MARY McAleese has written a powerful study which expertly unravels
one of the central and most contentious issues in the Catholic Church
today - who governs the Church. How power and decision making are shared is the issue at the heart of most fractious disputes in the Church worldwide and is in danger of overshadowing the Church's mission.
The former President of Ireland brings her expert legal mind to unpack the meaning and practice of collegiality in the Code of Canon Law.
The title of the book is Quo Vadis? That should be warning enough.This is not light reading and is of necessity an academic treatment.
The title Quo Vadis is a Latin phrase taken from St John's Gospel 13:36.
In a conversation between St Peter and the Lord, the question is asked: "Lord where are you going?" Quo Vadis? In common parlance it has come to mean: "where do we go from here?"
Collegiality in the Catholic Church is much more difficult, if not impossible, to define.
The whole point of this book is that there is no agreed definition of collegiality and in some cases, no agreement about how precisely it should work.
Failure
The book reaches astonishing conclusions about how our church is governed.Mary McAleese categorically states: "The structures of Church governance were not in fact markedly updated in the twentieth century, leaving the church one among very few global institutions not to have been updated from within or without."
This failure to implement collegiality is at the heart of the crisis in the Catholic Church today.
"There is no forum in the Church for determining the views of the People of God on the subject of governance and collegiality or virtually anything else for that matter..." (page 155).
The leadership is often surprised at the views held by the ordinary believers. In a truly collegial church such differences would be impossible. "...the church lacks an obvious idea of where it is going in terms of collegial governance."
The problem is starkly outlined when she writes: "The church is, in effect, arguably constitutionally incoherent. It has a governing Head, the nature of whose authority, though divinely instituted, is opaque; that authority is linked to the College of the Apostles and to Peter, but precisely how is not clear."
"The College of Bishops has full and supreme power over the universal church but how that power relates to papal power remains undifferentiated and untested except in conciliar format. The Pope, the Synod of Bishops and the College of Cardinals are all said to 'represent' the College of Bishops but in fact only the Pope does so canonically. No-one knows for sure when he acts in the name of the college and when he acts personally. The Curia, which looks like a Civil Service, acts like a government but on what authority? It has no juridic relationship whatsoever to the College of Bishops." (p156)
Non-collegial governance has caused great hurt and deep divisions in the Catholic Church world-wide. "Church teaching on clerical celibacy, ordination of women, gay marriage, admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to the sacraments, is not necessarily an expression of the views of Catholics generally. Church teaching on birth control is so widely ignored that some canonical commentators question whether it can be said to have been validated by the faithful" (p157).
Where do we go from here? This challenging work, "written by one of God's faithful" does not provide a road map but it gives us a clear starting point on the road to renewal.
(Quo Vadis? by Mary McAleese, Columba Press)