ROME (CNS) — Encouraging greater “synodal” practices in the Catholic Church should help the church find a greater balance between the power of the pope and the power of local bishops in their dioceses, said theologians participating in the Synod of Bishops.
The balance between the authority and jurisdiction of the pope as the bishop of Rome and the authority of local bishops — a balance that would allow for greater diversity within the universal church — also would benefit efforts to restore Christian unity since for many other Christian churches, the way popes currently exercise their primacy is an obstacle to unity, the theologians said.
An adjustment in the balance would recognize that the bishops are successors of the apostles and vicars of Christ, not vicars of the pope, said Father José San Jose Prisco, dean of the faculty of canon law at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain, and a theological expert at the synod.
The priest, two other theologians participating in the Synod of Bishops and an Australian archbishop spoke at a synod forum Oct. 16 exploring the relationship between the exercise of papal primacy and synodality.
Father Dario Vitali, coordinator of theological experts assisting the synod and professor of dogmatic theology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, told forum attendees that in very broad terms the first millennium of Christianity was marked by “synodality” and local autonomy as the faith spread throughout the world with almost centrifugal force. For Catholics, the second millennium was marked by a greater emphasis on the universal jurisdiction of the pope in a centripetal push to ensure unity.
“In the third millennium, we hope to be able to speak of both synodality and primacy,” he said, respecting local expressions of the faith and local priorities, but also recognizing the ministry of the pope as one that serves and preserves the unity of the universal church.
Questions about the exercise of papal primacy are not new or unique to the synod. In his 1995 encyclical, “Ut Unum Sint,” (“That They May Be One”), St. John Paul II called for an ecumenical exploration of ways the pope could exercise his ministry as a service to the unity of all Christians.
The global process of listening and discernment that have characterized the current synod “can be of service to the pope in his role and also of assistance to the bishops themselves,” said Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference and a member of the synod.
However, the archbishop said, the “circular” process of the synod — all members, including the bishops and the pope, listening to each other, discerning in prayer, sharing their concerns, listening more — “can easily become a linear process” where the faithful are consulted, the bishops “discern the presence, or otherwise, of harmony between what the faithful have said and what the church teaches” and then they submit their conclusions and proposals to the pope for approval.
“The problem with this understanding is not that it’s completely wrong,” the archbishop said, but that it separates church members into three distinct groups — the faithful, which does not include the bishops or priests, “the bishops who act as judges of what the people have said, and the pope, who simply receives at the end the final outcomes in which, in fact, he’s had really very little part to play in the process.”
“Such an approach, if rigidly followed, perpetuates a pyramidal structuring of the church,” Archbishop Costelloe said, “and such a structuring of the church is just not in harmony with the vision of Pope Francis or with the theology of Vatican II.”
Catherine Clifford, a theologian and member of the synod from Canada, told the forum that “recent developments in the practice of synodality in the global Catholic Church reflect a shift in Catholic ecclesiology and practice away from an almost exclusive emphasis on the personal or primatial dimension of the bishop of Rome’s office and toward a restoration of greater balance with the collegial and communal dimensions in the exercise of that office.”
If the Synod of Bishops becomes “a more effective instrument for listening to the life of the local churches,” she said, it can be a tool that helps “the bishop of Rome to serve the communion of faith and proclaim it in more effective ways, discerning and taking decisions that express the faith, the sense of faith of the whole church.”
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