ARTICLES

Is the Papacy the Problem?

VATICAN TOO POWERFUL, SAYS QUINN

By George Neumayr

"I have been involved in quite a number of ecumenical dialogues," says Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles in an interview with the Faith. "And one trouble has been that it is hard to find anybody who can speak for Anglicanism or Lutheranism or Presbyterianism because they have such a splintered government ....We do have somebody who speaks for the Church -- [the Pope]."

Retired San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn, however, argues that a strong papacy is a disadvantage for the Church. Writing in The Exercise of the Primacy, a recently published series of essays, Quinn says that the papacy often acts in ways "injurious not only to the collegiality of 'brothers in ministry,' but to ecumenism as well."

He cites the Vatican's recent document on the clericalization of the laity as an example of papal overreaching and insensitivity. "Collegiality and brotherly communion" is wounded "when, for instance, the recent document on lay ministry was composed and promulgated without prior knowledge of the episcopate."

He notes approvingly that several "Episcopal Conferences in Europe have made public criticisms of some weaknesses of the document." Had the Vatican consulted the bishops on the document, "this would not have happened." Moreover, he says, the document would have taken "a more positive approach to this issue," since most bishops "do not approach the involvement of lay persons in ministries with fear, but with gratitude and admiration."

The Vatican, he complains, too often adheres to a "strictly monarchical conception of the papacy, strongly favored by the minority element at the Second Vatican Council and all too evidently still favored by important elements in the curia." A "pseudo-Romanization" threatens the good of the Church, acting as a form "of narcotic that puts to sleep all critical judgment."

As Quinn sees it, the Vatican could benefit from the presence of more women: "The question must be asked why qualified women could not hold the highest positions in curial offices and congregations. If the curia is the instrumentality of the pope, women could surely be placed at the head of certain departments and congregations such as the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Commission for the Family, the Pontifical Commission for the Interpretation of the Code, the Congregation for Catholic Education and various others. The role of women needs much further prominence if the Church is to respond to what the Council and the popes have called one of the important signs of the times."

Tellingly, Quinn's essay in The Exercise of the Primacy appears alongside the essays of other scholars critical of the current papacy.

R. Scott Appleby, a member of the Catholic Common Ground project, a movement to dialogue with dissenters, writes that at "times, it seems, the pope has attempted to stifle the vibrant theological pluralism that was the Council's greatest promise and that offered the most secure foundation for the kind of ecclesial reform called for by Archbishop Quinn and others. Yet theological pluralism continues to thrive in the academy, which has given Archbishop Quinn perhaps his most sympathetic hearing."

Elizabeth Johnson, author of such books as She Who Is and Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit, complains that "Peter" is an obtuse patriarch, deaf to the pleas of women. "Women are witnessing to the work of the Spirit in our midst in new and previously unthinkable ways; but Peter is still going fishing, accompanied by many of the brethren." The Vatican is guilty of an "authoritarian and obnoxious form of governance," what with its indifference to "pastoral problems" on such matters as "sexual ethics, where women's bodies bear the burdens of the teaching." Johnson discerns that "God's will for Peter is that he stop going fishing and that for once, finally, he listen to Mary Magdalene."

John F. Kane, a professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver, laments what he calls a trend in the Church towards an "episcopacy of men who see themselves as essentially vicars of the Pope rather than vicars of Christ...of men who increasingly look very much like branch managers in a multinational corporation who serve the will of the CEO and his centralized administrative staff." According to Kane, the present papacy is heavy-handed and sexist, attempting to "silence or discredit a few theologians while alienating many of the most active and committed Catholics."

Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit theologian at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, also frets about the Church's politically incorrect character. "How can a church that does not accept the ordination of women enter into eucharistic communion with those that do?" "The credibility of Roman Catholic magisterial authority in particular has suffered an enormous loss, beginning with Pope Paul VI's reaffirmation of the traditional ban on contraception in his 1967 encyclical Humanae Vitae." "Today an increasing number of Catholics quietly ignore the Church's rules on divorce and remarriage, its eucharistic discipline, its teaching in the areas of sexuality and social justice."

Fr. Peter Stravinskas, editor of the Catholic Answer, sees this Quinn-led agenda to weaken the papacy as a great mistake, threatening to produce, if followed, "untoward disaster." Says Stravinskas to the Faith: "In this era of a global village, the very last thing we need is more splintering of the Church, which is to say, the Roman primacy has probably never been more important than it is right now and I think that is one reason why you have large numbers of Orthodox and Lutheran and Anglican theologians looking rather closely at and [seeing] even the necessity for the spokesman for the Christian Church." Quinn's "proposals would have the effect of diminishing the authority and the power of the Roman pontiff."

Stravinskas says that Quinn's criticism of the Vatican's approach to the document on lay ministry is unsound. "I suggest that there is nothing in the Vatican II teaching on collegiality which obviates the possibility of an instruction being prepared by the Holy See and specifically at the mandate of the Bishop of Rome..." Besides, "there was plenty of input to the Holy See and that is why they came to the conclusions that they did."

"Bishops are not necessarily in the best position to critique their own cultures," says Stravinskas. "There is an old principle of Roman law...No one is a judge in his own case. I think that again each of these [Quinn] proposals would have the effect of removing a level of review from the life and activities of the Roman Church. I think it would be detrimental to the life of the local Church and therefore detrimental to the life of the universal Church."

Dr. Joyce Little, a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, says that shifting power from the papacy to national conferences of bishops is a bad idea, because "the national conferences of bishops create problems for us. The national conference of Catholic bishops is not part of the holiness of the ordering of the Church..."

Little adds that all this "collegiality" talk ignores, ironically, past colleges of bishops: "My frustration here is that we have here a 2,000-year church. The church isn't just the people living today. It is not just the bishops living today. There is this tremendous arrogance that supposes that a single generation of Catholics can overturn the faith of the Church and the faith of 2,000 years of Catholics on grounds of collegiality. Collegiality extends to all bishops at all times and all places, not just what the bishops in America, in Canada and Europe happen to think in 1998...."

"There is always a centrifugal tendency of the national conferences...for autonomy," says Fr. Avery Dulles. "In order to preserve the unity of the sense of the one church, Rome has to exercise constant vigilance. Otherwise we would have an African Church and an Indian Church, a Latin American Church, [etc.]....They would all go in different directions."

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