ROME — A number of bishops have begun pushing back against an effort to endow local Church bodies with authority over doctrine, warning that this would lead to a splintering of the Church’s teaching.
Under the banner of “decentralization,” a coordinated contingent within the current Vatican “Synod on Synodality” has been attempting to give local bishops’ conferences the power to decide on doctrinal issues within their precincts.
Critics have noted that such a move toward federalization would open the door to absurd situations where Catholic moral teaching would vary from place to place, and the same action — say gay sex — would be considered sinful in one territory and perfectly okay in another.
The Synod’s working document, drafted by a committee prior to the Vatican meeting, proposed recognizing episcopal conferences “as ecclesial subjects endowed with doctrinal authority, assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church.”
Synod participants have spoken on condition of anonymity, given the strict confidentiality rules of the assembly, but one declared that pushback against the proposal has been “tremendous.”
“A majority is clearly opposed. Overwhelmingly,” the delegate stated.
According to German Catholic media, another Synod member publicly stated that a fragmented faith “means a fragmented Church!”
The former chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, said last week that allowing different bishops’ conferences to teach varying doctrines “would be disastrous.”
“Fragmentation in matters of faith and morals would be really against the will of our Lord and really hurt our mission, especially our mission of evangelization in a divided world,” Bishop Rhoades said. “We should be a sign of unity in a divided world.”
According to official Vatican teaching on the matter, the Church’s doctrine is universal and should not differ from place to place.
“Since the doctrine of the faith is a common good of the whole Church and a bond of her communion, the Bishops, assembled in Episcopal Conference, must take special care to follow the magisterium of the universal Church and to communicate it opportunely to the people entrusted to them,” reads a 1998 Vatican text titled Apostolos Suos, which was written specifically to address this matter.
A German prelate, Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau, has also warned that some in the German Church are looking to “regionalize” doctrine, especially in regard to gender issues and sexual morality.
While there can be regional differences in pastoral approach, the same is not true regarding Church teaching, he said.
Similarly, Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney observed that the Church “cannot teach a different Catholicism in different countries.”
“Could we, for instance, envision a Church where you have ordination of women in some countries but not in other countries, or you have same-sex marriages in some countries but not in other countries, or you have an Arian Christology in some countries and a Nicene Christology in others?” the archbishop asked.
