The Future of the Catholic Church: Church Governance by Christopher Ruddy –
Courtesy of First Things
Pope Francis is both a cause and a symptom of the present crisis of governance in the Catholic Church.
Deliberate doctrinal ambiguity, egregious (in)action on clerical sexual abuse, centralization of papal authority in the name of synodality, a problematic conception of the relationship between ordained and lay authority, mixed signals sent to a German Church teetering on the edge of heresy and schism—these and other actions have pushed Catholicism into uncharted territory.
We face the sad irony of a supposedly synodal, decentralized Church that, to raise a seemingly minor example, forbids some faithful Catholics from worshipping in their parishes and dictates to pastors what can be printed in parish bulletins and on parish websites.
And yet Francis is also a symptom of the centuries-long process that has unduly centralized ecclesial authority in Rome and fostered a cult of papal personality—often at the behest of the laity.
The result has been a conception of the pope as an absolute monarch enthroned above the rest of the Church, oracular and isolated.
How can any church leader, for instance, exercise authority effectively in an age marked by liquid modernity and a crisis of trust?
Three desiderata seem especially urgent:
doctrinal integrity,
juridical accountability and
transparency,
and an ecclesial culture of participation and responsibility.
Doctrine might seem an odd place to start a discussion of ecclesial governance. But every bishop’s first task—and the bishop of Rome’s task above all—is to preach and teach faithfully.
The Lord proclaimed Peter the “rock” of the Church only after he had professed that Jesus was “the Christ, the son of the living God.”
The Church of Rome, for its part, has historically been known for the purity of it’s apostolic teaching.
St John Henry Newman spoke of the papacy, for instance, as a remora—a “break” –against the deforming innovations of heretics.
Rome’s job, so to speak, has been to conserve, not to innovate:
It is said, and truly, that the Church of Rome possessed no great mind in the whole period
of persecution. Afterwards for a long while, it has not a single doctor to show;
St. Leo, its. first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine;
St. Gregory, who stands at the very extremity of the first age of the Church, has no place in dogma or philosophy.
Sound doctrine is not simply the business of theologians, but makes possible good ecclesial
governance.
When the deposit of faith is undermined, doctrines become “policies” that one pope promotes and another pope reverses. The pope becomes a president, and an apostolic exhortation an executive order.
The Church, built upon the apostolic faith, cannot be governed that way.
But as scholars such as Hermann Pottmeyer and Klaus Schatz have shown, such instability is a constant threat because of how the modern papacy has developed.
Pottmeyer has argued that nineteenth-century papal Rome was shaped by “three traumas”: the ecclesial trauma of movements (conciliarism, Gallicanism) that
sought to counter papal primacy; the political trauma of state-controlled churches in France and elsewhere; and the cultural-intellectual trauma of Enlightenment-era rationalism and liberalism.
The response of Rome was to reassert the primacy and authority of the pope as the counterweight to these disintegrating forces in the Church and the world.
Catholics needed to look to Rome, “over the mountains [the Alps]” (hence “Ultramontanism”), for direction.
One result has been, as the late Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard put it, a pope who is “more than a pope.”
That is, a pope who, in the popular ecclesial imagination, is quasi-divine and the source of all ecclesial insight and initiative.
For instance, in some popular piety he became one of the “three white bearers of Christ,” along
with the Eucharistic Host and Mary.
The flip side of such aggrandising centralisation was a growing lack of
initiative elsewhere, a kind of learned helplessness among both clergy and laity.
Doctrinally, the two Vatican councils provide a corrective to ultramontane views of governance. They affirm that the papacy is a “permanent and visible source and foundation of unity of faith and communion” in the Church.
sadly francis has failed miserably in particularly this regard as Card. Burke, Bishop Strickland and other reputable (removed) former church hierarchy will attestThe pope—as Peter’s successor—has a unique, nontransferable responsibility to ensure unity
among the bishops and, through them, the entire Church.
The two councils also made strong claims about
papal primacy—it is “full,” “supreme,” and “immediate”—and -infallibility.
But Vatican I, often held to be the charter of ultramontanism, did not write the popes a blank check.
First, it taught that papal primacy did not detract from other bishops’ authority, but rather “supported and defended” it.
Vatican II underscored that teaching when it proclaimed that bishops are not “vicars of the Roman Pontiffs,” but the true shepherds of their dioceses.
Second, Vatican I held that the Holy Spirit does not give popes divine inspiration to set forth new
teaching, but instead gives them assistance to guard and expound the apostolic deposit of faith. No pope can regard himself as a Mormon president, receiving new revelation and reversing previous teaching.
Vatican II deepened Vatican I’s teaching when it affirmed that the pope and the other bishops stand under the Word of God, not above it.
They are its servants, not its masters.
A striking instance of that subordination came during Vatican II, when Paul VI suggested—amid
concerns that an affirmation of episcopal collegiality would undermine papal primacy—that the council teach that the pope is “accountable to the Lord alone.”
The conciliar Theological Commission politely but firmly rejected his proposal, noting that the pope is “bound to revelation itself, to the fundamental structure of the
Church, to the sacraments, to the definitions of earlier Councils, and other obligations too numerous to mention.”
Benedict XVI echoed the Theological Commission’s words when, just a few weeks into his
pontificate, he took possession of his episcopal chair (cathedra) at St. John Lateran in Rome:
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary:
the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word.
He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.
This obedience is, paradoxically, a liberation. Yes, doctrine develops; tradition cannot be reduced to mere repetition. The Church can go deeper, remember things that have been forgotten, recover what has been marginalised.
But, in words Vatican I borrowed from St. Vincent of Lérins, any true development must always have the “same sense and meaning” as previous teaching. Deeply troubling in this regard are recent claims by high ranking cardinals that the “sociological--scientific foundation of this teaching [on homosexuality] is no longer correct,” and that “on some issues the understanding of human nature and moral reality upon which previous
declarations of doctrine were made were in fact limited or defective.”
Such views would sever the Church from the faith of the apostles.
They would leave her in perpetual suspension and provisionality, unable to teach
with binding authority.
The Catholic Church cannot function that way.
Second, good governance calls for the rule of law and the transparent, accountable administration of justice.
Pope Francis has made real, if uneven progress on the Vatican’s finances (Cardinal Pell has not Frances)....., but (Frances' ) record on sexual abuse is appalling. There is presently an almost incomprehensible combination of inaction toward, and protection of, sexually abusive bishops and priests—for example, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta and Fr. Marko Rupnik.
Such deeds have rendered papal leadership on this front literally incredible.
Justice must be seen to be done.
For instance, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis’s 2019 motu proprio, offered helpful norms for addressing sexual abuse and its concealment by bishops and religious superiors.
Its implementation, however, has limped along. Bishops have been removed from office as a result of Vos Estis mandated investigations, but the results of those investigations are often kept hidden or only partially revealed.
This lack of accountability and transparency undermines effective, credible governance.
The restoration of trust calls, finally, for a culture of participation and responsibility.
Pope Francis’s signature initiative is clearly synodality—which the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has described as “the involvement and participation of the whole People of God in the life and mission of the Church”—and he has already taken steps to ensure that this initiative will survive beyond his pontificate.
(...the whole?...hmmm ...a few selected by Frances more like it...)
Trust is the element that makes possible a culture of participation and responsibility. It is the
fundamental condition for the exercise of authority, especially in a voluntary community whose law is love.
Synodality need not be a Trojan horse for ecclesial heterodoxy and division. But in the absence of transparent, orthodox, and genuinely collaborative governance, it will be.
Article edited for reasons of space; full article available at firstthings.com
Christopher Ruddy is associate professor of historical and systematic theology at the Catholic University of America.