This article may appear to be behind a paywall. However when I clicked a "no" to their invitation to be on their e-mail list, I was still given access to the whole article.
What is most interesting about this article is that making substantial changes to the way of electing the Pope has been considered at the highest levels ever since Vatican II.
Synodality and electing the Bishop of Rome
Robert Mickens
"Over new plan to elect pope, 3 cardinals threaten to quit ."That headline appeared in the October 6, 1972 issue of the National Catholic Reporter." If insiders' reports are accurate, Pope Paul is faced with a threatened palace revolt over proposed changes in the procedures used to elect a pope," wrote Desmond O'Grady, the now-deceased Australian who was NCR's very first Rome correspondent.
The new plan evidently was to allow the presidents of national episcopal conferences to be part of the electoral body and to restrict the vote of the cardinals to only those who are in charge of Vatican offices or local dioceses at the time of the "sede vacante" (i.e. at the death or resignation of the pope).
The proposal had been around for some time. One of its most vocal advocates was Cardinal Michele Pellegrino of Turin in Northern Italy. Almost immediately after Paul VI named him bishop in September 1965, just a month before the start of fourth and final session of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Pellegrino began clamoring for changes to the conclave's membership. His views found substantial support among a good number of Council Fathers, but also stiff opposition from several heavyweights who were fixtures of the Roman Curia's old guard. The opponents claimed any change in the papal electoral system could undermine the Bishop of Rome's standing as the Vicar of Christ and would reduce the pope to a sort of president of the combined local Churches.
But those who supported Cardinal Pellegrino's proposal -- and they exist even to this day -- believed that a conclave restricted to cardinals, which the Roman Pontiff chooses independently and at his own discretion, was not in line with the principle of episcopal collegiality in the spirit of Vatican II.One of the most outspoken on this point was Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens of Malines-Brussels (Belgium).
In a long and carefully worded interview published in May 1969 in the French periodical Informations Catholiques Internationales, he argued -- as he did in a book written several months earlier -- for practical changes that would better foster co-responsibility at all levels of the Church.
The problem is not just geographics. As the late Primate of Belgium pointed out in his 1969 interview, the College of Cardinals does not offer a "faithful image of (the Church's) diversity" .And the way its members are selected (arbitrarily and by the pope alone) does nothing to substantially change that. In fact, Suenens argued that it smacked of absolute monarchy and risked conveying who is in favor with the pope and who is not .He also believed that lay people had to have some sort of role in helping select those in higher office, including the Roman Pontiff.
But Pope Paul, who was a close friend of Suenens', moved carefully on the issue. During a consistory to name new cardinals in early March 1973 he announced that he was looking into a different proposal to allow Eastern Church Patriarchs and the fifteen members of the Synod of Bishops' permanent council to participate in the conclave. A few weeks later he repeated this to officials in the Synod's secretariat. But, in the end, he did nothing. That did not end the debate, however.
John R. Quinn, the late-archbishop of San Francisco, offered a number of "possibilities" for changing the way the Roman Pontiff is elected in his 1999 book The Reform of the Papacy: the Costly Call to Christian Unity. .And while "confining the election to 120 cardinals at the most creates a manageable electoral body", he argued that this college "does not relate directly or structurally to the episcopal conferences". Quinn insisted that "at least some of the presidents of conferences" merited a vote in the conclave. He also suggested representatives from religious orders and the laity "could be invited to express their view on the more important qualities they would like to see in the next pope" .The late archbishop admitted that it would be tricky to decide exactly who might be invited to do this, but said, "Whatever the problems involved, careful consideration should be given to how lay persons could be included."
All this sounds very much in sync with the synodal process that Pope Francis has been trying to make a constituent part of the Roman Catholic Church's communal life and decision-making process .He has brought synodality -- which includes the participation, in various ways, of all the People of God, ordained, lay and vowed religious -- to bear on almost all areas of the Church, including the Roman Curia. But he has done little to extend this to the selection and appointment of bishops and nothing to make it part of the election of the Roman Pontiff. Francis has made scant use of the College of Cardinals as a consultative body .But he is summoning all its members (both cardinal-electors and the men over 80 who have lost their vote in the conclave) to two days of meetings at end of August, only the third time he's held such a red-hatted summit in over nine years.
Changing the election process now to include presidents of bishops conferences would likely produce electors who are less progressive than those chosen by Francis, e.g. people like Gomes.
ReplyDeleteChanging the election process to include heads of religious orders, and laity would likely result in more progressive electors.
The pope choose the cardinals, and then the cardinals choose the next pope.
ReplyDeleteIf the heads of episcopal conferences were added in as electors, then we could observe that the pope also chooses the bishops, who in turn choose the head of the episcopal conference. So maybe there is an additional degree of separation there, but I'm not sure what it amounts to.
I've read somewhere that Francis was elected because his supporters were united and organized, and his rivals (if one may use that term) were neither.
ReplyDeleteIf Francis could run again to succeed Francis, there is little doubt that Francis would be chosen again. But it won't be Francis, it will have to be someone else. Is there a consensus candidate behind whom a majority can line up? Or will factions emerge in the "Francis coalition"? And what about the Francis opposition - do they have their own consensus candidate, or are they divided among themselves?
Vatican I created problems because it gave an outsized role to the Pope without defining the role of the bishops. Vatican II tried to correct that problem by emphasizing the role of the bishops which it talked about in terms of collegiality, a college of bishops organized around the Pope, and a college of presbyters organized around the bishop in each diocese. However we have been left with how collegiality of bishops with the Pope, and with each other, and with their clergy should work out.
ReplyDeleteVatican II also emphasized the importance of laity, i.e., the universal call of the baptized to holiness without relating how that relates to the calls to ordained ministry and religious life.
Historically councils and synods in the church have been much more than meetings of bishops. Up until recently they involved laity in terms of civil authorities, bishops and monks, and sometimes theologians. While the theologians played an important role in Vatican II, it was off stage rather than center stage as at the Council of Trent. Religious superiors had only a minor role, laity were reduced to observers.
The sociological reality of Catholicism is that most of continuing church reform has come from religious orders rather than from bishops and diocesan clergy. In the early church monks and religious women kept the Church from completely succumbing to civil authority. In the Middle Ages, abbeys led both the economic and religious revitalization of Europe. In the Renaissance the medicant orders led civic revitalization. And in the era of European colonization the missionary orders led.
The continuing reform of Catholicism by religious orders has work not only through their own institutions but also through their contributions to spirituality. They have provided models for the laity to use in their own spiritual lives.
What do you see in the future? Based on the trends, according to the data, religious orders are also dying, both men’s orders and women’s orders, who attract even fewer new aspirants than the men do. The hype about the resurgence of traditional women’s orders ( living in convents, wearing habits etc) is just that - hype. A careful look at the numbers shows that those orders are struggling as much as the “ liberal” orders and won’t begin to fill the gaps left by the increasing numbers of deaths. Will they continue their work by partnering with laity and having them do the majority of the work of the order going forward - along the lines of the Third Orders?
ReplyDeleteJack, great comments re: religious orders. The orders also were the fountainhead of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement which the Council mainstreamed with liturgical reform.
ReplyDeleteOur church is relatively impoverished nowadays when it comes to religious orders. A number of orders ran parishes in Chicago some 60 or 70 years ago; now, relatively few do. Most of the Catholic high schools in the archdiocese were run by religious orders as well. Many of those have closed, too. At least in the US, I think the dioceses have become more "diocesan" and less, uh, religious-order-y.
ReplyDelete