Cardinal Brandmüller Warns Against Synod Proposal To Give Local Bishops Undue ‘Doctrinal Authority’

It was exactly this kind of 'synodality' that led to the destruction of the Anglican "Communion", giving local synods the power to decide doctrinal matters.

From LifeSiteNews

By Michael Haynes

The undue rise of bishops conferences 'is both an expression and a cause of a creeping process of secularization of the Church in our day,' wrote Cardinal Brandmüller.

Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has critiqued a Synod on Synodality proposal for bishops’ conferences to hold more authority and autonomy, saying that their further empowerment is “an expression and a cause of a creeping process of secularization of the Church in our day.”

If the Catholic Church’s “authentic form of collegial episcopal action could be revived,” then it would be “an important step toward the goal of the desecularization and therefore of a spiritual revival of the Church, especially in Europe.”

So writes Cardinal Brandmüller in an essay recently published by veteran Vaticanist Sandro Magister. The remarks of the German cardinal, a longtime professor of Church history, should be seen in the context of key debates in the Synod on Synodality regarding the power and role of the episcopal conferences in the “Synodal” style of the Church.

Natural origin of local authority

Brandmüller’s text deals with the “authentic and original organ of collegiality,” which the cardinal posits as “the provincial council.”

A provincial council, writes Brandmüller, “was the assembly of the bishops of a given ecclesiastical province, for the purpose of the common exercise of the teaching and pastoral ministry.”

Brandmüller holds that the formation of an “ecclesiastical province” was due to the natural process of “evangelization” by which new dioceses were formed from one original, and new bishops “were ordained by the bishop of the mother church.”

“So this is not the fruit of a merely bureaucratic-administrative act, but rather of an organic sacramental-hierarchical process,” he remarks.

Brandmüller describes this as “tradition in action.” The “provincial synod” is where the Church’s tradition and teaching are “fleshed out,” he adds:

And it is precisely in this that its teaching and pastoral authority [are] rooted, as well as the binding character of synodal legislation.

National conferences risk Church’s unity

The cardinal’s theological assessment appeared in the wake of  a controversial proposal by the Synod on Synodality during its third week of meetings.

The proposal, drawn from the working document or Instrumentum Laboris (IL), argues that the desire of Vatican II for local churches to foster the “collegial spirit” has “not been fully realized.”

To this end, the Synod expressed a call for “recognition of Episcopal Conferences as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favoring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts.”

But Brandmüller warns against awarding undue authority to bishops’ conferences – bodies which are different from local provincial synods. “The episcopal conference differs in a fundamental way from all this,” he says. “It is rather the assembly of bishops whose dioceses – in general – are located in the territory of a secular state, of a nation.”

“The organizational principle of the episcopal conference, therefore, is not of an ecclesiological but rather of a political nature,” Brandmüller adds.

The cardinal writes that an episcopal conference was originally, and should still be, aimed at “debating and deciding on questions concerning the life of the Church precisely in this political frame of reference.”

But he warns that such national episcopal conferences risk limiting the authority of local bishops, and even of the entire Church:

In fact, the creation of a national body forces the loosening, if not the dissolution, of the “communio” of the universal Church, which then finds expression in special national regulations. This is experienced in the most evident manner in the liturgy; one need only think of the introduction of the national languages. […]

Brandmüller cites Amoris laetitia’s admission of the divorced and “re-married” to Holy Communion as evidence for this, given that it was implemented in some areas (Malta and Argentina) and not in others:

In the same way, as has happened recently, a grave attack on the unity of faith within the Church is constituted by the contradictory interpretations that various episcopal conferences have given to the apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis “Amoris laetitia” of March 19, 2016. […]

Call for limitation of episcopal conferences

Faced with such issues today, Brandmüller recommends that the contextual origin of national bishops conferences be examined, in order for proper understanding and limits to be placed on their operations.

This should involve limiting the conferences “to those questions which concern the ‘ad extra’ relations of the Church.”

In contrast, the “provincial synod” is concerned with the internal life of the Church, writes Brandmüller. Its process, he says, is the exercise of the local bishops under the “presidency of the metropolitan” since “their joint teaching and leadership authority flows directly from their episcopal ordination. It therefore rests on sacramental foundations.”

Brandmüller directly links the growth of national episcopal conferences to the decline of the “provincial synod,” saying:

This synod or provincial council is, in fact, already in itself a liturgy, being a sacred form of the exercise of the teaching and pastoral ministry founded on the ordination of the assembled bishops. But evidently in our day the awareness of this has largely died out, so that for quite some time the synod, the provincial council, has largely given way to the episcopal conference. This fact is both an expression and a cause of a creeping process of secularization of the Church in our day.

His warning, clearly aimed at the current working of the Synod on Synodality without mentioning it directly, precedes the Synod members’ vote on the decisive document which will finalize proceedings later this week.

Expected to be released on Saturday, the document will be based on the deliberations of the past four weeks, themselves the results of the previous three years of the Synod.

Full coverage of the Synod on Synodality can be found at this link here on LifeSiteNews, and on the X account of LifeSite’s Vatican correspondent.

Pictured: His Eminence Walter, Cardinal Brandmüller, President Emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences