My latest in First Things
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/10/letters-from-the-synod-2024-9
Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary
October 18, 2024
Once again, Jonathan Liedl of The National Catholic Register has given us an excellent report on the various issues swirling around the Synod. Yesterday, he gave us the welcome news that there was significant pushback on the Synod floor, by what appeared to be an overwhelming majority of Synod participants, against the proposal that national episcopal conferences be recognized as “ecclesial subjects” in their own right, and therefore should be granted the authority to make their own doctrinal adjudications.
This is extremely important on a number of levels. First, as with last year’s synodal pushback against including a statement on “LGBTQ+” issues in the Synod’s final text, we see here that a majority of Synod participants are not fully on board the progressive change train that has garnered the majority of media attention. What would be interesting would be to see if the majority of those opposed to these proposals were bishops, or some equal number of bishops and non-episcopal voters. But whatever that case might be, the fact remains that the proposal to concede some measure of doctrinal authority to national episcopal conferences was so fulsomely criticized this week that the Synod organizers felt the need to salvage some semblance of respectability for the idea, so they took the very unusual step of having a theologian give a short speech in support of the proposal on the grounds that there is precedent for this in Church history.
But that is a dubious claim, since national episcopal conferences are a modern novelty. There were indeed local synods in the patristic and medieval Church, but they were more centered on common linguistic factors rather than the ever-changing borders of various kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and so forth. Indeed, the “sovereign nation-state” had not yet been invented, and this concept really did not come into its own until much later in history. Furthermore, the exact doctrinal authority of these various local synods remained vague, with many synods even being repudiated as false synods owing to defects, or manifest heresy, in their theological positions.
A second reason why criticisms of the proposal were significant is that, as Archbishop Anthony Fisher, O.P., of Sydney noted, the Church’s unity would be destroyed if, for example, the German Church teaches and does one thing and the Polish bishops another. It simply cannot be the case that what is true and moral in one country can be false and immoral in another. The proposal runs the risk, if enacted, of reducing the Catholic Church to a mere confederation of local churches with the pope being a largely toothless, symbolic figurehead of unity, rather than its guarantor. The specter of the Anglicization of the Catholic Church thus looms over this debate.
There are few theologians who would disagree with the idea that we need a decentralization of governing authority in the Church, less centered on Rome. But governance is one thing and doctrinal authority a very different thing. Furthermore, as some Synod participants apparently pointed out, the papacy and the episcopacy are of divine origin and national episcopal conferences are not.
This fact was highlighted by none other than Joseph Ratzinger. In the interview that came to be published in 1985 as The Ratzinger Report, he noted that Vatican II was not focused on synodalism but on increasing the authority of the local bishop by emphasizing that the three munera (functions) of the bishop—teaching, governing, and sanctifying—accrued to the bishop by divine right in virtue of his consecration, and not as something delegated to him by the pope. This was the now famous teaching on collegiality and was the Council’s attempt to nuance the teaching of Vatican I on papal authority since that council was cut short and interrupted by political events in what was becoming Italy.
Therefore, those who claim that granting national episcopal conferences doctrinal authority is an implementation of the teachings of Vatican II are wrong. And there is the further danger that this proposal actually undermines the teaching of Vatican II on the authority of the local bishop—which is, to repeat, a divinely constituted authority—by focusing instead on the ersatz invention of the doctrinal authority of the national body. The authority of the local bishop fades, insofar as there will inevitably arise pressures to conform to whatever decisions are reached on a national level.
The Ratzinger Report sums this up as follows: Vatican II “wanted specifically to strengthen the role and responsibility of bishops,” Ratzinger wrote. However, there were difficulties in putting this teaching into practice, for
the decisive new emphasis on the role of the bishops is in reality restrained or actually risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureaucratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences 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. . . . No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission; its documents have no weight of their own, save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops.
Ratzinger goes on to reference Germany during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s; there, the truly courageous opposition came from a few local bishops while the annual national meeting of German bishops, the Fulda Conference, was far more cautious and restrained. And there is a lesson here for our own “signs of the times.” All bureaucracies seek their own preservation, which often requires compromise with the powers that be when, in fact, the crisis of the moment requires a more prophetic response. Furthermore, this spirit of compromise, largely for reasons of political expediency, will then have the effect of marginalizing the truly courageous and prophetic individual bishop who will now be characterized as an idiosyncratic anomaly, best ignored and treated as an antiquarian relic “out of step” with the “complex circumstances of today.”
It would seem, therefore, given the pushback against the current proposal to concede doctrinal teaching authority to national episcopal conferences, that the spirit and legacy of good Papa Benedict live on.
