Published on Commonweal magazine (http://commonwealmagazine.org)
Bishops or Branch Managers?
Collegiality after the Council
Created 10/01/2012 - 9:09am
John Wilkins
No
reforming project exercised the pope and bishops at Vatican II
(1962–65) more than collegiality—the doctrine that the church is
governed by the college of bishops, with and under the pope. The
Catholic Church had for centuries been known as a monarchy. Now, in its
dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium,
it described itself as a people’s church, hierarchically structured on
the pattern of the twelve apostles around their leader, Peter. This
reform of governance was a key result of the council’s progressive
method, eschewing the juridical approach to church governance dominant
for centuries so as to draw out from biblical and patristic sources the
deepest and richest meaning of tradition.
Yet today, fifty years after the Second
Vatican Council opened, the collegial hopes and expectations of that
time are muted. For now and for the foreseeable future that reform, with
all the ecumenical and pastoral avenues it would have opened up, is on
the shelf.
There had been great surprise when a straw
poll of concilar bishops at the council taken on October 30, 1963,
showed very large majorities in favor of the collegial principle. “We
have won,” exclaimed Pope Paul VI. The former seminarian Michael Novak,
who at that time sided with the progressives, was ecstatic. Present in
Rome as a freelance reporter, he wrote that in the evening of that day
“a nearly full moon bathed St. Peter’s Square in such brilliance, such
serenity, as was worthy of the greatest day in Roman Catholic history
since 1870”—the date of Vatican I.
The battle over chapter 3 of Lumen gentium,
where the collegiality doctrine is set out, would be fierce and
protracted. The conservative minority of bishops fought every inch of
the way. They were convinced that the primacy of the pope defined by
Vatican I would be infringed if the doctrine passed. They did not accept
the assurances of the majority that collegiality would strengthen both
pope and bishops.
The debates came to a head in the third
session of the council in 1964, but the movement toward collegiality can
be traced back to the very beginning of the first session in 1962, when
some 2,500 bishops rejected the first drafts of the council documents
prepared for them by the Roman curia. The bishops were asserting their
traditional right as a general council with the pope to exercise supreme
power over the entire church, as codified in canon law. From that first
moment the council experienced collegiality in its every action.
Naturally, the bishops sought to enshrine the practice in their
documents.
One theologian who first came to wide notice during the council was Joseph Ratzinger, present as the invited peritus,
or expert, of Cardinal Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne, who was
one of the leaders of the reform movement. The reports Ratzinger wrote
after each session were subsequently collected and published in 1966 as Theological Highlights of Vatican II, which breathes the atmosphere of that time. The book constitutes a locus classicus for the issues and arguments over collegiality (see “Ratzinger at Vatican II,” Commonweal, June 4, 2010).
The future Pope Benedict XVI is
clear about the ultimate aim—“to correct the one-sided functions of an
overemphasized primacy by a new emphasis on the richness and variety in
the church as represented in the bishops.” He singles out the struggle
for special treatment in his report of the third session:
No other issue
resulted in so much activity both open and covert; nor was any other
issue subjected to such a careful and meticulous voting. A few figures
will verify this. In the entire schema [draft] on the church [Lumen gentium],
which comprised eight chapters, ten ballots were taken during the first
series of votes on chapters 1–2 and chapters 4–8. In contrast, for
chapter 3 alone...41 separate votes were taken. The more important
sections were voted on sentence by sentence.
The crucial doctrinal exposition of Lumen gentium comes in chapter 3, article 22. As to Peter’s successor, the text states:
In virtue of his
office, that is, as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole church, the
Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the church. And
he can always exercise this power freely.
The council thus reaffirms the doctrine of
Vatican I. That previous council had in fact intended to consider next
the powers of the bishops, but was prevented from doing so when the
Italian army seized Rome. With Lumen gentium the bishops intended to fill in that gap:
The order of
bishops is the successor to the college of the apostles in teaching
authority and pastoral rule.... Together with its head, the Roman
Pontiff, and never without this head, the episcopal order is the subject
of supreme and full power over the universal church. But this power can
be exercised only with the consent of the Roman Pontiff....
It is definite,
however, that the power of binding and loosing, which was given to Peter
(Mt 16:19), was granted also to the college of apostles, joined with
their head (Mt 18:18; 28:16–20). This college, insofar as it is composed
of many, expresses the variety and universality of the People of God,
but insofar as it is assembled under one head, it expresses the unity of
the flock of Christ.
The extreme care taken to balance primacy and
episcopacy is evident. The council uses the more modern title for the
pope, “Vicar of Christ,” rather than the original “Vicar of Peter,” but
elsewhere balances this too by stating that by divine right, not by papal delegation, each bishop is a vicar of Christ in his diocese.
In the debate, two mindsets were colliding,
and here it is important to understand the use of the term “college.”
Those eager to embrace collegiality saw the church as a communion, with
the hierarchy at the center of a circle and at its service. The minority
visualized the church as a pyramid with the pope at the apex. In Roman
law, a college is defined as an association of equals, and this was a
concept the traditionalists could not reconcile with their idea of a
monarchical papacy. The Irish cardinal Michael Browne, a staunch
conservative in the Roman curia, is reputed to have said that there
could be no such college in the Catholic Church, for pope and bishops
were not equals. Also attributed to Browne (as well as to others) is the
quip that the only time the apostles acted collegially was when Christ
was betrayed and they all ran away.
Seeing that they had no chance of overturning
the large majorities behind the doctrine of collegiality, the
conservatives laid siege to Paul VI in person. The Jesuit historian John
O’Malley writes in his book What Happened at Vatican II that “the papal apartments had begun to compete with the floor of St. Peter’s as the council’s center of gravity.”
As the focus of unity, Paul VI sought to
consider both sides fairly. And he was swayed to an extent by the
criticisms of those opposed to collegiality—it was sometimes said of him
that he had too much faith in the papacy.
Early one day the Jesuits at the Gregorian
University saw an official car from the Vatican drawing up in the piazza
outside. It had come to collect a German canonist, Wilhelm Bertrams,
who had published a little book in Latin on primacy and episcopacy.
Bertrams’s conservative theory was that the pope could act in two
modes—as Vicar of Christ, exercising the primacy and owed obedience, or
as head of the college of bishops, collegially, with episcopal
participation.
This distinction was subsequently adopted by the pope in his Nota explicativa praevia, or Preparatory Explanatory Note, which shocked the council on November 16, 1964. It was to be appended to Lumen gentium as the key for interpretation of the collegiality doctrine. But it had not been discussed by the council or voted on.
The note was drafted mainly by the Belgian
theologian Gérard Philips, who played a mediating role at Vatican II.
But Bertrams and the pope’s unofficial personal theologian, Bishop Carlo
Colombo, also had a hand in the document. Crucially, the note insists
that the pope can act by himself or together with the bishops. In other
words, the pope can stand apart from, not among, his fellow
bishops. The synthesis sought by the council’s majority, by which the
pope’s power would be constitutionally defined as flowing from his
headship of the college of bishops, is split apart. As Christopher
Butler, then abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation,
observed, the pope now had a moral obligation to govern collegially—but
he did not have to.
The note was one of several outcomes that
caused this closing period of the third session to be called the “Black
Week” of Vatican II. While the dissenting minority was content, the
majority went into shock. An opinion grew among them that the whole of
chapter 3 should be rejected. But on reflection it was argued that
collegiality was in the text, and any further delay in passing it would
add to the pope’s anxieties and risk giving time for further damage. In
the event, Lumen gentium went through with an overwhelming
positive vote—only five negative ballots were cast. Among the
contributors to that near-complete consensus, however, there were very
different expectations of what the future would bring.
Reflecting on this drama, Joseph Ratzinger, who had himself at first been in favor of rejecting chapter 3, acknowledged in Highlights
that “without doubt the scales were here further tipped in favor of
papal primacy as opposed to collegiality.” But he judged that the note
left “interpretations open in both directions” and “created no
substantially new situation in regard to the council text itself.”
The ultimate fate of collegiality takes a
dramatic turn in 1978 with the election of Karol Wojtyła, the first
Polish pope. John Paul II would reveal himself to be one of the most
dominant personalities ever to occupy the Chair of Peter, and it soon
became clear in which direction he would lead the church.
As cardinal archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyła had
watched many bishops conferences around the world respond to Paul VI’s
1968 encyclical, Humanae vitae, which reaffirmed the
traditional ban on contraception. Less than three years after he had
steered the council to its conclusion, the pope had issued his
encyclical without a shred of collegial input. Among those immediately
objecting that the perspectives of Vatican II were being lost was Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens, primate of Belgium, who had been one of the council’s pillars.
Wojtyła did not approve of internal church disagreements, especially among bishops. Humane vitae
was authentic papal teaching, and he himself had never had any doubt
that artificial birth control was sinful. As pope, Wojtyła moved to
reassert strong central control. Rhetorically he hailed Vatican II and
he embraced many of the evangelical opportunities it opened up, but he
did not implement its implicit call for the decentralization of church
authority. He called its work a “sure compass” for the twenty-first
century, “a source of riches” from which new generations would drink. In
his world travels he pushed Vatican II boundaries out further. His more
than a hundred visits to five continents preaching human rights would
hardly have been conceivable without the council’s positive vision in Gaudium et spes
of the activity of the spirit outside the church as well as within; his
visits to synagogues and mosques and his interreligious initiatives at
Assisi put flesh on the bones of Vatican II’s affirmation in Nostra aetate that “the church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions”; his ecumenical encyclical Ut unum sint
was remarkable in its request for others’ help in making his office “a
service of love recognized by all concerned”; and his support for
religious freedom, forged under the Communist regime in Poland, was
unwavering.
Within the church, however, he lost no time in
reminding the bishops where they stood: he was in charge. His very
first encyclical, Redemptor hominis
(“Man’s Redeemer”), contained an early section on collegiality. It was
preceded by praise of Paul VI mixed with references to “the difficult
postconciliar period” when “the church seemed to be shaken from within,”
affected by “various internal weaknesses.” At precisely this time of
“difficulties and tension,” John Paul II declared, Vatican II’s
principle of collegiality “showed itself particularly relevant.” For
“the shared unanimous position of the college of the bishops, which
displayed, chiefly through the synod, its union with Peter’s successor,
helped to dissipate doubts.” John Paul here presented as established
fact what he intended to be his own governing policy: the bishops will
be acting collegially when they agree with him.
The establishment of the Synod of Bishops had
been one of the high hopes of the advocates of collegiality at Vatican
II. They thought it might become, in Ratzinger’s words at the time,
“like a council extended into the church’s everyday life.” One of the
most noted speakers at the council was Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV. An
Eastern Rite Catholic, Maximos always insisted on addressing the council
in French, not Latin. He called for an episcopal Sacred College to be
set up permanently in Rome to assist the pope in governing the universal
church. Maximos argued that the pope and the bishops, not the pope and
the Roman curia, should be the church’s supreme decision-making body.
The Synod of Bishops instituted by Paul VI on his own initiative—motu proprio—was
not like that at all. The pope’s preemptive strike caught the council
unawares right at the start of the rushed and overloaded fourth and
final session. Otherwise the bishops might have sought to put forward
some structural guidelines as to how the synod might function, with
perhaps a postconciliar committee entrusted to set out its canonical
authority. Instead, the new body, although it had a permanent general
secretary, would come together only at intervals as determined by the
pope, who would set the agenda and preside. It would have a majority of
elected members, with a minority appointed by the pope. Its function
would be to provide information and offer advice; it would not make
decisions unless the pope decreed, and subject to his ratification.
Nowhere in the text did the word collegial appear.
Still, there was an openness in Paul VI’s
proposals. Evidently the synod could develop over time. Alas, with the
help of the bishops themselves, it became a rubber stamp. Initially, the
synods composed the document summing up their endeavors. In 1974,
however, the participants could not agree on a synthesis of two
divergent drafts about evangelization. They turned the document over to
Paul VI, who wrote Evangelii nuntiandi,
one of his finest efforts. But in failing to reach consensus the
bishops had surrendered what little autonomy the synods had. It is
widely alleged that John Paul II’s “report” of the 1981 synod on the
family, Familiaris consortio (1982), could have been issued without the bishops ever having met.
Nevertheless, the synod is a tangible result
of Vatican II, and might be put to better use in the future. “At present
it is not worth the time and trouble that go into it,” the late
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin once told me in Rome when attending one of its
meetings. “But it exists.”
Immediately after the mention of the synod in
his first encyclical, John Paul included a passage warmly endorsing
bishops conferences and other intermediate bodies, which were becoming
increasingly active and widespread. He presented them as manifestations
in the local churches of the shared communion of the people of God:
As we are dealing
with the evident development of the forms in which episcopal
collegiality is expressed, mention must be made at least of the process
of consolidation of national episcopal conferences throughout the church
and of other collegial structures of an international or continental
character. Referring also to the centuries-old tradition of the church,
attention should be directed to the activity of the various diocesan,
provincial, and national synods....
The same spirit of
collaboration and shared responsibility is spreading among priests
also, as is confirmed by the many councils of priests that have sprung
up.... That spirit has extended also among the laity....
I must keep all
this in mind at the beginning of my pontificate as a reason for giving
thanks to God, for warmly encouraging all my brothers and sisters and
for recalling with heartfelt gratitude the work of the Second Vatican
Council and my great predecessors, who set in motion this new surge of
life for the church, a movement that is much stronger than the symptoms
of doubt, collapse, and crisis.
But the green light would turn to amber, and
then red. In 1982, John Paul II was joined in Rome by the same brilliant
German theologian who had published his reports on Vatican II as a
leading progressive peritus. Joseph Ratzinger had since
switched sides after suffering a trauma during the political turmoil of
1968, whose effects never left him, and which will always remain
somewhat mysterious despite the explanation of it he has given in his
memoirs Salt of the Earth (1996) and Milestones
(1998). He has said that he came to see “very close spiritual links”
between the political and social unrest of 1968 and revolutionary
interpretations of the council. What he had taken to be the new order
was instead becoming, he seems to have thought, the new disorder: “So I
knew what was at stake: anyone who wanted to remain a progressive in
this context had to give up his integrity.”
He was in a powerful position to put his views
into effect, for John Paul had appointed him to head the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith. When in 1985 a synod was called in Rome
to review the results of Vatican II, twenty years after its close,
Cardinal Ratzinger made a bid to seize the agenda in advance through an
interview with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori. When it appeared
in book form as Rapporto sulla Fede (the English-language edition was titled The Ratzinger Report),
it became a world bestseller. In the interview Ratzinger gave vent to
extreme alarm. In an extraordinary phrase, he even warned that “truly
every type of heretical aberration seems to be pressing upon the doors
of the authentic faith.”
In the interview it became clear that Ratzinger had also turned his back on his previous views on bishops conferences. In Highlights
he had noted with approval that the conferences had emerged as “a new
element in church structure” between individual bishops and the pope.
Exercising an intermediate level of collegiality, partial but real, they
“would revive the synodal structure of the ancient church,” when
regional synods and councils met regularly and made decisions. The
revalidation of the local churches, he wrote then, went hand in hand
with the revalidation of the local bishops, each overseeing his part of
“a fabric of worshipping communities” and looking toward all the others.
In other words, their mutual concern for the whole church included a
horizontal dimension as well as an upward one to Rome.
Yet in The Ratzinger Report,
employing what was becoming a favorite theme, Ratzinger decried the
burdensome bureaucracy of the conferences, which risked “smothering” the
individuals who take part. He now spoke as though the conferences had
no more ecclesial standing than the departments of the Roman curia. They
“have no theological basis. They do not belong to the structure of the
church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a
practical, concrete function,” he wrote.
When the 1985 synod actually met, these
pessimistic theses were not echoed. On the contrary, an overwhelming
majority endorsement of Vatican II emerged. Nevertheless, in the wake of
the synod a narrowing of interpretations became evident. The theology
of creation in Gaudium et spes would cede ground to the
theology of the Cross, and a hopeful reading of the “signs of the times”
given currency by Pope John XXIII had become a negative one.
Pope John Paul greatly respected German
theology in general and this German theologian in particular. As the
pope’s Parkinson’s disease advanced, so did Ratzinger’s influence. In
1998 came the coup de grâce for the bishops conferences. The pope’s motu
proprio Apostolos suos, drafted in Ratzinger’s office, emasculated them, on the lines set out in The Ratzinger Report. Collegiality operates fully, said Apostolos suos,
in an ecumenical council, and where bishops throughout the world, even
if dispersed, are united with the pope in holding a teaching. The
individual bishop has full teaching authority, in union with the pope,
as Vicar of Christ in his diocese. But conferences or councils of
bishops are mere associations of individual bishops, without collegial
standing unless all the individuals within them are unanimous
(impossible almost anywhere, and certainly in a conference of any size)
or have submitted resolutions with large majority backing to Rome for
authorization.
Christ said that “where two or three are
gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” But there would
be no more pastoral letters from the German bishops conference
supporting the restoration of women deacons, and asking the pope and the
universal church to consider and examine such a move (1981); nor would
there be any more pastoral letters from the U.S. bishops conference on
nuclear deterrence (1983) or economic justice (1985), and certainly not
on women, where the Americans ran into such contention, and such
interference from Rome, that they had to abandon the project.
Apostolos suos did allow that bishops
conferences in their joint debates and action manifest “affective
collegiality.” Was all that effort at Vatican II for nothing? Did the
bishops cast ballots in forty-one votes to establish “affective”
collegiality, which they already had and had always had? In an article
published in the German Jesuit monthly Stimmen der zeit in 2000, which later became a chapter in his book Receiving the Council
(2009), the Jesuit canonist Ladislas Orsy suggested a thought
experiment to test what substance there might be in this concept of
“affective” collegiality.
What would happen
if we applied the distinction between “effective” and “affective” to the
exercise of the primacy? We know what “effective exercise” means: it
was defined at Vatican I (and confirmed by Vatican II) as direct,
immediate, and ordinary jurisdiction. But what could be the “affective
exercise” of the primacy? Paternal disposition? Inspiring discourses?
Encouraging counselling? Whatever it could be, it would not be the
exercise of primacy with jurisdiction. So it is with collegiality:
affective collegiality is not real collegiality.
When John Paul II died in 2005, the cardinals
chose the man they all knew, Joseph Ratzinger, as his successor, though a
pope’s closest collaborator is not usually elected to follow him. Right
from his inauguration sermon, it was apparent that collegiality would
not be the guiding principle of this papacy
I am not
alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry
alone. All the saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me, and
to carry me.
But what of his brother bishops? He did not mention them.
Beyond a tight hand-picked circle of trusted
colleagues, this is a pope who does not seem to believe in consultation.
He disregarded the bishops college, for example, when in 2007 he
authorized permanent use of the Tridentine liturgy as the “extraordinary
form” of the Mass alongside the “ordinary form” promulgated by Pope
Paul VI after the council—the first time in history that the Catholic
Church has had two universally valid forms of the Latin Rite, which may
divide communities as they celebrate the Eucharist, the sacrament of
unity. As cardinal and pope, he did nothing to prevent, and much to
support, the moves by which the Vatican deprived bishops conferences of
the right given them by Vatican II to approve and institute vernacular
translations of the liturgy in their local dioceses. When he established
the Anglican ordinariate in 2009, the Pontifical Council for Christian
Unity was kept in the dark, as was almost everyone else, and there was
no discussion with the local Catholic and Anglican bishops. Earlier in
the same year he lifted the excommunications of the four Lefebvrist
bishops, although the very raison d’être of their movement is outright
opposition to the Second Vatican Council and rejection of all the popes
who steered it and have implemented it. A professor at Tübingen
University, Peter Hünermann, wondered: Did he have the right even as
pope to dispense them from accepting the teaching of an ecumenical
council of the church?
Benedict’s style came at a price. Even when
instruments were at hand, he preferred not to use them. When a fresh
tsunami of clerical sexual-abuse cases broke in 2010, he could have
called together in Rome the presidents of all the bishops conferences to
jointly draw up guidelines for the protection of children and rules for
the notification of these crimes to the authorities. The world would
have seen the collegial commitment of pope and bishops to redressing
scandals that have damaged the church’s reputation for generations. But
he was prevented by his theory.
Pope Benedict dutifully refers to
the Vatican II documents periodically, but to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the council’s opening in October these beautiful and
inspiring texts are not being singled out for Catholics to study, even
though the young know little or nothing about them. Rather, the “Year of
Faith” that has been announced is linked as much to the Catechism of the Catholic Church—an
endeavor subsequent to the council—as to the conciliar documents. It is
to the catechism that the faithful are being directed for sound
teaching. “After the Second Vatican Council and in the changing cultural
climate,” Benedict wrote last year in the foreword to the catechism
being distributed to participants in the World Youth Day in Madrid,
“many people no longer knew correctly what Christians should really
believe, what the church taught.”
In the epilogue to his recent book Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning,
Massimo Faggioli asks a startling question: “What will happen to
Vatican II in the future? Will the council face a silent abrogation of
its work?” No one present at Vatican II would have dreamt that such a
question could ever be asked. With huge voting majorities behind them,
the reformers seemed beyond doubt to have won. But they had not. John
O’Malley’s lapidary judgment in What Happened at Vatican II carries a lethal sting:
The minority never
really lost control.... The center not only held firm and steady but,
as the decades consequent to the council have irrefutably demonstrated,
emerged even stronger.... Collegiality ended up an abstract teaching
without point of entry into the social reality of the church. It ended
up an ideal, no match for the deeply entrenched system.
In addition, there is another strong
force pushing to keep the council’s vision on the shelf. The
neoconservatives in today’s church dismiss collegiality as one of the
products of the 1960s, a sop to democracy at the expense of grace. This
argument has particular resonance in the United States, where one side
in the culture wars links Vatican II with the social and sexual
permissiveness that they believe ruined a Christian culture. And they
believe Benedict XVI is on their side.
But the neoconservatives are mistaken. In
seeking to break away from the monarchical model of church governance
the bishops hoped to go deeper into the tradition. They wanted to
substitute a pattern more reminiscent of the early church—something more
evangelical. They wanted to provide a window into the person of Jesus.
They were also seeking to redress—to repeat
Ratzinger’s words at the time—the one-sided functions of an
overemphasized primacy. The richness and variety of the Christian
faith—represented in the bishops—can never be encompassed solely by pope
and curia. The witnesses who handed down the Christian revelation to
us, as enshrined in the Bible, were not even all apostles—of the
synoptic writers, one (Matthew) was, but two (Mark and Luke) were not.
St. Peter hardly features in these founding documents except in two
short letters attributed to him or his circle. The proponents of
collegiality at Vatican II were correct in arguing that the church must
celebrate and channel this wonderful diversity. It is the failure to do
so that has caused the deficiencies that have become apparent during the
rule of Benedict XVI.
When he launched the council fifty years ago, Pope John XXIII hoped
for a new Pentecost. He trusted the bishops. He did not want them to
behave like branch managers (as they have done over clerical sexual
abuse). “They also have the Spirit,” he said. He foresaw a renaissance
of collegiality and coresponsibility throughout the church, between pope
and bishops, between bishops and priests, and between priests and
people, with religious orders supplying their own distinctive
contribution and theologians free to explore. He showed the way to go.
But it is hard to follow a great saint like John and it is not the way
we are going.
This essay has been funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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