RITE & REASON: If a pope is infallible in telling us what to believe, he has absolute power over us.
MARY
McALEESE (Weekend Review, October 13th) complained about the crippling
of collegiality in our church. “Vatican II,” she wrote, “failed to
articulate clear guidelines for the future development of conciliar
collegiality or church governance at any level;” leaving us with
incoherence in “official accounts of our church’s governance and its
juridic infrastructure”.
But I would like to propose that the
definition of papal infallibility by Vatican I results in a coherent
account of church governance, its power and distribution; but with
consequences no less dire for any prospect of true collegiality. The
relationship between infallibility and absolute power is easily stated:
if a pope is infallible in telling us what to believe about our world
and our prospects within it, together with how we are to behave
ourselves in all matters, he has absolute power over us.
Our
God-given moral sense is neutered, and no collegiality is possible such
as would release into the human community that congruence of moral
insight that derives naturally from the moral status and dignity of
everyman.
The relationship was illustrated most dramatically in
the Middle Ages when the first party in the church to argue for papal
infallibility did so on the grounds that it would make the pope’s power
absolute; and the motion was defeated by the party that believed the
fellow had too much power already, and the last thing the church needed
was to give him more.
Therefore what passes for alleged
collegiality in the College of Bishops – the representative Synod of
Bishops and the College of Cardinals – is no such thing, for “the Roman
pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the church, and he
can always exercise that power freely;” whereas it is “together with its
head, and never without this head, that the order of bishops is the
subject of supreme and full power.”
As for the poor plain people
of God, while chapter two of Vatican II’s deliverance “On the Church”
paints this idyllic picture of the people of God all together and equal
before God, irrespective of differences between “the common priesthood
of the laity” and the hierarchical priesthood; chapter three gets down
to the nitty-gritty of church governance, and papal infallibility is
rolled out again to insist that papal teaching on beliefs and morals
needs “no approval of others,” and allows of “no appeal”.
Therein
lies as clear an account of governance structures and juridic
infrastructure as one could ask for; and collegiality is the consistent
loser in all of it.
Jesus of Nazareth, on his own recognisance,
was a prophet in Israel; in fact, the prophet Moses promised for the age
of fulfilment. As such he was sentenced to death because the Temple
authorities took his perfecting of the Law of Moses to be nothing more
than its fracturing.
The only constitutional body he ever founded
was a prophetic community whose members were known, as with other great
prophets of old, as “sons of the prophet” who could carry his mission
and message to places and times he would not reach.
The only
leadership corps Jesus ever instituted was that of The Twelve,
emblematic of the religious renewal of all 12 tribes of Israel. He did
appoint Peter leader of The Twelve, but demoted him as soon as he sensed
that Peter was more interested in following a successful pretender to a
throne than a prophet doomed to die.
The figure of Peter in
history did not take on the lineaments he loved, of kingly, nay imperial
rulers of the church until the Emperor Constantine extended to
Christianity his edict of toleration of a number of religions in his
empire.
Then the bishops of Rome set about in earnest the task of
emulating that emperor-like primacy of the church in the Roman empire
that their predecessors had long felt to be the prerogative of a seat of
power situated in the capital city of that great empire.
It is
the details of the governance structures and juridic infrastructure of
this ancient Roman empire that still live on in our church’s
constitutional law to this day; not anything that Jesus could ever have
contemplated.
James P Mackey is visiting
professor at the school of religions and theology at TCD, and Thomas
Chalmers professor emeritus of theology at the University of Edinburgh