| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| COLUMN |
BISHOPS: SERVANTS OF
CHRIST – and of YOU
by Gerard V. Bradley
Have you ever attended a Catholic college’s graduation, or a Confirmation, or Mass
at the cathedral church? If you are reading Catholic Dossier, chances are you have. Thus,
you will probably ace this surprise quiz: Which of the many dignitaries present (at
Confirmation or Mass or graduation) was the bishop? A tip: this question is much like the
recurring challenge Sesame Street poses to my four year old. Sesame (as it is called at
our house) puts four images on the screen, and asks, “Which of these is not like the
others?” (They also ask, for the record, “Which of these doesn’t
belong?” I leave that aside, for reasons soon to become obvious.) Because Sesame puts
up three pictures of people, and one of an aardvark, even well-buttered toddlers
intoxicated on Cheerios have no trouble getting it right.
Yes, the bishop is the man in red, resplendent (occasionally overdone) in regal dress. He
is addressed as if he is a master or lord: “Your Excellency” or, if the bishop
is a Cardinal, “Your Eminence.” Those around him tend to be obsequious; many
ordinary people (like me or you) hesitate to draw near. If you ask him about a matter of
substance and importance, chances are it will be taken “under advisement,” or
that matters are “being handled” or that one should simply “trust”
that the bishop is doing the right thing. One does not feel entitled to know whether the
bishop is even doing those things that a glance at Canon Law, for example, demonstrates he
is under a sacred obligation to do.
If the bishop is an Ordinary he is what the civil lawyers call a “corporation
sole.” That means that he owns all the Church’s property in the diocese.
Civilly, he pretty much is the Roman Catholic Church in that place. Canonically, he is
head of the “particular”church, the diocesan ecclesia. The individual bishops,
as Lumen Gentium [LG] states, “represent each his own church”; the bishops are
the “visible principle and foundation of unity in their particular churches.”
All the priests in the diocese engage in priestly ministry with the bishop’s consent,
even (practically speaking) as extensions of him.
It is easy, then, to see why believers in Jesus treat bishops so specially. As the Council
Fathers said in LG, “bishops by divine institution have succeeded to the place of the
apostles, as shepherds of the Church, and he who hears them hears Christ, and he who
rejects them, rejects Christ and Him who sent Christ.”
Easy to see. Imagine yourself running into Matthew or Thomas or Andrew. You would likely
fall to your knees and give homage. Much more so Peter, and the Lord Himself.
But is all the deference to bishops an unmixed blessing? I think not. I leave to those
properly trained to explore the psychological effects of being treated like royalty. But
it is easy to see how anyone, including a bishop, who is continually exalted by others,
who is almost always flattered and seen as being the main man, may eventually come to
regard his own will as a source of authority, and to treat strict duties as those things
which he can be made to do by someone else.
And bishops have duties. Lots of them. In truth, their prerogatives are subordinate to
their duties. They are the (so to speak) bosses precisely and entirely to allow them to
serve. To serve Christ, to be sure. But the way bishops serve Christ, the way Christ wants
them to serve Him, is by serving you. And me. And all the faithful. And everyone,
(principally) by proclaiming and preaching the Gospel.
This is the bishops’ principal duty, to which all other duties, responsibilities,
rights and privileges are subordinate: to proclaim the Good News, the Gospel of our Lord
and Savior. That part of LG which treats of bishops repeatedly testifies to the central
solemn duty of bishops to teach the truth. The greatest gift that they receive — the
Holy Spirit — is to empower them to “be witnesses to [Jesus] before the nations
and peoples and kings even to the ends of the earth.” Bishops, LG also states,
receive from the Lord the mission to preach the Gospel to “every creature.”
“[T]hat duty . . . is a true service, which in sacred literature is significantly
called ‘diakonia,’ or ministry.’”
It is not a lawyer’s polemic, or a logician’s trick, to state that this divinely
imposed duty corresponds to a right of the “all creatures” to have the Gospel
preached to them. No one person has a claim, of course, that the local Ordinary stop over
at half past seven tomorrow night to preach a homily. It is hardly ground to justly
criticize a bishop because he attends to many duties other than preaching. But a bishop
can be delinquent, shirk his duty, even consciously decide not to perform it, all for bad
reasons. The worst reason is this: he thinks, often correctly, that we — you and I
— do not want to hear the truth.
What’s this? The episcopal servant derelict for aiming to please, or not to disturb,
the beneficiaries of his duties and obligations? That’s correct. We think of servants
as doing whatever the masters please. But that won’t do for bishops. A bishop is a
unique kind of servant, just as Christ was. We think of a master as calling the servant to
do his bidding, to carry out the will of the boss. This works fine so long as the boss is
God, whose will even the divine Son sought, always and in every way, to do. We creatures
must seek to do God’s will. The bishop is in the business of helping us to do just
that. We are here to cooperate with God and His plan for each of us. We are inclined
instead to try to get God to cooperate or empower us to do what we plan. Bishops are duty
bound to smack us out of this damnable illusion. More than a few bishops, it seems, worry
over our approval more than over our salvation.
Bishops are duty bound to the Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, the Roman Pontiff.
LG states: “The pope’s power of primacy over all, both pastors and faithful,
remains whole and intact . . . . The Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power
over the Church,” which he is free to exercise at any time. Bishops are scarcely
hired hands. But they are under obligations of fidelity to the Holy Father’s
authoritative teaching much the same as we are, and they are under the Pope’s
discipline in ways beyond ours. Thus, it seems to me, they have the opportunity, and the
obligation, to serve as exemplars of obedience to the Pope. The scandal of episcopal
dissent is grave, and the sight of it revolting.
Here we must go slowly, giving the benefit of the doubt to the bishop who appears to be in
defiance of the Holy Father. But faith and piety do not rule out the possibility of
bishops at odds with the truth, shirking their duties. A prudent faith in fact requires us
to entertain, when the evidence is clear, such a possibility. Whether the matter be the
pastoral care of homosexual persons, the implementation of Canon Law governing Catholic
universities, or the promiscuous use of lay Eucharistic ministers, there is, sad to say,
evidence of episcopal dereliction. But in all this, there is always Peter, always Rome. To
the Holy See we must continually turn for that light which too often flickers here at
home.
Gerard V. Bradley is professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and a regular
columnist for Catholic Dossier.
Back to Catholic Information Center on Internet