Pope Issues Edict Limiting Power of Bishops Conferences

Moving to limit the power of national bishops conferences to speak out on doctrinal issues, Pope John Paul II declared Thursday that, unless their pronouncements are approved by a unanimous vote or have his approval, Catholics are not obliged to follow them.

The papal edict is intended to clarify an issue that has long been a source of confusion and some tension among bishops themselves and between bishops and the Vatican--what are the conditions that national bishops conferences must meet before their declarations may be considered authentic teaching?

By requiring that all such pronouncements win a unanimous vote--or have a two-thirds majority, plus the pope’s assent--John Paul appears to have eliminated the ambiguity.

“[It] clarifies a situation that has been under discussion for more than a decade,” said Bishop Anthony M. Pilla of Cleveland, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

But others--such as Father Thomas J. Reese, editor of the Catholic magazine America and the author of a history of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops--cautioned that the practical effect could be to hamstring bodies like the U.S. bishops conference from taking stands on divisive national issues.

For example, the U.S. bishops’ landmark 1983 pastoral, condemning America’s nuclear deterrence policy of mutually assured destruction as immoral, and the 1986 pastoral on economic injustice each had overwhelming support among the estimated 300 active U.S. bishops. But Reese said each fell nine votes short of a unanimous tally.

“Would that mean that if bishops tried to do something like that today, it would have to go to Rome and sit in Rome for God only knows how many years before they had a chance to review it and put their two cents in before they could receive [papal] recognition?” Reese asked.

The new rule is “very impractical,” Reese said, because it would allow a single bishop to block the rest of the nation’s bishops from issuing a teaching deemed to be authentic without appealing to the pope for his recognition.

Furthermore, Reese said, the U.S. bishops conference has never issued a “doctrinal statement,” although pastoral letters contain doctrinal content.

“The distinction between pastoral and doctrinal is very vague and unclear,” Reese said in an interview from New York.

John Paul’s latest letter, titled “The Theological and Juridical Nature of Episcopal Conferences,” came less than a month after the Vatican issued a letter intended to end dissent over such issues as the church’s ban on female priests.

In that letter, John Paul inserted a provision in canon law that for the first time applied unspecified penalties to those theologians, priests and other officials of the church who dissent from church teachings that fall short of divine revelation but are nonetheless considered to be infallible because they were pronounced by the pope and his bishops.

In this week’s letter, John Paul acknowledged that a nation’s bishops must respond to new questions “arising from changes in society” that can confront Catholics in their countries.

But there are limits, he said, on a what a national conference can do. He restated the Roman Catholic Church’s historic standard: Any such pronouncements must always take the universal church’s teachings into account, including the teachings of the pope made in concert with the world’s bishops, and must be invested with “the authority of Christ.”

As Reese noted in his 1992 book, “A Flock of Shepherds,” the bishops conference must operate within the international communion of the Roman Catholic Church--it is not an independent agent.

“Theology, cannon law and custom demand that it be respectful of Rome and of other episcopal conferences,” Reese wrote.

But the requirement of a unanimous vote is new. “If this unanimity is lacking, a majority alone of the bishops of a conference cannot issue a declaration as authentic teaching of the conference to which all the faithful of the territory would have to adhere, unless it obtains the recognitio [recognition] of the Apostolic See, which will not give it if the majority requesting it is not substantial.”

John Paul also said that committees, commissions and other bodies established by national bishops conferences could not speak for a nation’s bishops.

In October, for example, the bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family issued a controversial pastoral message, “Always Our Children,” which encouraged parents of homosexual children to continue to love them and communicate. Then, last month, the message was revised at the urging of the Vatican.