The upcoming second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024 represents the culmination of a 150-year evolution in nature and practice of the teaching authority within the Catholic Church. The First Vatican council in 1870 not only defined in very restricted circumstances the infallibility of the Pope but also determined that his teaching authority extended not only to his own diocese of Rome but also to every diocese in the Catholic Church. He had, in ecclesiastical terms, ‘universal and immediate jurisdiction’.
The Second Vatican Council (1963 -65) complemented this version of papal authority with its teaching on episcopal collegiality. In addition to the authority they enjoyed each in his own diocese, the bishops in college and with the Pope were also endowed with universal teaching authority. To facilitate this collegial authority the Second Vatican Council projected that the bishops would meet together regularly in synod to consider and advise the Pope on issues of particular importance to the Church’s development. So, recently, we had a Synod on Young People (2018), a Synod on the Amazon (2019), and, currently, a Synod on Synodality (2023-24).
And now we have a further refinement. While not diluting papal or episcopal authority, the Pope and bishops in synod have been joined in consultation by members of the laity. What is ostensibly a more democratic process has been instituted. The image of cardinals, bishops, clergy and laity seated not in serried ranks but indiscriminately at round tables signifies this development. Disputed questions are distributed to ten expert committees to advise the synod before the Pope and the relevant Vatican Dicasteries pronounce judgment. The ‘Instrumentum Laboris’, the document which sets the agenda for the second session of the Synod on Synodality, however, has gone out of its way to stipulate that decision-making still resides uniquely in the hands of the Pope and bishops. But at least there is input from clergy and laity in the consultative stages of the process.
In the generations between each of these refinements we have seen paradigmatic examples of the different ways in which teaching authority may be exercised in the Church. Between the First and Second Vatican Councils, for instance, Pope Pius X exercised his papal authority to the full in pursuing recalcitrant biblical scholars and Modernist theologians. There were penalties of excommunication prescribed for those who refused to conform firstly in the decree of the Holy Office, ‘Lamentabili’ (3 July, 1907) and then in his encyclical ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’ (8 September, 1907). Nor was Pope Pius XI in his encyclical, ‘Casti Connubii’: (31 December, 1930), any less authoritative in rejecting any relaxation in the Church’s teaching on marriage to accommodate artificial modes of contraception. And his successor, Pope Pius XII, in a series of magisterial encyclicals in the 1940s and 1950s did not hesitate to use his teaching authority to elucidate theological issues as diverse as biblical scholarship (‘Divino Afflante Spiritu’ : 30 September, 1943) and devotion to the Sacred Heart (‘Haurietis Aquas’: 15 May, 1956). It was the high watermark of authoritative papal teaching. Only Pope John Paul II in the 1990s, addressing moral relativism (‘Evangelium Vitae’: 25 March, 1995, and ‘Veritatis Splendor’: 6 August, 1993) and women’s ordination (‘Ordinatio Sacerdotalis’: 22 May, 1994) could be construed as aspiring to an outspoken teaching authority similar to that of his predecessors.
Contrasting with these more ‘autocratic’ interventions are those papal statements that explicitly invoked episcopal and wider consultation prior to their promulgation. The only infallible statement since the First Vatican Council, the definition of Pius XII of the Assumption (‘Munificentissimus Deus’, November, 1950) was preceded by a worldwide consultation with the Pope’s episcopal colleagues. And perhaps the most contentious encyclical of the century, ‘Humanae Vitae’ (25 July, 1968), on artificial contraception was issued only after Pope Paul VI had publicly sought the expert advice of sixty lay and clerical moral theologians. They provided a majority and a minority report. The majority (56 members) recommended some relaxation from the strictures of ‘Casti Connubii’ to accommodate some difficult circumstances; the minority (4 members) opposed any relaxation. The Pope sided with the minority, but at least there was evidence of a consultative process prior to the definitive papal teaching.
It is no secret, of course, that even in those instances of the Pope’s exercise of his own specific teaching authority, he may privately have consulted widely. Even a draft may have been written by a favoured theological expert. But the teaching authority derived from the papal imprimatur and not from the strength of the reasoning and its alignment with Scripture and tradition. Even in the instances where more public consultation with bishops and experts was instituted, ultimately it was the papal authority that constituted the teaching as definitive Catholic doctrine.
Nevertheless, over the course of 150 years, the significance of the consultative phase has increased. The Church has moved from papal universal and immediate jurisdiction and teaching authority at the First Vatican Council to the recognition of the teaching authority of episcopal collegiality at the Second Vatican Council and now to engagement with the episcopacy, the clergy and the laity in the current synodal process. The process is to this degree at a remove from the traditional exclusively papal mode of exercising teaching authority, and probably this is why at both sessions of the current synod the Pope seems to have been more intent on entrenching the process rather than addressing individual neuralgic issues. There will be progress reports from the ten expert committees at the second session in October 2024, but their final reports will be postponed to June 2025, and will be submitted not to a third session of the Synod but to the relevant Vatican Dicasteries and Curial offices. It will be in this, rather than the synodal context, that the Pope will make any authoritative teaching intervention on the disputed questions.
So, consultation in the synodal process is limited to that – consultation – and teaching authority is reserved to the deliberative agents – the Pope and the bishops. As the Pope has insisted on a number of occasions, the Church is not a democratic institution, and the synod is not a parliament. Disputed questions are not resolved by recording votes. But, as the ‘Instrumentum Laboris’ has promised, transparency and accountability not only in the consultative, but also in the deliberative, stages are a sine qua non.
Bill Uren, SJ, AO, is a Scholar-in-residence at Newman College at the University of Melbourne. A former Provincial Superior of the Australian and New Zealand Jesuits, he has lectured in moral philosophy and bioethics in universities in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth and has served on the Australian Health Ethics Committee and many clinical and human research ethics committees in universities, hospitals and research centres.
Main image: The Second Vatican Council in session. (Wikimedia Commons)