I am painfully aware that it should be Fr. Joe Komonchak rather than me mounting a defense of episcopal conferences. But I came across the following translation of a Vittorio Messori article on Amy Welborn's blog about his interview with the incoming Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Bertone had made the statement that "(There is need) to turn back from the specificity of local churches to the universality of the Catholic church."

Worrying that this will be misunderstood, Messori tries to "elaborate" for Bertone by recalling conversations he had with then-Cardinal Ratzinger some years previously:

The future Benedict XVI told me that amongthe unforeseen and contradictory effects of Vatican-II was thediminution in the importance of bishops, which on the contrary, theCouncil wished to re-emphasize. In fact, however, the autonomy and thefreedom itself of a bishop over his own diocese were caged in andcoopted by the establishment of national bishops' conferences.

Theseconferences, Ratzinger pointed out, have no theological basis; they arenot part of the Church structure as are parishes, dioceses and thepapacy. They are simply institutions, of recent origin, which werecreated for practical reasons but which have gradually created aweighty structure of their own, becoming in effect "little Vaticans."

I think there are some problems here. First of all, I am hard pressed to identify a real live example of a bishop beingprevented from exercising his responsibilities to "teach, sanctify, andgovern" because of a national bishop's conference. The recent sexual abusecrisis made clear how little power, for example, the USCCB has over individual bishops. Ifindividual bishops feel hemmed in by their conferences, that is their ownperception, but it does not correspond to any canonical realities that I amaware of.

Secondly, this quote from then-Crdl. Ratzinger that the bishops' conferenceshave "no theological basis" is badly misunderstood in the paragraphexcerpted above. By "no theological basis," the Cardinal meant thatnational bishops' conferences do not exist iure divino, as does theoffice of bishop. By this measure, parishes and many other elements of the church's structure (e.g. the College of Cardinals) don't qualify either. But there isno question that episcopal conferences were explicitly mentioned in VaticanII's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church and the Decree on the Pastoral Officeof Bishops in the Church (Para 38). They are also mentioned in the Code of CanonLaw. They may not have a "theological basis" if one uses an extremely narrow reading of that term, but they certainly have a doctrinal and canonical basis.

Episcopal conferences became a point of controversy in the wake of the 1985Extraordinary Synod. In the final report, the bishops had suggested a study ofthe theological status of the conferences. An instrumentum laborisissued by the Congregation for Bishops in 1988 took a highly restrictive viewof the role of the episcopal conferences, arguing that they cannot be properlyconsidered collegial in character and do not therefore have a magisterial role.The instrumentum drew a distinction between the effective collegialityexercised by the college as a whole and the affective collegiality exercisedby the conferences, which are said to be collegial only in an analogous sense.

This position was criticized by a number of theologians, including AveryDulles, who noted in a 1989 article entitled "Doctrinal Authority ofEpiscopal Conferences" that CIC Canon 753 clearly implies that under somecircumstances, bishops gathered together in conference are authoritativeteachers and masters of the faith. He conceded, though, that an episcopalconference would not be able to define doctrine in a way that engages theassent of faith (although its teaching could require religious submission ofmind). At the same time, Dulles noted thatin the United States at leastthe USCCBhas never used its authority to define doctrine.

I'll also note in passing that our own Joe Komonchak wrote a fine article entitled "The Roman Working Paper on Episcopal Conferences" in 1989 that criticized the "all or nothing" approach to collegiality expressed in the instrumentum laboris, but rather than speak for him, I'll let him add further comment if he desires. For myself, I'll say that I tend to assume peoples' good faith and I would not say that the episcopal conferences are beyond criticism. But in thiscase, it is very hard for me to believe that criticism of bishops conferencesis not at least partially motivated by a desire to remove a stumbling block toRoman centralism.