DISQUISITIONS ...being thoughts on Synod 2015 from various observers
Doubts About Devolution – IV
Those Contingent Borders, and a Few More Lessons from History Both St John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI, were committed to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the collegiality of bishops. Indeed, the future Benedict XVI, as Fr Joseph Ratzinger, helped formulate that teaching in his work as a Council peritus, or theological adviser, while the future John Paul II, as Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, was a leading member of one of the most rock-solid episcopal conferences in the world, a genuine collegium of bishops whose unity was a major obstacle to the Polish communist regime’s efforts to deconstruct the Catholic Church in Poland. At the same time, however, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were clear on the nature of national or regional conferences of bishops. Both men saw these bodies as essentially functional: they served primarily as instruments of pastoral coordination and mutual support among bishops, not as some sort of “intermediate” level of teaching authority in the Church wedged “in between” the Office of Peter and local bishops. Their reasoning on this point, as I understand it, was theological. The Council had taught, in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, that full authority in the Church belonged by divine origin to the College of Bishops with and under the Bishop of Rome (see Lumen Gentium, 22). The Council had not taught that that authority could be devolved to national or regional episcopal groups – a notion uncomfortably redolent, it might be noted, of the old, pre-Vatican II image of the Church-as-pyramid. Moreover, while the current ecclesial self-understanding of the Catholic Church has certainly developed over time, the notion that Catholicism is a federation of local churches is an outlier in the history of Catholic theology. Rather, on the John Paul II/Benedict XVI view, which is the Vatican II view and is both reiterated and deepened in the 1998 apostolic letter Apostolos Suos, local churches are distinct expressions of the universal Church, each reflecting the truth of Jesus Christ, who is himself the one origin of the Church’s universal mission. Still, while their teaching on episcopal conferences and their functions was primarily driven by doctrine and theology, I cannot believe that John Paul and Benedict, two keen students of history, were not also impressed by certain historical problems with regionalism and nationalism that had bedeviled the Church over two millennia. Feuding patriarchates in the Mediterranean world were one unhappy feature of the first thousand years of Christian history, the most dramatic case being the mutual excommunications exchanged by Rome and Constantinople in 1054; those excommunications have been mutually lifted, but the effects of the rupture can still be felt today. But the controversies that led to 1054 were not unique to Rome and Constntinople. Ongoing contentions between the patriarchates of what is now the Middle East and North Africa in the first millennium helped weaken the Church in that part of the world over time; and that, arguably, was one of the factors contributing to the success of Islam in its triumphant drive out of the Arabian peninsula, across the southern Mediterranean littoral, and on into Spain. The utter contingency of national borders must also impress itself on anyone trying to assess the claim that such borders, whatever their meaning in international law, constitute coherent bodies of Catholic bishops who, by reason of those borders, enjoy as a group an “intermediate” authority between that of the Pope and that of the local bishop in his diocese. Alsace and Lorraine have bounced back and forth between France and Germany for centuries; if the question of who won the last war between the French and the Germans is determinative of who is in what episcopal conference in that part of the world, does that suggest that General Eisenhower somehow created the teaching authority of those episcopates in their present form? Suppose Robert E Lee had listened to James Longstreet on the morning of the third day of Gettysburg, avoided a direct assault on the Federal position on Cemetery Ridge, and won the battle – and the American Civil War? Would the Army of Northern Virginia have been the decisive factor in creating two distinct bodies of bishops? What if Winfield Scott had kept going after conquering Mexico City, all the way down to the Isthmus of Panama? What if William Seward hadn’t convinced the US government to buy Alaska from Russia? What if those we now know as Canadians had not repulsed their southern neighbours in the American Revolution and the War of 1812? What if Norway had not detached itself from Sweden, or if Schleswig and Holstein had not been restored to Denmark? What if the Italian Risorgimento had failed to unite the tribes and subtribes of the Italian peninsula into a single state? What if British India had remained one country rather than eventually splitting into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh? What if Lwow and Wilno were still part of Poland rather than being L’viv in Ukraine and Vilnius in Lithuania? And so forth and so on. In addition to the doctrinal and theological issues involved, the case that borders somehow “make magisterium” is a hard one to sustain, given the contingency of national borders over time. There’s yet another subtext to this discussion. Certain western European bishops are the principal drivers of proposals for the “devolution” of authority over doctrinally weighty pastoral matters to local bishops’ conferences. In presenting their case, they seem to assume that their ecclesiastical situation is normative and that, sooner or later, the rest of the world Church (like those culturally backward Africans, stubborn Poles, and “culture-warrior” Americans) will eventually get with the programme, understand “pastoral accompaniment” as they do, and join in offering what I described yesterday as an exemption from the universal call to holiness – in the hope that this will somehow get people interested again in Jesus Christ and his Church. It’s all a bit reminiscent of the debates more than a decade ago over a new constitutional treaty for the expanded European Union. Then, the Old Boys’ Club in western Europe spoke rather haughtily of a Europe proceeding à deux vitesses – “at two speeds,” the laggardly new kids on the block from behind the old Iron Curtain eventually catching up to their elders (and betters). It’s certainly not the case that all the bishops from western Europe who are fathers of Synod-2015 think of the rest of the world in these terms. But some clearly do. And while they’re waiting for the dullards to catch up, they want some sort of synodal authorisation to proceed along their own path – which, as everyone paying attention knows, some of them are already doing. One more thing. Those western Europeans who simply assume that everyone else in the world Church will eventually be like them seem not to have noticed that the secularisation hypothesis – the classic sociological claim that modernity inevitably and inexorably leads to the collapse of religious conviction – has been falsified in every part of the world except theirs (and their cultural colonies, like Québec). Yes, Christian faith must now be far more intentional than in the days of our grandparents and the old Catholic ethnic-transmission belt. Yes, the claims of postmodern culture raise all sorts of new challenges for the proclamation of the Gospel and for living an integral Christian life. But when Jesus is boldly proclaimed as Lord and the walking wounded of postmodernity find in the Lord’s witnesses – the Catholics they meet – the possibility of a happier, nobler, more compassionate and more exhilarating way of life, then the Church not only survives, it flourishes. Which might be something else for the proponents of devolution to consider. George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center
