A Call for Collegiality

When Roman Catholic bishops assembled at Vatican City from all over Europe recently, Pope John Paul II came to their daily meetings in a black Mercedes-Benz bearing the papal coat of arms. As the convertible top popped open and the ailing pontiff was helped to his feet, a retinue of bishops knelt and kissed his ring.

Inside the hall, the agenda was a 92-page document that was supposed to reflect prior discussion among Catholic faithful across the continent but read more like a collection of John Paul’s quotations. The bishops took turns speaking as a dour Spanish cardinal appointed by the pope tried to hold them to the script. Discussion was closed to the press and public.

The synod ended Oct. 23, but months will pass before the pope responds to its suggestions for what the church should be doing in Europe during the next millennium.

This is not what the world’s bishops envisioned in 1965 when they ended the Second Vatican Council with a call for collegiality, or shared policymaking between them and the pope. The bishops’ synods, a creation of the council, were stripped of any legislative influence a few years later, and today the church runs, as it has for much of its history, as an absolute monarchy.

Near the end of a long papal reign that has further centralized power in the Vatican, collegiality is becoming a buzzword for what many Catholics want from John Paul’s successor--regardless of his views on birth control, ordination of women and other divisive issues.

The buzz penetrated the carefully choreographed synod with an eyebrow-raising speech by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the archbishop of Milan, Italy, who is on most unofficial lists of would-be popes.

The 72-year-old biblical scholar, using carefully diplomatic language, asked whether there wasn’t a “growing awareness” of the usefulness, “even the necessity, of a collegial and authoritative consultation among all the bishops on sexual morality, the shortage of priests and other issues facing the church.”

“Another synod wouldn’t be enough,” he added. “Some of these issues probably require a more universal and authoritative” forum, “where they can be faced with freedom, in the full exercise of episcopal collegiality,” he told his peers and the pope.

Martini was more blunt with reporters. He said he was not calling for a new Vatican Council, but a new way of running the church.

The pope appoints bishops, but many feel torn between John Paul and local churches that want more autonomy. Last year, the Vatican ruled that national bishops’ conferences may no longer issue statements on matters of faith or morals unless they are unanimous--a move that critics said was aimed at preventing the conferences from speaking out on most controversial issues. In an especially bitter feud, German bishops are resisting a Vatican order to stop issuing certificates to women who receive abortion counseling at church-run clinics. The issue isn’t the morality of abortion, a contentious issue in itself, but the authority of bishops.

German law requires a certificate of counseling from any woman seeking a legal abortion. The Vatican argues that the church, which issues about 20,000 such certificates a year, is an accomplice in the approximately 15,000 abortions obtained by women who hear and then reject Catholic counseling against the practice. The bishops argue that the church’s advice saves 5,000 unborn lives.

Vatican heavy-handedness, many clerics say, tends to alienate Catholics. Despite 21 years of John Paul’s activism, Catholicism in Europe suffers from low attendance at Mass and growing competition from new spiritual movements. Opening the synod, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, the archbishop of Madrid, said these trends produce “an atmosphere of despair.”

Meanwhile, a grass-roots Catholic movement demanding a “democratic” church is gaining momentum and seeking to influence the choice of a successor to the 79-year-old John Paul.

The 4-year-old coalition known as We Are Church has spread from its base in Austria to claim ties, forged over the Internet, with 127 liberal Catholic groups in 27 countries, including the United States. After a “shadow synod” near Rome earlier this month, the group’s European branch addressed recommendations to the pope in a giant yellow envelope and handed it to bemused Swiss Guards at a Vatican gate.

The dissidents, who included priests and nuns but no bishops, proposed that a “representative council” write a church constitution that would involve “all the people of God” in decision-making. They cited a 1997 poll showing that most Catholics in the United States, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain want to elect their bishops and want them to have more autonomy. A Vatican-appointed synod secretary, Polish Archbishop Jozef M. Zycinski, rejected the idea. The belief that internal democracy can solve the church’s difficulties, he said, “would seem a little closer to magic than to theology.”

No one expects serious debate about power-sharing until there’s a new pope.

“Most bishops would agree there’s a need for such a discussion,” said Crispian Hollis, the bishop of Portsmouth, England. “The faithful talk about it in real life. But it would be awkward for the bishops to confront the pope because many of us feel that he is at least willing to listen to our advice.” Still, the issue found its way to the synod floor in an oblique way that may foreshadow debate in the College of Cardinals, when John Paul is gone, over what kind of leader it should choose in his place.

Javier Echevarria Rodriguez, Spanish leader of the influential Opus Dei movement, argued that Catholicism cannot thrive without unity and unswerving loyalty behind a single authority. It needs “a new Romanity,” he said. But Antonio Baltasar Marcelino, the bishop of Aveiro, Portugal, said centralized authority gives the church “a face of clerical power and privilege” and makes it less innovative and responsive to rank-and-file Catholics.

Several cardinals taking part in the synod are often mentioned as possible papal contenders, including Martini, Godfried Daneels of Brussels, Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, Christoph Schonborn of Vienna and Miloslav Vlk of Prague, Czech Republic.

Among them, only Martini raised the issue of collegiality.

Cardinals representing the Vatican bureaucracy spread themselves among discussion groups at the synod and effectively kept other controversial topics, such as the rule that priests be celibate, out of the final document, participants said.

Instead, the bishops’ final message urged new missionary energy to combat what is called “the spirit of evil” in a Europe “often closed to the transcendent, stifled by consumerist attitudes, enslaved by old and new idolatries.”