One of the prominent questions that emerged during discussions at the second session of the Synod on Synodality was whether the episcopal conferences spread all over the Catholic world have the legitimate competence to teach on Catholic doctrines having to do with faith and morals.
While episcopal conferences are sometimes viewed as a contemporary manifestation of church structures that emerged after the Second Vatican Council, history shows that they have long been part of the church’s ecclesial structure. This reality, and the history of many such groupings involved in clarifying Catholic doctrine on faith and morals, may help our understanding of their role in the global church today.
By the end of the second century, groups of bishops from neighboring dioceses spread around North Africa, Asia Minor and some parts of Europe did indeed meet through various regional councils whenever a pastoral need arose to teach their flocks authoritatively about Christian faith and morals. Carthage, Orange and Toledo are some well-known examples of such councils. Although the bishop of Rome from the earliest times enjoyed the privilege of being treated as “presiding over other local churches in charity,” at times these councils were convoked even by the ruling civil authorities, such as the emperors of the Eastern or Western Roman Empire.
The role of these regional councils of bishops gradually declined in direct proportion to the gradual centralization of the role of the bishop of Rome, which reached a peak in the High Middle Ages with popes such as Gregory VII, Innocent III and Boniface VIII. In the 16th century, the Council of Trent advocated strongly for holding regular provincial councils of bishops, but this recommendation was very rarely observed. And with the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, the primacy of the papacy, including its teaching authority, came to be treated as indisputable.
However, from the 19th century onward, bishops within individual nations began to discuss various common pastoral issues. Such meetings came to be known as “conferences.” By the time of Vatican II, it is estimated that there were some 40 such conferences in the Catholic world.
At that council, the church accepted a more balanced and nuanced concept of the teaching authority of the pope in communion with the bishops. Bishops were no longer considered to be “the altar boys” of the bishop of Rome but were seen as possessing the teaching authority of the church in themselves as “successors of the Apostles.”
The underlying principle was the fact that Christ conferred teaching authority not only on Peter but on all the Apostles, headed by Peter. Consequently, Pope Paul VI mandated the formation of national episcopal conferences. But the role of their teaching authority remained somewhat ambiguous—to the point that it left sufficient room open for divergent views on the topic to develop for decades after the Council.
In the 1980s, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) and later Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, argued that only the pope in communion with the bishops around the world could teach authoritatively any doctrine of Christian faith and morals.
In this view, each bishop could speak definitively on faith and morals as long as he was in communion with the Roman pontiff and the other bishops. It explicitly denied any legitimate teaching authority to episcopal conferences themselves; this restriction was popularly perceived as a necessary guarantee of the unity of Catholic faith and morals. Such a perception was based on the presumption that unity of faith is equivalent to uniformity of faith, and it ruled out any plurality of expression or interpretation of the Catholic faith in different socio-cultural contexts.
But is this how the church has historically proceeded on questions of faith and morals? At the opening of Vatican II, Pope John XXIII said, “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the Deposit of Faith is one thing, and the way it is presented is another.” The conciliar Fathers repeated the same statement in “Gaudium et Spes,” inviting theologians “to seek continually for more suitable ways of communicating doctrine to the men of their times; for the deposit of Faith or the truths are one thing and the manner in which they are enunciated, in the same meaning and understanding, is another” (No. 62), clearly implying that a plurality of expressions of the same faith and morals is possible in diverse socio-cultural contexts without damaging the unity of Catholic faith and morals.
Six years after the conclusion of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI stated in “Octogesima Adveniens” that as the bishop of Rome, he was not in a position to give a teaching that was valid for all the diverse contexts in the world:
In the face of such widely varying situations it is difficult for us to utter a unified message and to put forward a solution which has universal validity. Such is not our ambition, nor is it our mission. It is up to the Christian communities to analyze with objectivity the situation which is proper to their own country, to shed on it the light of the Gospel's unalterable words and to draw principles of reflection, norms of judgment and directives for action from the social teaching of the Church.
This was in harmony with what the fathers of Vatican II had taught in “Gaudium et Spes,” that the church always has the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in diverse contexts in the light of the Gospel. Ever since his election, Pope Francis has called for a “healthy decentralization” of his papal authority, including the authority to teach doctrine without damaging the unity of the Catholic faith, as is evident in “Evangelii Gaudium” (2013) and “Praedicate Evangelium” (2018).
Within such a context of contemporary magisterial teachings, when Catholic believers from all over the world representing all ranks of the people of God meet in a synodal assembly like the one currently in progress in Rome, there is little wonder that the question of the doctrinal authority of the episcopal conferences would emerge.
In fact, the instrumentum laboris (working document) of the current Synod on Synodality—which is based on a three-year discernment process involving representatives of all rungs of ecclesial life—raises the question of whether it is not possible to recognize the “Episcopal Conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church” (No 97).
Given the socio-cultural diversity of the local churches spread all over the contemporary world, common sense demands that this question not be brushed aside by waving the “red flag” that it would invariably destroy the unity of faith or that it would lead to relativism. After all, unity is not the same as uniformity—as is evident from the earliest Christian centuries. This is well illustrated by the four different Gospels themselves. Although the revelation of Jesus has to do with one truth, that truth is expressed in four diverse ways by the four evangelists who were writing to four diverse faith communities immersed in four diverse lived realities. Instead of relativizing the truth revealed by Jesus, the four Gospels enrich that truth by highlighting it in four different perspectives.
At a time when the church’s cherished doctrinal teachings on faith and morals are questioned everywhere, the relevance of such teachings to the believers born and brought up in diverse contexts is of utmost importance. Humanly speaking—as Pope Paul VI admitted some six decades ago—it is simply impossible for Rome to perceive and understand all the socio-cultural diverse realities in the world and to give universally valid teachings. Hence the indispensability of recognizing the teaching authority of the local episcopal conferences on matters to do with Christian faith and morals, provided of course that they always take care to interpret the revealed faith in a manner that does not damage the unity of Catholic faith. It is a matter of teaching cum Petro and sub Petro.
The bishop of Rome and the college of bishops have a duty not only to preserve the unity of faith but also to teach in a manner that is relevant to their flocks. It is therefore of vital importance how the second session of the synod might respond to this crying need, and how in the aftermath of the synod it might be put into practice. We need a healthy decentralization of the ecclesial teaching office of the church if synodality itself is to take root in the church in diverse contexts.
