Last week, Bishop Joseph Strickland quoted a few lines from my latest article for Crisis Magazine called “The Great Convergence.” I wrote the piece, in part, to push back against what Bishop Athanasius Schneider calls the culture of papal-centrism we find everywhere in the modern Church. Here’s the paragraph Bishop Strickland tweeted:
"The West needs to remember that our bishops do not derive their authority from the pope. They are not the Vatican’s regional managers. They are Successors to the Apostles in their own right. They have their own teaching authority. They are the shepherds of their sheep."
For that, His Excellency was called a schismatic, a heretic, even an apostate. It goes to show how much confusion there is about the papacy even among faithful, well-informed Catholics. Apparently, quite a few of us think bishops are indeed the Vatican’s regional managers. They seem to think that the pope is the only real bishop, and that he simply rents out a little bit of his bishop-ness to the seven thousand ordinaries around the world.
Clearly, that’s not the case. All bishops (including the pope) derive their authority from the same source: God. Our Lord consecrated the Twelve Apostles as bishops. The Apostles then passed on the authority of their office to a new generation through the laying on of hands. We call this line Apostolic Succession.
As the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church puts it:
"For from the tradition, which is expressed especially in liturgical rites and in the practice of both the Church of the East and of the West, it is clear that, by means of the imposition of hands and the words of consecration, the grace of the Holy Spirit is so conferred, and the sacred character so impressed, that bishops in an eminent and visible way sustain the roles of Christ Himself as Teacher, Shepherd and High Priest, and that they act in His person. Therefore it pertains to the bishops to admit newly elected members into the Episcopal body by means of the sacrament of Orders."
Lumen Gentium goes on to explain: “This power, which they personally exercise in Christ’s name, is proper, ordinary and immediate, although its exercise is ultimately regulated by the supreme authority of the Church, and can be circumscribed by certain limits, for the advantage of the Church or of the faithful.” So, yes: bishops are bishops in their own right.
It’s true that bishops are subject to higher authorities, including the pope. Yet it’s possible for them to exercise their episcopal office in defiance of the papacy. The Orthodox have been doing it for a thousand years.
Read the rest here.
HT: Blog reader John L.
Academic question: would abolishing the College of Cardinals be a healthy reform?
ReplyDeleteAbolishing the papacy and electing an Orthodox bishop of Rome would be better. Many more managers should be sent packing. Orthodox Christians this could happen to us.
ReplyDeleteThe number of cardinals ranged from 20 to 25 during the late Middle Ages; various unsuccessful attempts were made to limit their number to an absolute maximum of 24. Leo X (d. 1521) began the process of increasing the number, until Sixtus V (d. 1590) limited it to 70. It was John XXIII (d. 1963) who began to increase the number beyond that limit. In 1975 Paul VI (d. 1978) decreed (a gross injustice, IMO) that cardinals over the age of 80 could not vote in papal conclaves, and limited the number of "cardinal electors" (cardinals eligible to vote in papal conclaves) to 120. In the period since then, the number of "cardinal electors" has exceeded 120, although at all subsequent conclaves (1978, 1978, 2005, 2013) the number did not exceed 120. I believe that the total number of cardinals at the present time is around 215 to 220.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with this post, and the underlying article, is that it fails to identify who exactly called Bishop Strickland "a schismatic, a heretic, even an apostate" for repeating what I always understood was a rather commonplace notion, that the authority of the bishops derives from their succession from the apostles, not from being delegated from the bishop of Rome.
ReplyDeleteI myself have been disappointed to read some of the statements that have been attributed to Bishop Strickland this past year, such as the assertion that an American Democrat cannot be a Catholic. This is a little more than theoretical, since, a quarter of a century ago, Bishop Strickland (then Father Joe) was my parish priest; he baptized one of my children. A goodly portion of the parish consisted of Democrats at time time (in a heavily Republican area of East Texas), and I rather wonder what happened to those I left behind so long ago.
Father Joe was a good man then and undoubtedly remains a good man as Bishop Strickland. His reported connection with at least one pro-Trump event in DC a year or so ago certainly doesn't make him a heretic or schismatic or an apostate. But I would be interested in knowing who made those charges, and on what basis, since it's kind of hard to credit the claim that they were based solely on a characterization of episcopal authority directed supported by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.