The Joy of Bishops' Conferences?

By Robert Royal The Synod on Synodality is a self-defined exercise in listening, openness, transparency - and a whole litany of the usual progressive shibboleths. In practice, it has been marked by listening almost exclusively with the left ear, openings only to revisionist sects like pro-LGBT and women's ordination groups, and an absolute opaqueness - the result of the synod managers requiring delegates not to speak to anyone outside about what's going on inside so that participants can be candid without having to worry about their remarks coming back to haunt them later. (So sweeping is this rationale that the ban on disclosure is supposed to remain in force in perpetuity.) Except for a very few, almost totally unenlightening, press conferences and a few special events, any curious person has almost no way to know anything about a "process" that is supposed to be a model of the open new synodal style of "being Church." It's no surprise that one consequence of this model is that there are even fewer people than in the past interested in what's going on - even in Rome. Still, there are leaks for those of us looking for them. And one that should be of particular interest, especially if it continues on to find a place in the final document, is what seems to be increasing momentum (and pushback) towards empowering bishops' conferences with "doctrinal authority," a discussion point tucked away in the back of the Working Document: From all that has been gathered so far, during this synodal process, the following proposals emerge: (a) recognition of Episcopal Conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favouring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts; (b) evaluating the real experience of the functioning of the Episcopal Conferences and the Eastern hierarchical structures, and of the relations between Episcopates and the Holy See, to identify the concrete reforms to be implemented. . . That now seems to have become a potential rallying point - along with "continental" structures - since the progressive hot-button issues seem to be, as might have been expected, unresolved or actually getting strong traditional pushback. A cynic might conclude, then, that empowering bishops' conferences is a way for progressives to keep the conversation going beyond the end of the synod this month. With the possibility of getting desired results piecemeal, if not wholesale. At some later point. Giving bishops' conferences doctrinal power is for some quite serious theological minds a major stumbling block. In the Church, from the beginning, there have been bishops and there has been Peter. The very modern notion of particular nations that could be employed to form intermediate ecclesial bodies never existed. And as the mighty Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said forty years ago in The Ratzinger Report: "No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission; its documents have no weight of their own save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops." He insisted on this point, "Because it is a matter of safeguarding the very nature of the Catholic Church, which is based on an episcopal structure and not on a kind of federation of national churches. The national level is not an ecclesial dimension." His remarks came in the aftermath of Vatican II, during which one of the points that the Council Fathers were seeking to deal with an overemphasis on the papacy left unaddressed when Vatican I was broken up by Garibaldi's invasion of Rome in the nineteenth century. In Ratzinger's view, the push for elevating bishop's conferences was a deviation from what was good in the Vatican II vision of the bishop as having full authority over his diocese: The decisive new emphasis on the role of the bishops is in reality restrained or actually risks being ...