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Books A blueprint for papal reform
THE REFORM OF THE
PAPACY By John R. Quinn Crossroad, 189 pages,
$19.95
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By ROBERT BLAIR KAISER
In his May 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, the pope said
that the church needs a new understanding of papal primacy that the rest of
Christianity can live with (as it has not been able to do for almost the entire
millennium). He wanted suggestions from the church at large, even from
Protestants and the Orthodox. How should the church re-define primacy?
This book is, in effect, Archbishop John R. Quinns answer to
the popes question. Quinn, once the Vicar of Christ in San Francisco,
says that problems of primacy will be solved not so much by what the pope says,
but by what the whole church does. The pope has to become more collegial, not
only with the worlds bishops, but also with all the people of God.
(Collegial is a code word. For Americans, the best translation is
democratic.)
But the pope hasnt become more collegial. If anything, he
has become more dictatorial, though Quinn does his respectful best not to level
charges against the pope. He thereby proves up one of his own propositions,
that a mystique has come to surround and engulf the pope since the 19th
century, a mystique that creates a deep psychological barrier to speaking
in critical terms about policies, declarations or actions of the
pope.
As Quinn could tell you from personal experience (but doesnt
in this book), the Vatican has ways of keeping bishops in line, especially
those who are deficient in the mystique department. Quinn gave a lecture at
Oxford on papal primacy that drew wide media attention back in June 1996, and
the curia made him pay for it by disinviting him to the Synod for America in
1997, even though he was elected by his fellow U.S. bishops to represent
them.
What is the case for collegiality? According to Quinn, this was
not a revolutionary idea invented at Vatican II, but something prefigured at
Vatican I, and later endorsed by Pope Pius IX in 1875 when the German bishops
insisted they were not mere functionaries of the pope. The pope is bishop
of Rome, they maintained, not bishop of any other city or diocese,
not bishop of Cologne or of Breslau. Pio Nono explicitly agreed with
that.
At Vatican II, the fathers of the council expanded and elaborated
on the notion, and found solid theological backing for collegiality in
the will of Christ, in the sacrament of Holy Orders and in the nature of the
church as communion.
On paper, John Paul II agrees. In Ut Unum Sint, he lays
down seven ways the pope can and should exercise his primacy (which Quinn
endorses) and then adds, All this, however, must always be done in
communion. When the Catholic church affirms that the office of the bishop of
Rome corresponds to the will of Christ, she does not separate this office from
the mission entrusted to the whole body of bishops, who are also vicars
and ambassadors of Christ. The bishop of Rome is a member of the
College, and the bishops are his brothers in the
ministry.
In practice, says Quinn, the pope (and/or his curia) go right on
with their autocratic ways, and thus continue to alienate Orthodox and
Protestant Christians. He quotes Paolo Ricca, a Waldensian scholar in Rome:
John Paul II must be convinced that the papacy as it is today has no real
ecumenical chance. To have one, it must change.
How to change
How change? Quinn suggests the pope should:
- Get off the monarchy train. For a thousand years, the pope
didnt act like a king, but a servant of the servants of God.
Then a monk named Hildebrand came along at the beginning of this millennium
and, as Pope Gregory VII, turned the church from a communion of autonomous
churches into a juridical monarchy that had no precedent.
- Let bishops be bishops. By ancient tradition, bishops are the
watchers of the faith. (The word bishop comes from the Greek episkopein, to
watch over.) According to Vatican II, they are Vicars of Christ
every bit as much as the pope. But theres a currently powerful bloc in
the church, writes Quinn, that thinks the pope can at any moment and for
whatever reason intervene in the affairs of any diocese or even of any parish.
This is the mentality that identifies primacy with sovereignty and regards the
desire for a truer collegiality in the church as a plot to take power from the
pope and turn the church into a democracy.
- Encourage local churches to select, even elect, their own
bishops, as they did in the beginning. Quinn here leans on the scholarship of
the late Dominican Cardinal Yves Congar, whose work took the fathers of Vatican
II back to the early primitive church for ideas that would help them bring the
church up to date in the 20th century. According to Congar, the election
of priests and bishops goes back to the time of the apostles.
Bishops continued to be elected for many hundreds of years. Ss.
Ambrose and Augustine were chosen by a vote of the people and the clergy. The
rationale: Quinn cites one ancient canonical principle: What concerns all
should be discussed and approved by all. In fact, until 1829, Quinn tells
us, most bishops were not appointed by Rome, but either by cathedral chapters
or by the kings and queens of Europe. Now, in a democratic age, Quinn suggests,
we must think of more democratic ways to run the church. Electing our own
bishops would be a good first step.
An election? What kind of bishops would the people of God vote
for? Quinn suggests people would vote for candidates who are not only
orthodox in the true sense, but who are also endowed with critical judgment,
imagination and who are open to new ideas. Fidelity to the mission of the
church requires candidates who can listen, listen to the world, listen to
people, who have the spiritual discernment and critical judgment to endorse
what is good, reject what is evil, and not stifle the Spirit.
Does this describe your own bishop (who, odds are, was appointed
by John Paul II)? No? Then maybe you understand what Quinn is driving at.
Quinn gives chapter and verse about the Vaticans absolutist
ways, sometimes with examples close to home -- like the long and disedifying
battle between the U.S. bishops and Rome over inclusive language in the U.S.
lectionary -- and sometimes with examples from afar. Cardinal Franz
Königs (carefully unnamed) successor in Vienna, says Quinn, was
selected most uncollegially, with no consultation, either with König
himself, or even with the Benedictine monks religious superiors.
What Quinn does not report (but could have) is that this
appointment was steamrollered through because the pope once had one personal
encounter with this man, Hans Hermann Gröer, and liked him, and made him
the cardinal-archbishop of Vienna on a whim. This is the same Gröer who,
not 10 years later, had to quit his post in disgrace after public accusations
that he was an ephebophile.
Another example says what is wrong-- ecumenically speaking -- with
absolute power. In 1998, the pope came out with a document on protecting
the faith -- Ad Tuendam Fidem -- that, among other things, set
back years of productive ecumenical conversations between Catholics and
Anglicans. In a commentary accompanying that document, Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger said that an 1897 decree of Leo XIII denying the validity of Anglican
ordinations must be held definitively. That meant, No more
discussion, boys.
The timing of that statement, reports Quinn, shocked most Catholic
theologians, the late Cardinal Basil Hume and the Vaticans Cardinal
Edward Cassidy. According to Quinn, none of them had been consulted. As
president of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cassidy wouldnt
have approved -- which is probably why he was ignored.
Which illustrates another point that Quinn makes in passing: Some
of the men in the curia (there are no women with any rank) are good guys. But
they pay a price: As the Cassidy case proves, it means that in a place where
information is power, they are often kept out of the loop.
Episcopal conferences? Quinn tells us the pope castrated the
conferences in 1998 with another motu proprio. (The phrase itself,
on his own motion is also revealing of the monarchic mindset). This
one decreed that regional conferences had to have unanimity before issuing a
doctrinal declaration. Nowhere else does the church require a unanimous vote,
not even in an ecumenical council or in the official meetings of the curia
itself. Writes Quinn: This requirement rules out a doctrinal role for an
episcopal conference.
But why would Rome want to do that? Power games, again. Someone,
Quinn suggests, was trying to diminish the importance of
conferences. He is loath to point a finger at the pope. He doesnt
have to. We know who signs motu proprios: Popes do.
Quinn speculates: The fear also arose that the conferences
were becoming a threat to papal authority ... The U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops is a special threat, because it has so many resources
and such access to the media. The whole world hears what happens in the United
States, and other episcopal conferences take note of what the American bishops
do. Hence the fear that the American bishops conference could becomea
counterforce to the policies of Rome.
Space prevents a reviewer from giving all the other examples cited
by Quinn, but a history of church synods -- even those held since Ut Unum
Sint -- makes it clear that these periodic gatherings of (mainly) bishops
are also designed to shore up the centralizing power of the papacy.
Quinn tells of the Asian Synod of April and May 1998. There,
subsidiarity and inculturation were constant themes, because the bishops
of Asia felt a lack of freedom to address issues of their churches according to
their own judgment as pastors: the Vietnamese bishops, the archbishop of
Nagasaki, [Japan], the Syro-Malabar bishop, the auxiliary bishop of Seoul,
[South Korea], and bishops from the Philippines, Indonesia and India.
The forbidden word
But those writing the synods final report to the pope were
forbidden to use the word subsidiarity. I have learned that the ban on this
word was given by Cardinal Jan Schotte, the synods secretary general, on
the grounds that it was not a theological term. Schotte was asked
for a substitute word. Try decentralization, someone said. So the
editors used decentralization. That didnt fly either. That word (and the
entire concept) was deleted from the Asian Synods final report.
Quinn understands that some Catholics will be shocked to see an
archbishop writing critically of the modern papacy. If you love,
says the current Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, you do not
criticize. Quinn counters that with a long list of papal critics, from
Fra Angelico to Dante, from St. Bernard to St. Catherine of Sienna. They loved,
and, because they loved, they had to lodge their objections.
Hard to say what affect this book of Quinns objections will
have on Pope John Paul II or on his waning restorationist papacy. For years
now, cardinals from the hinterlands have been telling the pope he had to be
more collegial and it hasnt done much good. A long-retired cardinal told
me in August: The pope used to nod and tell me I was right; he should
consult more with his bishops. But he never did.
Curial leaders at the most recent Synod for Europe, which ran
three weeks in October, scuttled every new idea. Their most telling move came
when they tabled a proposition from Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of Milan
urging that the synod take another look at the exercise of collegiality.
Catholic public opinion doesnt need much more enlightenment.
Nor do Catholic opinion makers. Members of the Vatican press corps have given
up on reform from this pope. We will just have to wait, they say,
and see what the next pope will do.
I would suggest that some reader of NCR who had a good year
in the market buy 120 copies of Quinns book and make sure every cardinal
gets one, because it is (still) the cardinals who will elect the next pope.
When the cardinal-electors meet, I suspect collegiality will be a top item on
their agenda. They will have to ask themselves which one of their number will
not only say the right things about collegiality, but actually come up with
ways of being collegial.
As Quinn suggests in the books sub-title, the call to papal
reform will be a costly one. But costly to whom? He doesnt say. The
common wisdom is that the pope (and certainly the papal court) will have to
lose some power when the last absolute monarchy in the world finally joins the
20th century. (And here it is, now, you say, the 21st? Yes, the church moves
slowly.)
But Quinn wonders about this supposed loss of power. If the curia
does not change, and decentralization does not take place, there will be
great disorder in the church because an omnicompetent central
bureaucracy wont be able to keep up with the rapid pace of change
in the world. Quinn concludes: It will be the paradox of the insistence
on central control being, in reality, the loss of control.
As Quinn points out, we had a pope in the 20th century who gave
power away (and, as a result, in my opinion, gained more consequent moral
authority, if not institutional control). It was Saint John XXIII.
He took a great risk when he convoked the council
thereby handing power to the worlds bishops, so that they, not his
courtiers, could write a charter for the 21st century. As the bishops (and
their theologians) proceeded on what turned out to be a four-year, rather
startlingly democratic assembly, it was always clear that they were working
away with John XXIIIs early admonition in mind.
They were listening to history -- which is another way
of saying they were listening to the people of God.
Robert Blair Kaiser, who covered Vatican II for Time
magazine, is living in Rome and writing a book on the future of the church.
You can reach him on e-mail at rkaiser@ibm.net
National Catholic Reporter, January 14,
2000
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