Excerpt from
Authority in the Church
David J. Stagaman, S.J.
© The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville,
Minnesota. All rights reserved.
No part of this may be reproduced by any means, without the
written permission of
The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Authority in the Church: A Central Issue and Some Other Issues
Chapter 2: What Authority (Secular or Religious) Is Not!
Introduction
Chapter 3: What Is Authority?
Chapter 4: The First Millennium
Chapter 5: The Second Millennium
Chapter 6: The Conclusion
Index
Introduction
In the past several years, a number of books by Roman Catholic theologians have appeared on the topic of Church authority. Two by Ladislaus Orsy and Francis Sullivan have concentrated on the authority of the Church's teaching offices (or magisterium).
Orsy's book attacks a distinction too often made between a teaching Church (the pope and the bishops) and a learning Church (the rest of us). He insists that the whole Church both learns and teaches. The college of bishops with the pope as its head forms a "qualified" teacher which witnesses to the faith of the whole body faithful who cannot err in matters essential to the faith. Then, in the remainder of his book, Orsy addresses the issues of assent to and dissent from official Church teaching. He reminds us that the early Church was a communion of local churches and of members of those churches bonded together in such a way that both the churches and the members were expected to give an obsequium to Church teaching that was more than mere respect but less than abject submission. Obsequium was an attitude toward such teaching rooted in a love of the Church that hoped to embrace the teaching once it was clear that it reflected and witnessed to the faith of the whole Church.
Sullivan reminds us that bishops have succeeded to the apostolic ministry of pastoral leadership in the primitive Church such that their teaching has a fullness which that of other Church members does not have. This fullness is "divinely instituted" in the sense that the Holy Spirit guided the early Church to have bishops and to heed what they were taught. Sullivan restricts the term magisterium today to the teaching of the episcopal college in union with its head, the Bishop of Rome. This college can articulate dogmas that pronounce truths divinely revealed and normative for the faith of the people of God. In this articulation they possess infallibility as they are assisted by the Spirit of the Lord who guarantees the truth of what is said. Nonetheless, neither pope nor bishop has any special access to divine revelation. Both are called to witness to the faith-life of the Church.
In chapter six Sullivan makes a cogent and important argument that concrete or particular norms of the natural law cannot be objects of the Church's ordinary infallible teaching authority. While Roman Catholics ought to, if possible, form their consciences according to such moral teaching, their unconditional agreement is not required. Sullivan concludes his work with an examination of a dozen theses from the International Theological Commission which ought to guide not only the magisterium but also the response to it on the part of theologians and the remainder of the faithful. All twelve reflect the author's wisdom, especially the final thesis which describes the Church as a "colloquium" or a conversational community engaged in dialogue at every step of its discernment of what is the true faith.
More recently, Richard Gaillardetz in Witness to the Faith, has focused on the ordinary universal magisterium of the bishops dispersed throughout the world, but as one body proposing a teaching to be held without reservation. He is particularly concerned whether such teaching can be and ordinarily is infallible. A significant portion of the book examines the history of Church teaching. Gaillardetz argues that the concept of an ordinary magisterium emerged in Tuas libenter, the reaction of Pius IX to the 1863 Munich Congress, and found its way into conciliar Church teaching for the first time at Vatican I.
The concept was further elaborated by Roman Catholic theologians over the next century and became a focal issue during the controversy that followed Humanae vitae.
Gaillardertz operates out of a communion ecclesiology which sees the bishops as leaders of local churches through public proclamation of what was previously unclear or only implicitly believed. The bishops belong to a college which can give corporate testimony to the faith of the whole Church. They do so by developing and encouraging dialogue in their own churches and with their fellow bishops and their churches around the world. In this latter dimension of the dialogue, the pope as head of the college, plays a crucial role. His duty is to foster free communication among the local churches so that their bishops can proclaim the lived faith of the whole Church by hearing and heeding the voice of the faithful. In this act of listening, they acknowledge that the Spirit inspires the preaching, theological reflection, catechesis, worship, and daily living of Church members and, thus, builds up the source for episcopal teaching.
Thomas Rausch concerns himself with the relation between the Church's official teaching and its ecumenical endeavors. He finds that the hierarchical model which generally informs official teaching conflicts with the reverence for pluralism honored in ecumenical dialogue, especially when priestly celibacy, the role of women, or Christian marriage and sexuality come up for discussion. Rausch investigates the New Testament and Church history for principles that might bridge the conflict and enable the various churches to restore unity among themselves. He hopes for a more organically and conciliarly minded Church that respects, but endeavors to reconcile diversity. He wishes that all ecclesial bodies would understand themselves as elements of one body in a communion of churches who share responsibility for preaching the gospel and strive for renewed papal primacy that would symbolize the oneness Christ willed for his people.
Edmund Hill studies the relationship between authority in the Church and its ministry. He sees present debates about this relationship torn between two options: an ultramontane one which is preoccupied with obedience to the magisterium and with papal prerogatives and another which emphasizes collegiality and the need to take seriously the objections of our separated brethren to this ultramontane view. He then explores the almost two thousand years of Church history with special attention to this millennium which has seen steady progress in the preeminence of the ministerial priesthood, especially the hierarchy, as alone endowed with authority and responsible for the Church's ministry. This development has culminated in claims for the teaching authority of the Vatican and its exclusive right to appoint bishops. Justification for these claims reached apogees in Vatican I's Pastor aeternus (1870) and Pius XII's Humani generis (1950). Hill argues that Vatican II provided a healthy antidote to the excesses of these claims and their justifications. It relativized the hierarchy in relation to the body faithful, contending that episcopal authority must be a service to the whole. It also stated that the bishops form a college with a head such that the entire college and not just the pope, has pastoral care and responsibility for the Church worldwide. One aspect of this service involves the healing of divisions in Christ's Church. Thus, at least in theory, triumphalism was all but eliminated, juridicism much reduced, and clericalism mitigated.
In contrast to the aforementioned books, this study looks at authority in the Church in all its guises and asks two questions: what is the source of authority when it is found in any community? How did authority in the Roman Catholic Church come to be as it is? In response to the first question, this study asserts that authority is not an attribute of a person, for example, the local bishop, nor of a thing, for example, the Scriptures. Authority is rather the bond experienced by all members of a community as they interact in certain relationships. Authority gives a particular identity to a community in a manner analogous to the identity an individual gains through free choices. Authority resides in human practices that relate persons to persons or persons and things. These practices give one party in the relationship the initiative and place upon another party an obligation to heed that initiative. A human practice is authoritative wherever the rule which governs its right manner of action also stipulates why this practice is better than its alternatives.
Authority so described and analyzed is grounded in what this book (along with some other authors) calls the authoritative: the foundational beliefs and values of the community that make the group the particular community it is. As character grounds freedom in individual persons and functions as the reason why the person chooses as she or he does, so the authoritative grounds practices of authority and gives the community its norms for evaluating all particular acts of authority. In answering the first question, the method used is by and large phenomenological.
The response to the second question about authority requires an historical inquiry for reasons which will become clear at the end of chapter two. This study takes exception to others who have attempted to derive the nature of Church authority either philosophically or theologically. No, authority in the Church has taken its present shape over two millennia—two Spirit-filled millennia without doubt, but two thousand years where authority has been shaped by choices which might have been otherwise. While the author does believe that predecessors' decisions can be coercive on present conduct, he also insists that these decisions were timely (i.e., not timeless) initiatives which determine the identity of the Church today through the force of tradition.
Chapter one explores a paradigm shift which has occurred in the Roman Catholic Church since the Second World War. Roughly, Church membership has shifted from an almost total preoccupation with official authority to a recognition of the necessary role charismatic authorities play in the Church. The chapter concludes that both types of authority are needed for the healthy functioning of the Church though it is essential to realize that official and charismatic authorities justify their actions and themselves according to quite different and sometimes conflicting logics.
Chapter two criticizes other studies that delineate authority as a subjective reality (an attribute of persons) or an objective one (a property of a thing). It also critiques two modern myths about authority: first, that authority is opposed to sound reasoning; second, that it is inimical to freedom and/or spontaneity. The chapter goes on to assert that authority in the Church is not ideally concentrated in any one person nor is such authority exclusively or even primarily juridical. Church authorities are endowed with an authority which is best understood as sacramental (in the sense that Church itself is a sacrament, not in the sense of seven sacraments). The pope, for instance, is most pope when he celebrates Eucharist for and preaches to a local assembly on one of his numerous trips.
Authority, as we have said is a practice. The third chapter examines the grammar (cf. Wittgenstein) of practices which possess authority. They are human interactions in which the rule governing the way to proceed also functions to oblige one interactor in relation to another. To anticipate a bit (from a summary midway through that chapter): Authority, then, is a human, that is, socially shared and historically produced practice. In the practice, an obligation is laid on one party while another party is enabled to speak and/or act in the name of the community. Practices of authority are distinguished from other human practices in that the rules inherent in the practices are themselves the reasons for keeping the rules because these rules are stipulated in laws, embedded in custom, or constitute the bedrock whereby the community has its life. The transactions or communications between the parties who participate in a practice of authority both respect the agency of the parties and enhance their capacities for fuller living.
When authority is analyzed synchronically, it falls into two types: official or in authority; charismatic or an authority. When it is analyzed diachronically, it is found embedded in traditions which bear the past into the present, but also critically assess that heritage in light of the demands that the future makes on the community. Authority is grounded in the authoritative which provides norms for the legitimacy of all exercises of authority. Here it is crucial to acknowledge that trust in the traditionally given always precedes questions or doubts which arise about that tradition and generate different options in the future. Finally, the healthily authoritative community is one where dissent flourishes.
Chapter four looks at the first millennium of Christianity: New Testament understandings of authority; the ascendance of monoepiscopacy in the postapostolic era; the Church's universalist mission after Constantine's edict of toleration; the emergence of councils and synods as modes of government; claims for succession to Petrine primacy.
Chapter five begins with the turn towards centralization in Rome and a juridical understanding of ecclesial authority in the eleventh century. It also notes various challenges to these two tendencies and the Avignon Schism as well as Conciliarism which brought the conflicts to their culmination in the medieval ages. Much of the shape of authority in the Roman Catholic Church of 1994 had its origins in the Church's reactions to the Reformation. These reactions governed the development of a new branch of theology, ecclesiology, which insisted on the centrality of the papacy in understanding what Christ willed and on the visible character of his Church. With Vatican I the infallibility of the Church and of the Bishop of Rome were inextricably intertwined. At Vatican II the concentration of power in Rome and the juridical interpretation of all ecclesiastical power were gently corrected.
Chapter six, after pausing to ask whether the theory expounded in the first three chapters is consonant with the history of the development of Church authority, inquires what makes Church authority Christian and, then, Roman Catholic. It is Christian if it is under God, eschatological in character, and sacramental. Roman Catholicism accepts an episcopal college with the Bishop of Rome as its head which serves the body faithful and witnesses to the sense of lived faith in the whole Church. This chapter concludes with a number of observations on the religious freedom of the baptized, especially their right to speak freely in the Church.