VATICAN CITY (CNS) — While some media reported a move at the Synod of Bishops to allow every national bishops’ conference to make Catholic doctrine, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, N.J., said that was not precisely what he heard.
“I think there’s a general feeling in the hall, at least from where I sit, that absolute doctrinal teaching does not belong to a bishop’s conference,” he said. “Now that doesn’t mean to say they don’t have something to say about doctrine (and) the pastoral application of the doctrine of the church” in a particular country.
In fact, the application of doctrine “should be a real interest of the bishops’ conference, and we should be able to listen to each other about how we would apply the teachings of the church,” he told Catholic News Service outside the synod hall Oct. 18.
Members of the synod, including Cardinal Tobin, spent Oct. 15-18 discussing the “places” where synodality is and can be experienced in the church. One of those places was the national bishops’ conference.
The synod working document said that after the first synod session in October 2023, proposals emerged for a “recognition of Episcopal Conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority.”
The line set off a debate and even some alarms by bishops who were concerned the statement basically meant a nation’s bishops could create Catholic doctrine and it could differ from what was taught as Catholic truth in another country.
Cardinal Tobin noted that in 2025 Christians will celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the origin of the Nicene Creed.
“No bishops’ conference should ever tinker with the Creed,” he said. “That’s what holds us together.”
But the cardinal said he hoped bishops’ conferences, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, would listen more to people in their dioceses and to each other to “apply the doctrine to the concrete situations” of the church in their country.
“We have to listen, certainly, to the Word of God and the tradition of our church, and we have to listen to each other,” he said.
Synod members, he said, have found “a consensus that without the support of the bishops’ conference, synodality will not really enter the life of a national church.”
The national and regional conferences of bishops blossomed after the Second Vatican Council, but their stature and influence began shrinking in the late 1990s, when St. John Paul II and his closest aides tried to rein in the conferences’ perceived power over the authority and ministry of a local bishop for his diocese.
In 1998, St. John Paul issued an apostolic letter, “Apostolos Suos” on the theological and juridical nature of bishops’ conferences. He said bishops’ conferences could issue statements on doctrinal and moral issues only if approved unanimously by conference members.
But from the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis has given a higher profile to bishops’ conferences and their teaching authority and has underscored that by frequently citing the teaching of different national conferences in his own encyclicals and apostolic exhortations.
In his 2013 apostolic exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis wrote that the Second Vatican Council affirmed that “episcopal conferences are in a position ‘to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit.'” But, he said, “this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated.”
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