A Forgotten Vision?: The Function of Bishops and its Exercise Forty Years After the Second Vatican Council

A FORGOTTEN VISION? THE FUNCTION OF BISHOPS AND ITS EXERCISE FORTY YEARS AFTER THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL Gilles Routhier* The issue that the author was asked to address in this presentation was a question. But this question also suggests a hypothesis to interpret what happened over the last forty years since Vatican II. One hypothesis is that Vatican II has expressed a vision of the function of bishops and its exercise (note how we put two elements together that are not of the same value). Furthermore, it is suggested that this vision has been forgotten, a point which we will need to examine. We will need to see if the term “forgotten ” (or amnesia) is the best way of expressing what has happened. Finally, the way the question is asked indicates a relationship between this vision and the life of the Church. In understanding this relationship, there is a presupposition that we have a certain vision that is expressed in our ecclesiology and that this vision is empowered in the Church through legislation.1 In such a case, there is a great risk of transforming the process of reception into an application of the reality of a vision that developed at the council. In such circumstances, not only do we grant the practice a consecutive status in regard to ecclesiology; but we limit the relationship and the intermediaries that lead us from text to action, or from the vision to its realization. As we can see, the title of this article alone offers us a full program if we want to study its various elements in detail. But, remembering the words of Congar, who is still, in the author’s opinion, an ecclesiological The Jurist 69 (2009) 155–169 155 * Professor of Theology, Faculté de Théologie et de Sciences Religieuses, Université Laval, Québec. 1 This is generally the relationship articulated in the Peter and Paul Seminar, from which I will distance myself. For a presentation of this consecutive relationship between vision (theology—or the teaching of the council) and the life of the Church (canon law and legislation), see Ladislas Örsy, “Introduction: The Scope and Spirit of the Peter-Paul Seminar ,” The Jurist 59 (1999) 331–334; “Collegiality in the Church: Theology and Canon Law: Editor’s Introduction,” The Jurist 64 (2004) 205–207. For a critique of the concept of the consecutive character of law in relationship to theology, see Gilles Routhier, Le défi de la communion (Montréal; Paris: Médiaspaul, 1994) 170–182. 156 the jurist master, “the door through which you venture into a question sets the stage for a favorable or not so favorable solution. The concepts that we use are the determining factor.”2 To enter through the door of the vision of the council and then its application does not necessarily offer the best conditions for a fruitful reflection. The chances are, however, that it will determine its conclusions. The author suggests we enter through another door, approaching the issue from another angle, without leaving aside the terms of the problem as it was submitted to him. An experience of communion Starting from the theology of communion or the understanding of the Church as communion—this is already a vision of the Church that we, rightfully so or not, attribute to Vatican II—Pottmeyer already pointed out in 1980 that “there must be a practice and experience of the communion in order for a corresponding ecclesiology to develop and be accepted . The development of the ecclesiology of the Church as communion as part of the council is an excellent example of the intimate union between the practice and the experience of communion, on the one hand, and a further reflection on this issue and its formulation on the other hand.”3 Along those lines Congar observed: The fact of the council has been, for those gathered in a council situation, an experience with its own importance and energy. The council helped rediscover the value that it was expressing. That was obvious for such realities as the liturgy, whose variety was proposed in the daily Eucharist; the theology of local churches, for they were all there; collegiality, since the College was...