Editor’s note: The ongoing Synod on Synodality in Rome has raised the question of the role and authority of bishops’ conferences regarding faith and morals. In 1998, another moment when the question gained prominence, America asked the Rev. Joseph Komonchak, a leading authority on ecclesiology and the history and theology of the Second Vatican Council, to weigh in. This article originally appeared in America on September 12, 1998, with the title "On the Authority of Bishops' Conferences."
The Apostolic Letter Apostolos Suos, approved by Pope John Paul II on May 21 but not made public until July 23, had its origins in a request made at the Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 1985. The synod asked for a study of the theological and juridical status of episcopal conferences, with special reference to their teaching authority. In response the Pope entrusted the examination of the question to the Congregation for Bishops working in collaboration with the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
A working document (instrumentum laboris) was sent in January 1988 to the episcopal conferences for comment, corrections and amendments. Many of the responses were quite critical and required the preparation of a second, completely new text—never made public—prepared by a new commission composed of bishops and experts from around the world. This second text, completed by the end of 1990, was the subject of discussion and revision within the Vatican for the next six years. Then, in March 1996, the Pope asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to study the new text and, in particular, to develop its properly theological aspects. After two more years’ work, the text was deemed ready for presentation to the Pope, who approved it.
The apostolic letter begins with a brief summary of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on episcopal collegiality. It then offers a short history of collective exercises of episcopal responsibility in the holding of particular and general councils in the patristic and medieval periods. It also looks at a more recent development: the emergence in the last two centuries of episcopal conferences, which, unlike councils, have a stable and permanent character. Vatican II, acknowledging their usefulness and potential, recommended that episcopal conferences be established wherever they did not yet exist. Since the council, they have become “the preferred means” for episcopal collaboration on local levels and “a most helpful means of strengthening ecclesial communion.”
The second part of the letter returns to the teaching of the council on “collegial union among bishops.” Recalling that the whole order of bishops possesses “supreme and full power over the universal church,” the letter argues that this power can be exercised only by the entire college either in solemn form in ecumenical councils or, less dramatically, either when the pope calls them to a collective action or accepts an action initiated by bishops throughout the world. No other collective episcopal actions have this strict and proper collegial character.
Intermediate bodies of bishops thus have a character and authority different from those of the individual bishop in his diocese and from those of the whole order of bishops. Such bodies, then, should not be thought to replace or be allowed to replace the authority of the bishop in his diocese or to be on a par with the entire college of bishops.
The third section applies these theological considerations to episcopal conferences. Their utility and even necessity for a large number of episcopal responsibilities are recalled, and the provisions of the Code of Canon Law for their structuring and deliberations are set out.
The real novelty of the apostolic letter appears in the sections on the teaching office. It recalls the limits of pronouncements issued by episcopal conferences, which “do not have the characteristics of a universal magisterium.” They become binding on the faithful only when they are either approved unanimously or when, after being approved by a two-thirds majority, they receive the recognitio (approval) of the Apostolic See. Such binding statements can come only from the plenary assembly, not from any subordinate organ of the conference. Three norms then set out these provisions in canonical form.
The first thing to be said about the recent apostolic letter is that it is far better than the draft statement released in 1988. Would it not be likely that Catholics would be more ready to trust and accept what is taught by 200 or 300 bishops than what is taught by only one? Quoting a text of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the earlier draft denied that episcopal conferences could be considered collegial bodies in any theologically proper sense. Instead, the 1988 draft statement described them as, at best, expressions of something called “affective collegiality,” as distinct from the “effective collegiality” that belongs only to the whole order of bishops.
On the other hand, the apostolic letter describes episcopal conferences as expressions and realizations of “collegial union” and “collegial spirit”—that is, of the bishops’ “consciousness of being part of an undivided body” (No. 3). The earlier draft’s consistent suspicion of the conferences as threats to individual bishops and to the authority of the pope has disappeared, and their real necessity and contributions are recognized. Finally, it is a contribution that clarity is brought to ambiguous canonical issues.
That the primary purpose of the apostolic letter was legislative was made clear by the presence at the July 23 press conference of Archbishop Julián Herranz, president of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts. In his remarks during the same press conference, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger noted that the Pope had not intended to set out the entire ecclesiology underlying the status of episcopal conferences. Nor did he intend to respond to all the theological problems or to preclude further theological clarifications. It is permitted, then, to offer some comments here on certain historical and theological options made in the text.
The Weak Point of Collegiality.
First, one notes in the letter a desire to distinguish episcopal conferences from other forms of local episcopal collaboration. A footnote added to the very title of the letter distinguishes episcopal conferences from the synods of bishops in Eastern churches, which are not affected by this document. A certain contrast also seems to be drawn when theological motives are said to have led to the practice of holding councils in the past, while “historical, cultural and sociological reasons” led to the rise of episcopal conferences.
The “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (No. 23), on the other hand, first introduced episcopal conferences as similar to the organically related groups of churches, such as the patriarchates, that had been formed under divine providence. This text is not cited in the apostolic letter, where the conferences inevitably appear to enjoy less theological weight than what many consider their parallels in ancient councils or contemporary synods.
The reason for this neglect may perhaps be found in the parallel drawn, in an important paragraph (No. 12), between the relationship of the individual bishop to the whole body of bishops and the relationship between the particular church and the universal church. Just as the universal church is considered, in a phrase borrowed from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as “a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular church,” so the college of bishops is described as “a reality which precedes the office of being the head of a particular church.” Thus the college’s power is “a pre-existing reality in which individual bishops participate.”
Here the apostolic letter appears to be answering a question that was raised but left undetermined by the council, namely, whether ordination first relates a bishop to his particular church or to the whole college of bishops. The bishop’s insertion into the college here appears far more important than his presidency of a local church, and a footnote refers to the many bishops who are not heads of particular churches (auxiliary bishops, for example, or members of the Roman Curia).
The letter thus reflects one of the great weaknesses of the council’s treatment of collegiality. Vatican II concentrated more on the episcopal college’s authority over the whole church than on the relationship between episcopal ordination and the particular church. Vatican II concentrated more on the bishops’ role in the universal church than on intermediate forms, whether of the communion of churches or of episcopal collaboration. The idea of the ontological priority of the universal church threatens to turn the universal church into an abstraction somehow existing apart from the particular churches.
Likewise, the “modern” view of the college of bishops as a supreme governing board of the church—a view unfortunately held by Karl Rahner, S.J., but criticized by then-professor Joseph Ratzinger at Vatican II—threatens to prevail over the patristic notion that takes as its starting point the role of the bishop in his local church.
As this focus leads to a neglect of intermediate instances of the communion of churches, so it also leads to a relative disparagement of intermediate forms of episcopal cooperation. Individual bishops, says the apostolic letter, “have no competency to act over the whole church except collegially.” In one sense, this is obvious: The subjects of authority over the whole church are the pope and the whole body of bishops. But the whole church is not just the communion of individual churches; it has been and is also the communion of communions of churches.
The first expressions of a sense of collegiality were regional, not universal. and these persist not only in the Eastern churches and their synods but also in such structures as particular councils. The development of such regional, national and cultural forms of ecclesial and episcopal communion is an ecclesial fact of clear and great ecumenical significance, which deserves greater theological consideration than is provided in this document.
What Binding Force?
It is perhaps the sections on the teaching authority of episcopal conferences that have attracted most attention, particularly the requirement that binding statements require unanimous agreement among the members of the conference. So stringent a criterion—which, it appears, must be taken literally, as a numerical norm—is greater than any required in any other instance of ecclesiastical governance or teaching on either the local or the universal level. It demands much more than the normal criterion of moral unanimity traditionally and not unjustly required at an ecumenical council.
None of the documents of the Second Vatican Council would have met this standard. In practice it means that a single bishop’s disagreement could frustrate promulgation of a generally agreed-upon document unless it is submitted to the Apostolic See for approval. It is not at all clear why so high a standard has been set. The nearest thing to an explanation is found in Cardinal Ratzinger’s commentary, in which he speaks of the effort of ancient councils to arrive at “a potential unity in deliberative acts”; but this phrase seems to refer, properly understood, to something less than absolute unanimity.
Perhaps the deeper problem is that teaching authority is conceived juridically, that is, in terms of its binding force and the obligation of the faithful to give it, depending on its level, the assent of faith or religious assent. Here once again we find the underlying framework. The individual bishop has the authority to teach in binding fashion, but only the faithful of his own diocese are constrained by it (No. 11). The pope and the whole college of bishops can speak authoritatively, and in that case the whole church is constrained by their teaching. But episcopal conferences require unanimity (or subsequent approval by Rome) before their teachings can be considered binding on the consciences of their faithful.
This seems odd. On the one hand, it does not require a great exercise of one’s imagination to conceive of a situation where Bishop A teaches, say, that participation by Catholics in a war is justified, while Bishop B, in the neighboring diocese, teaches that it is not. Does this mean that Catholics in Diocese A are “bound” to assent to one position while Catholics in Diocese B are bound to assent to its opposite? On the other hand, would it not be likely that Catholics would be more ready to trust and to accept what is taught by 200 or 300 bishops than what is taught by only one? Is not the effort to teach out of a consensus the reason why bishops first began to gather in local and general councils?
The achievement of such a consensus among many has traditionally been considered the work of the Holy Spirit and thus a ground for trust. At Vatican II, Cardinal Josef Frings, archbishop of Cologne, pleaded with the bishops not to remain stuck in their positions on the right and left with regard to the chapter on the Blessed Virgin Mary proposed for the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.” Compromise would be necessary on both sides, he said, perhaps entailing the sacrifice of one’s own ideas, in order for as large as possible a consensus to be achieved on the best possible text. His advice was followed, and the chapter was overwhelmingly, but not unanimously, approved. That is the sort of thing that happens at ecumenical councils and at local councils, and it is a good method. Why it should not be thought adequate for episcopal conferences remains a mystery.
The real challenge, it seems, is to go beyond a theory of teaching authority that makes it equivalent to legislative authority and is focused on distinguishing the various levels of “binding force” and the various responses required. These distinctions have their place, but the prior need in the church today is the restoration of what Cardinal John Henry Newman called the “admiration, trust, and love” for Christ and his church that are the precondition of effective authority; their presence makes appeal to merely formal authority superfluous, while their absence renders it ineffective. Newman’s remark makes good sociological and theological sense. No bishop, no episcopal conference, no council, no pope has effective authority without the admiration, trust and love of the people.
One suspects that responses to the claimed authority of local bishops, of episcopal conferences, of Roman congregations, of the pope himself are largely correlative to the presence or absence of those attitudes. If they are lacking today or less prevalent than they should be, the remedy will have to be something more than clarifications of the Code of Canon Law or appeals to conversion addressed only to the faithful. Neither in the members of the hierarchy nor among the faithful does authority dispense from the need for conversion.
