review article  By Kenneth D. Whitehead

Defending papal primacy

PAPAL PRIMACY IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM By Russell Shaw (Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Huntington, Ind. 46750, 2000), 186 pp. PB $12.95).

When Pope John Paul II issued his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint on the Church’s commitment to ecumenism, he made a dramatic gesture towards “the ecumenical aspirations of the majority of Christian communities”; and pledged “to find a way of exercising the papal primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation” (#95). He invited other church “leaders and their theologians to engage with me in a patient and fraternal dialogue . . . in which leaving useless controversies behind, we could listen to one another, keeping before us only the will of Christ for his Church” (#96).

The pope was no longer saying to the separated brethren, in other words, what in past time the Church’s “ecumenical” position has so often seemed to be, namely, that non-Catholic Christians desirous of Christian unity must simply accede to the position of the Catholic Church on the latter’s terms. Instead the pope was proposing that good-faith dialogue and a more careful examination of the nature of the primacy — which the pope obviously cannot renounce since it rests on solemnly defined doctrine — might open up new avenues and approaches whereby non-Catholic Christians, and even entire churches and communities, might find it possible to accept papal primacy on renewed terms. Meanwhile, the Church too might find it possible to alter some of the ways in which the primacy has been traditionally exercised.

Although this bold new approach to the question of the primacy may yet come to interest some non-Catholic church leaders and their theologians, Lutherans, say, or even Orthodox, the response so far from the separated brethren to the pope’s dramatic proposal has hardly been overwhelming. Indeed it has apparently been a major disappointment for the pope, according to his biographer George Weigel; in few areas has this pope of so many successes experienced greater disappointment than on the ecumenical front.

What may have surprised the Holy Father more than a little, though, was the alacrity with which a response to his initiative came from some Catholics! Ut Unum Sint had not long been in the public domain, for example, before the recently retired archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn, in a widely reported lecture at Oxford University in June, 1996, blandly informed the world that “the pope has asked us for an honest and serious critique. He has every right to expect that . . . [the] response will be especially forthcoming from those who recognize and reverence the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.”

A “critique,” especially from Catholics, was not exactly what the Holy Father had asked for, of course. Nevertheless the papal initiative did provide a convenient pretext for the promotion of some other agendas currently present in the Church. And if we may judge by most of the favorable reports and commentaries — and even applause — received by Archbishop Quinn for his Oxford effort, we may conclude that a not inconsiderable body of Catholic opinion out there seems to be quite definitely critical of the way the papal primacy has been exercised in our time.

What were Archbishop Quinn’s “critical” concerns? His list included “the appointment of bishops, the approval of documents such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the grave decline in the number of priests and the consequent decline in the availability of Mass for the people, the cognate issue of the celibacy of the clergy, the role of episcopal conferences, the role of women, and the issue of the ordination of women.” While it remains arguable whether all (or any) of these problems really stem from a defective contemporary exercise of the primacy, it does seem indisputable that at least some of the “cognitive elites” in the Church tend to place the blame squarely on the pope for causing or aggravating these problems. Even while muting some of the specific concerns expressed in his lecture, Archbishop Quinn himself later put his general call for what he calls “devolution” of Church authority into a book entitled The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity (New York: Crossroad, 1999).

Actually, Archbishop Quinn’s Oxford lecture along with his book represents only the latest installment of a continuing and growing body of criticism of papal authority by American Catholics. This kind of anti-papal criticism in articles, books, lectures, and conferences has been going on virtually since the end of Vatican Council II — when the American Catholic cognitive elites discovered in the acts of the Council the twin ideas of episcopal collegiality and the Church as the People of God.

Of course, Vatican II did emphasize, and rightly, both of these concepts. Many Catholic intellectuals, however, seizing upon them, quickly carried them far beyond anything envisaged by or at the Council; Catholic intellectuals saw collegiality and the idea of the Church as the People of God as the forerunners and harbingers of what they considered a necessary and inevitable democratization of the Church along liberal lines. In their view, the Church had been fundamentally changed by Vatican II and could never be the same again. Authority, especially papal authority, could never again play the role it had enjoyed in the preconciliar Church; decentralization of Church authority was surely one of those famous ideas whose time had come.

This by-now widespread critical attitude towards papal authority on the part of Catholic intellectuals became greatly intensified following the issuance of Pope Paul VI’s anti-birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. For the cognitive elites, this encyclical not only proved that the Church’s magisterium could be embarrassingly wrong; it also signaled for them the Church’s continuing refusal to enter “the modern world.” (It was none other than Archbishop Quinn, it will be recalled, who told the 1980 Synod of Bishops that the birth control issue simply had to be re-visited, Paul VI’s teaching apparently not being the last word on the subject; apparently the archbishop’s discontent with the exercise of papal authority does not date from just yesterday or the day before.)

Over the years, there has been a veritable cottage industry and then some of continuing works taking the pope and the Vatican to task for various things and often calling for the decentralization of Church authority. The recent Papal Sin: Structures of Sin by Gary Wills (Doubleday, 2000) is only one of the latest examples of the genre. Inside the Vatican by Thomas J. Reese, S.J. (Harvard University Press, 1996) and The Limits of the Papacy by Patrick Granfield, O.S.B. (Crossroad, 1987) represent two other fairly recent examples in which prominent Catholic authors quite openly work to undermine papal authority while apparently continuing to maintain complete respectability as credible Catholic observers. The same thing is true of most of the contributions to the volume The Papacy and the Church in the United States edited by Bernard Cooke, S.J. (Paulist, 1989). Knee-jerk criticism of papal authority is not only not unusual among Catholic intellectuals today; it is practically “mainstream.”

Going back a few years, we find the insidious The Papacy Today by Francis X. Murphy, C.SS.R. (Macmillan, 1981) and The Remaking of the Church by Richard P. McBrien (Harper & Row, 1973) similarly critical of the primacy, and these are only a few of the more prominent titles in the genre, most of them written by priests. Archbishop Quinn’s foray into this same field thus has the effect of placing a prestigious episcopal imprimatur upon a whole school of anti-papal writing. Moreover, the archbishop’s entry into the lists has apparently stimulated yet more works in the same vein: i.e., Papal Primacy and the Episcopate: Towards a Relational Understanding by Michael J. Buckley, S.J. (Crossroad, 1998), and the collection The Exercise of the Primacy: Continuing the Dialogue) edited by Phyllis Zagano and Terrence W. Tilley (Crossroad, 1998). (Here all I this time the pope thought the “dialogue” was supposed to be with the separated brethren!)

It cannot be a sign of vigor or of spiritual health in the Church when, one after another, Catholic academics and writers, most of them priests — one of them an archbishop! — seem to consider it the intellectual order of the day to be continually launching criticisms of what is still, after all, the supreme authority in the Church by the will of Christ — an institution so thoroughly and solemnly grounded in the Church’s definitive and unchanging doctrine about herself that we would have expected anyone discontented with the current course of the Church at least to try to find something else to belittle and blame. The papacy with its primacy is surely inescapably and forever an integral part of the Catholic Church.

This current animus against papal authority seems to be a particularly misplaced and wrong-headed priority when we consider the role of the papacy and the current pope in today’s struggle against our unprecedented moral decadence and the culture of death; and in the equally necessary papal effort to try to restore the integrity of the faith in what nobody can deny has been in the postconciliar years one of the most serious crises of Catholic faith and practice in the Church’s long history. The pope endeavors to fortify the faithful with the authentic message of Christ even as the modern world sinks ever deeper into today’s evil and gross immorality; meanwhile, the Catholic intellectuals join with the world and endeavor to undermine his authority.

It is true that from time to time some intellectual voices are raised in favor of papal authority. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s excellent The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church (Ignatius, 1986) immediately comes to mind in this regard. So does The Shepherd and the Rock: Origins, Development, and Mission of the Papacy by J. Michael Miller, C.S.B. (Our Sunday Visitor, 1995), a general survey of the Petrine ministry in the Church. The original German title of the von Balthasar volume, Die antirömische Affekt, rather graphically describes the basic anti-Roman attitude which reigns among Catholic intellectuals — and which it is imperative to counter if the integrity and authenticity of the Church’s teaching on the role and primacy of Peter is to be properly resolved in the minds of today’s faithful.

For the primacy of the pope represents firm and established Catholic doctrine, solemnly defined by Vatican I and strongly reiterated by Vatican II. It is simply not going to be changed no matter how discontented some contemporary Catholics may be with its current exercise and results. Pope John Paul II himself does not propose to attempt to change it but only to look again at how it might better be exercised; he takes for granted the unchangeable fact of the primacy itself.

Thus, the continuing expressions of discontent and calls for Church decentralization of papal authority represent not only an unreal idea of the nature of the Church as established by Christ; they do great harm to the faith to the extent that they undermine the belief of the faithful that the authentic exercise of papal authority really does express the will of Christ for us. And when this authority is continually undermined in the minds of the faithful by the constant drumbeat of the papal critics, all Church authority ends up being undermined as well; for if we can legitimately question the role and place of papal authority in the Church, then we can question the role of episcopal authority just as easily. One of the principal results of Archbishop Quinn’s initiative, then, to the extent that it is successful, will thus be an undermining of Church authority generally, including that of his episcopal colleagues.

In this situation, counter-efforts are needed to defend papal authority. Today’s anti-authoritarian climate makes this necessary in general; but when sons and daughters of the Church are the first to jump on the pope and the papacy, it becomes imperative. One of the best recent examples which has followed upon the prominence given to Archbishop Quinn’s thesis is Russell Shaw’s Papal Primacy in the Third Millennium (Our Sunday Visitor, 2000). This new book is a relatively short, but clear and very readable discussion of the issues surrounding what the author aptly describes as efforts to “tame the pope.” Covered in its pages are not only Archbishop Quinn’s proposal for the devolution of Church authority but those of others mining the same lode, including the extreme proposals of a group styling itself the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church. This group calls for frank “democratization” of the Church, including the periodic election of a pope for a limited term by similarly elected national Councils.

Russell Shaw is a former Secretary for Public Affairs of the U.S. bishops’ conference, and a well-known Catholic writer and journalist. He disclaims in-depth expertise in history or theology and describes his book merely as an “exercise in the journalism of ideas.” The book is much more than that, however; it lays out as clearly as this reviewer has ever seen it done the true relationship between the collegiality of the bishops, which Vatican II did indeed teach and emphasize, and the primacy of the pope, which the same Second Vatican Council did not in any way downgrade or diminish, as is so commonly assumed and asserted in some of the outpourings of those who, in Shaw’s words, wish to “tame the pope.” The truth is, as Shaw demonstrates, that the episcopacy and the papacy, collegiality and the primacy, must necessarily exist and function together if Christ’s will for his Church is to be realized.

In reconciling the ideas of episcopal collegiality and papal primacy, the author draws fruitfully upon a too-little-known 1992 document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, as well as upon the thought of the outstanding contemporary moral theologian Dr. Germain Grisez. The happy result provides a distinct advance upon the usual discussions of the subject, which tend to treat episcopal collegiality and papal primacy as contradictory rather than as complementary realities.

Russell Shaw treats a number of the contemporary proposals to “tame the pope,” including some of those in the books mentioned above, which many informed Catholics would consider to be beyond what any Catholic legitimately could advocate and still be considered loyal to the Church; but he calmly goes about analyzing them, even while ultimately he shows their incompatibility with the Church’s God-given structure. His aim and approach are not at all polemical, tempting as that prospect must have been in some of his cases; rather, he is always patient, temperate, and fair; and, in the end, his case for the primacy as the Church herself understands it is only strengthened.

In particular, he very politely deconstructs up the well-known case put forward by Archbishop Quinn. Most of the “concerns” of this prelate, in fact, can be laid at the door of the episcopacy as readily, or more readily, than they can be laid at the door of the papacy. As Shaw points out (although he does not dwell on this subject, and, in general, goes very easy on his former employers, the U.S. bishops)

Complaints about Roman overcentralization and excessive intervention by the Curia in local affairs have a basis in fact. But they also reflect episcopal omissions — failures to take the initiative and lead. In the last three decades, American Catholicism has suffered an embarrassingly large number of cases in which egregious problems, from publicly dissenting theologians holding positions of trust to notorious abuses in matters of liturgy and pastoral practice, have been ignored, even though they were nationally or even internationally notorious as a result of media publicity. in some of these cases, Rome finally stepped in; and then the cry “Roman interference!” not uncommonly was raised, even though the fundamental problem was that local authorities had not done their job.

Particularly good in this book is the author’s sane and sensible chapter on “Evaluation of the Reform Agenda.” In this chapter he examines such concepts a collegiality, subsidiarity, inculturation, and the particular churches in the light of the universal Church’s true understanding of them; he then discusses the various proposals of “reform” in the light of this authentic understanding. Somehow the alleged need to “tame the pope” does not seem quite as necessary, or urgent (or possible!) when examined calmly in the light of the Church’s teaching about herself.

In short, Russell Shaw’s Papal Primacy in the Third Millennium is a welcome new addition to the literature in defense of papal primacy and authority as the Church herself views these things. It would be salutary if (but it is surely not very likely that), as a result of this serious and careful examination of just what is involved and at stake in the various proposals to decentralize or downgrade papal authority in the Church, some of the current and too often expressed discontents about the papal primacy could now be laid aside; and we could return to the much more important question which really engaged Pope John Paul II when he issued Ut Unum Sint, namely, how to get non-Catholics to look anew at both the fact of and the reasons for the papal primacy, which was established by Jesus Christ on Peter back at Caesarea Philippi.