This essay by Professor Daniel E. Burns on the problems and possibilities of electing bishops in the Catholic Church is part of a conversation with Professor Massimo Faggioli, whose essay can be read here.
I am grateful to Professor Massimo Faggioli for his generous response to my article in The New York Times proposing that our local clergy elect our bishops. I hope many others will join the conversation we are starting. If the structures of governance within our church are ever to be reformed—and the case of the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick strongly suggests that they need to be—then we will need a great many minds to work together in helping the church think this through.
In my article I said that my proposed reform should transcend the tired liberal-conservative divisions within our church. I am delighted to see that at least our discussion does transcend those divisions. By focusing on a practical question of governance reform, Mr. Faggioli and I have found a great deal of common ground—more than he and I might have had in a debate over narrowly theological questions.
Here are the chief points, as stated by Mr. Faggioli, on which we are in perfect agreement:
“The narrative that the pope has always had exclusive right to appoint bishops has…become part of a certain papalist and ultramontanist ideology.”
“The process for the appointment of bishops should be updated.”
“We have to make sure that the local church has a role in both the selection and reception of the bishop.”
“The church’s institutional culture is still largely shaped too much by anti-democratic and monarchic, clericalist culture.”
“The church has a specificity that cannot be assimilated to political institutions.”
I am tempted just to stop here, as I am much more attached to these propositions as a basis for future reform than I am to my specific proposal. If we could get educated Catholics in this country to agree on what Mr. Faggioli and I already agree on, we would have laid the foundation for some very important collective thinking that needs to go on in the coming months and years. But since I do also remain fond of my proposal for the election of bishops, let me address Mr. Faggioli’s main criticisms of it.
“We have to make sure that the local church has a role in both the selection and reception of the bishop.”
Mr. Faggioli warns that the charming stories of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine are not what we should expect from the messy and often acrimonious process of electing a bishop. The point is well taken. Augustine himself was deeply upset by the scandal of divisions in the Fussalan church over their arrogant and rapacious bishop Antoninus. But Augustine was much more upset at the sins of Antoninus that caused those divisions, and he never faulted the Fussalans for trying to expel Antoninus. Do we wish that they had patiently accepted this moral cadaver as their bishop?
Where bad men are in danger of being made bishops, we will have to choose either to accept them or to undertake the messy and acrimonious process of repelling them. That choice will always involve difficult tradeoffs between peace and justice. But right now, I would love to imagine any U.S. diocese showing one one-hundredth the level of interest in the choice of its bishop that the Fussalans showed for theirs. Overly rambunctious concern for ecclesial affairs is simply not a vice that the average American Catholic is prone to.
Long-distance historical analogies are helpful but inevitably weak. In Augustine’s Africa, a diocese was barely larger than our largest parishes. A better comparison would be to the 21st-century German-speaking dioceses in Europe that Mr. Faggioli refers to. Is their clergy’s election of bishops really so messy or acrimonious as to frighten us away from their example?
Where bad men are in danger of being made bishops, we will have to choose either to accept them or to undertake the messy and acrimonious process of repelling them.
Second, Mr. Faggioli warns that the move toward a Roman monopoly on bishop selection was historically “necessary for the freedom of the church in a growingly hostile political environment.” I hope that Mr. Faggioli will repeat this warning to defenders of the Vatican’s recent and still-secret agreement with China. If our only options were selection of bishops by the Roman Curia or nomination by the Chinese Communist Party, I would gladly concede the point and resign myself to the Curia’s vices. But our American priests and deacons are not the C.C.P. Is Mr. Faggioli worried that they may be unduly influenced by their hostile secular environment? I share the worry, but we have to ask what our alternatives are. In any fight with the powers of this world, I trust the current and upcoming generation of American clergy to last much longer than all the Curial officials who dipped their hands into the stream of money that former Cardinal McCarrick allegedly channeled through Rome.
Bishops would have an easier time acting like chief pastors if they could tighten their bonds with our shepherds on the ground.
Finally, Mr. Faggioli warns that it would be strange to adopt democracy in the church when our secular democratic institutions seem to be faring so poorly. Yet he also rightly insists that church governance will never be perfectly analogous to political governance. I advocate elections by the clergy, not the laity, and I trust that our clergy will manage to avoid forming Super PACs. Nonetheless, I believe we agree that the church can learn from secular institutions with similar governance structures. The church might, for example, benefit from a more independent judiciary, as Joseph Ratzinger suggested emphatically in both 1970 and 2000. The church would also benefit if bishops felt more like local leaders and less like regional managers in a Rome-based nonprofit. One way to move in that direction would be to have the clergy elect their bishops.
I close by summarizing the main points from my article that Mr. Faggioli has not touched on. Our trust in our bishops has been shaken; our trust in our clergy, on the whole, remains intact. The Curia’s role in (and reaction to!) the McCarrick scandal has shown that Rome cannot adequately address the problem of sexual abuse in our church. Rome’s habit of shuffling bishops from diocese to diocese has contributed significantly to the crisis we are dealing with today. Bishops would have an easier time acting like chief pastors if they could tighten their bonds with our shepherds on the ground.
If my proposal stimulates Mr. Faggioli or others to come up with reforms that do a better job of addressing these and related problems in our church, it will have more than served its purpose.
[To read the essay by Professor Massimo Faggioli to which Professor Daniel E. Burns is responding, click here.]
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