Synodal leadership can ease a bishop’s burdens, speakers say

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A bishop who runs his diocese like a “monarch” is not only not acting synodally, but he probably is lonely and stressed, said theologians advising the Synod of Bishops.

“The bishop is not the lord of the church, but the servant of the Lord, at the service of his community,” Father Carlos María Galli, a professor at the Catholic University of Argentina, told synod participants and members of the public at a forum Oct. 9.

The forum on “The Role and Authority of the Bishop in a Synodal Church” was one of four presentations the Synod of Bishops scheduled in October to give synod participants and members of the public a chance to explore the theological and pastoral foundations of some synod topics.

More than 200 people, including dozens of cardinals and bishops, attended the forum on the ministry of bishops, and many of them had questions for the five theologians making presentations there.

The theologians and members of the audience recognized how many responsibilities — both pastoral and administrative — a diocesan bishop has and how that can lead to overwork and stress.

The working document for the 2024 assembly of the synod said, “The bishop has the task of presiding over a Church, being a visible principle of unity within it and a bond of communion with all the Churches.”

His having ultimate responsibility, it said, “does not imply his separation from the portion of the People of God entrusted to him, and which he is called to serve in the name of Christ the Good Shepherd. The fact that ‘the fullness of the sacrament of order is conferred by episcopal consecration’ is not the justification for an episcopal ministry that is ‘monarchical,’ conceived as an accumulation of prerogatives from which every other charism and ministry derives.”

“Instead, it affirms the capacity and duty to gather and compose in unity every gift that the Spirit pours out on baptized men and women and on the various communities,” the working document said.

One bishop from Africa asked which responsibilities a bishop should delegate and which he needed to do himself.

Father Matteo Visioli, a professor of canon law at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, replied that discerning “what is essential and what is superfluous” or what can be delegated “is the question of every bishop, priest, pastor, parent and student.”

“A bishop can and must allow the baptized to participate in the governance of the diocese not by delegation but by (virtue of) their baptism,” Father Visioli said. One of the main points of synodality is that all the baptized are called to share in the mission of the church.

Requests by Catholics for accountability from their bishops, he said, are not about controlling the bishop, but helping him.

“When I read the word ‘monarchical’ in the working document, I did not think about his power, but his loneliness,” the canonist said.

Sister Liliana Franco Echeverri, a member of the Company of Mary and president of the Confederation of Latin American and Caribbean Religious, told the bishops, “We do not want your administrative tasks to take away from your most authentic vocation: to be a pastor, a caretaker who makes decisions with love.”

“You, too, are disciples,” she told them. “Your first mission is to be a witness of the Gospel.”

Cardinal-designate Roberto Repole of Turin, a longtime professor of systematic theology, told the audience that 60 years after the Second Vatican Council, there still are varying interpretations of what it means for a bishop to be a successor of the Apostles, called to preside over a local church and having the “fullness of the sacrament of holy orders.”

To many, he said, it implies that “from the bishop everything flows.”

“This leads to a ministry which tends to be solitary, individual, and which cascades down to produce an equally solitary and individual way of living priestly ministry,” he said.

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