How the Bishops are implementing Pope Francis’ teaching

Sep 16, 2016

By Massimo Faggioli
The summer of 2016 has not been a quiet time for Pope Francis. But apparently it has not been a quiet time for some of his brother bishops either. Some ordinaries of dioceses all over the world have given lectures and announced decisions that must be considered with attention not only for what they said, but also for the ecclesial environment in which they were received.

First, Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane (Australia) announced his intention to celebrate a national synod for Australia in the year 2020. In an interview published in the Catholic Leader the archbishop, who was an active (and tweeting) member of the last assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, talked about the inspiration received by the most important ecclesial event of the last fifty years.

“It was in listening to the Pope’s speech on synodality in the Church, on the morning of 17 October that I began to realise, in a clear and powerful way, that the time had arrived for Australia,” he said.

“I hope that the agenda of our Synod will be the result of genuine consultation within the Church, to be held between now and 2020. Anyone who wants to can have a say, as it was for the Synod in Rome,” Archbishop Coleridge emphasised.

Then another Australian prelate, Bishop Vincent Long of Parramatta, took a strong public stance in favour of Francis’ intention to re-position the Church in the modern world.

“If one can detect the direction of Pope Francis’ pontificate, it has something to do with the movement from security to boldness, from inward looking to outward looking, from preoccupation with our status quo, safeguarding our privileges to learning to be vulnerable, learning to convey God’s compassion to those who are on the edges of society and Church,” he said during a lecture on August 18.

Bishop Long, who is a Conventual Franciscan and former Vietnamese boatperson, emphasised the connection between the current Pope and Vatican II. He also listed a series of priorities for a more inclusive Church and talked about a new kairos in the Church.

Finally, Canadian Archbishop Donald Bolen of Regina (Saskatchewan), in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter at the end of August, outlined a vision of a Church “that’s in dialogue with the broader culture, respectful towards culture, with a message to proclaim, but deeply listening as well.”

We do not know yet what these speeches and interviews indicate about the posture of the global episcopate vis-à-vis Pope Francis (which, I believe, is one of the crucial issues for the success or failure of this pontificate and of Catholicism in this century). But this is not the point. It is more interesting to note that those opposed to Francis have interpreted the support these bishops have expressed for the Jesuit pope as a cynical, purely political realignment of prelates who are trying to gain visibility on Francis’ radar and earn a chance at getting a red hat the next time he makes new cardinals.

This is not entirely different from the cynicism of those who see the anti-Francis coalition as focused solely on keeping their privileges, while missing the fact that there is actually a deep theological and cultural rift around ecclesiology and, in particular, about the role of Vatican II in the practical ecclesiology of Catholicism today.

This cynicism is not just evidence of the rift in the Church concerning the agenda of this pontificate. It is a symptom of something deeper and more serious. The real problem is that, judging from the most vocal member of its hierarchy, members of the Church apparently no longer know how to be obedient and how to be in dissent.

Truth be told, the so-called liberals have long had a problem with obedience. But now that Pope Francis has opened up new spaces they have to learn how to be critically obedient without giving in to the neo-ultramontanist silencing of those who are disobedient.

The so-called conservatives, on the other hand, have long had a problem with dissenters.

Now they have to learn how to be faithful in dissent without declaring or hinting that the problem is a pope that does not know Catholic theology. But there is a big difference between these two aisles of Western Catholicism. In the years between 1978 and 2005 liberals never thought or insinuated that John Paul II or Benedict XVI were not Catholics or, worse, that they were heretics.

The lost art of critical obedience and faithful dissent may be part of the transition from a mass Catholicism, where everybody is supposedly Catholic and therefore can deal more easily with diversity, to a “minoritarian” Catholicism where internal diversity is more challenging for the sociological cohesion of the Church. In other terms, polarization and the inability to deal with dissent is a consequence of Christianity’s loss of hegemony on Western civilization.

The fact is, though, that Catholicism is the antithesis of sectarianism. Max Weber offered a very convincing argument for this at a great conference held in 1910 in Frankfurt (incidentally the city from where I am currently writing).

A deeply changed sociological position within secularized society should not be enough to radically change the way the Church deals with differences of opinion that are within the domain of what is open to debate and change. The real root of this mutation is not in the transition from majority to minority, but in the “ideologization” of Catholicism where the culture of debate and dissent is repressed. This is due to the fact that the Church is not immune to the multifaceted tribalism of today; it has become overly concerned with culture (more cultural, less spiritual and theological); and it has a problem with freedom.

The deeply underlying issue is ecclesiological, and it is no coincidence that there are differences within Catholicism. The ruthless use of power by some bishops in the English-speaking world in shutting down ecclesial initiatives or silencing individual theologians or priests or nuns is mostly unknown in many other parts of the world. That is especially true in the smaller and younger churches of Asia, for example, where Catholicism never was the sociological, political or cultural majority.

I am not completely sure it is a good idea for Pope Francis to keep in the Roman Curia cardinals that not only contradict or ignore him, but also misrepresent and sometimes lie about what he is doing. On the other hand, maybe this is just one of the ways the Jesuit pope is trying to teach us how to deal — and not to deal — with dissent in the Church.--Global Pulse