must enjoy fully the say in the government of the
church that the Second Vatican Council allotted to them. The Catholic doctrine
of collegiality must become Catholic fact. Henceforward, executive authority
must be shown by structural expression to belong not to the pope and the curia,
but to the pope and the synod.
He would go on, of course, to pay a well-deserved tribute to the
devoted work of the curia, without which -- whatever radical changes may have
to be made to it, especially if there is ever prospect of reunion with the
Orthodox -- no pope could fulfill his function.
Such a move would receive massive support from the world
episcopate, including the most conservative. There would then be no difficulty
in revising the canon that reserves all episcopal appointments to the pope. A
commission of canon lawyers could be instructed by pope and synod to suggest a
range of forms for appointment to the episcopal office appropriate to the local
churches. No candidate could take up office until confirmed by the bishop of
Rome, who would also reserve the right to appoint bishops for churches under
persecution.
Perhaps there might even be a return to a process by which the
people would play a significant part in electing their bishops. Such a move
would be hugely popular among the Catholic laity upon whom, in the last resort,
the church depends. (As Cardinal John Henry Newman said, it would look pretty
odd without them.)
Only a starting point
This would be only the starting point. It would be no gain if
bishops started behaving like ultramontane popes in their own dioceses. They
would need in their turn to confirm and deepen their collegial relationship
with their priests and lay people, actively encouraging the public opinion in
the church, which Pius XII said was essential.
They would need to free theologians to develop pluralistic
approaches in keeping with the scope of their endeavor, which, since Vatican
II, is as wide as human experience itself. The vision of Vatican II is of a
hierarchically structured peoples church on pilgrimage with
humankind.
That reaffirmation of Christian humanism implies particular
theologies to meet particular situations. It implies inculturation -- the
earthing of the gospel in particular cultures. But when liberation theology
sprang up in Latin America in answer to the needs there, it was checked or
outlawed from the center: The two instructions from Rome deployed a range of
arguments against it, and there was of course a case to answer. But as a
result, Pope John Paul IIs preaching in the Third World was not able to
seize the moral and intellectual high ground to the extent it had in Eastern
Europe. He did not have a word of similar power for the poor of the Third
World.
The reforming pope I have posited would know that his collegial
move would also kick-start the stalled ecumenical process. The Catholic
churchs deep commitment to ecumenism is today not in doubt: It breathes
through every page of John Paul IIs 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint.
The blunt fact is, however, that unless the Catholic church is governed through
a collegiality that is structurally safeguarded, no Orthodox, Anglican or
Protestant church will take a single practical step toward unity with it.
I can well understand that there would be those in Rome who would
have great doubts about this imaginary popes reforming program, just as
they had about Pope John XXIIIs calling of a council. What need is there,
they would ask, to open windows to the modern world: You never know what may
fly in. Ever since Pius IX famously declared in the Syllabus of Errors in 1864
that the papacy had no need to reconcile itself with progress, liberalism
and modern civilization, the Catholic church has been struggling with the
question of whether to be modern, and if so, how.
Modern industrial societies are engaged in a project of pluralism
that is new. From a plurality of races, religions, philosophies and lifestyles,
they are trying to construct civic cultures that give equal rights to all,
within the rule of law. The basis is a universal respect for human beings,
because of their unique dignity, which entails claims about how they should be
treated. This is a profoundly ethical endeavor because it recognizes as a
universal requirement the duty to ones neighbor.
Threat of relativism
But everywhere the viability of these modern societies is
threatened by relativism. The idea that no group has a determinative place but
all must share can be easily subverted by the idea that no position or
lifestyle is better than any other. For relativism, there are no absolutes.
Where pluralism is a debate about how one ought to choose, relativism merely
affirms the fact of choice.
The Catholic church can practice pluralism without relativism. It
already does. But there should be real subsidiarity: Decisions should not be
taken at a higher level than necessary. An unreformed command structure will
always emphasize an ethics of control rather than of responsibility. It will
start from the hierarchy and end with the people, instead of the other way
round, as the council did. In assessing the claims of truth and freedom, it
will tend always to draw the boundaries in such a way that freedom comes off
worse.
There needs to be greater internal freedom in the Catholic church.
Then it could evangelize the worlds freedom more effectively.
John Wilkins lives in London. He has been editor of the The
Tablet, a Catholic weekly, since 1982. Previously he worked for 10 years in
the BBCs External Services as a scriptwriter and broadcaster. Books he
has edited include Understanding Veritatis Splendor.
This is the ninth of eleven articles, edited by Gary MacEoin,
to be expanded and published as a book, The Papacy and the People of God,
by Orbis Books.
National Catholic Reporter, December 12,
1997
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