Five New Ideas On How To Select Bishops

By Sandro Magister
Chiesa
February 9, 2015

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350989?eng=y

They are proposed by an Australian theologian and economist, in an open letter to Pope Francis. A simple and concrete contribution to the reform of the curia that is in the works

ROME, February 9, 2015 – For three days, beginning today, the nine cardinals of the council that assists the pope in the governance of the universal Church will draw an assessment of the work done so far in the reform of the curia.

And on February 12 and 13, they will submit their proposals for the examination of the whole college of cardinals, gathered in consistory.

The consistory will be secret, but in any case it will not produce any conclusion. Pope Francis himself is taking his time and has pushed back all practical decisions until at least 2016.

The proposals that have been leaked to this point appear, in fact, to be very far from constituting an organic project. They include, for example, the consolidation of a certain number of curial officials in two new congregations, one for justice and peace and another for the family and laity, each of them subdivided into five departments, but there is no agreement on how they could actually function.

And the same uncertainty also applies to a few key existing dicasteries, like the secretariat of state, the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, and the congregation for bishops.

The secretariat of state is being overhauled, and is already flanked by the newly created secretariat for the economy, but it remains to be seen what responsibilities will and will not be assigned to it in the end.

The congregation for the doctrine of the faith, whose duties include that of evaluating word by word the dogmatic correctness of all the discourses and documents of the Holy See and the pope, often finds itself incapacitated. It is not rare that its corrections and observations fall on deaf ears.

As for the congregation for bishops, which attends to the selection of candidates to lead the dioceses, one innovation that is already in place is that it functions intermittently. With Pope Francis, in fact, it often happens that he alone makes the selection of the new bishop, entirely bypassing the congregation with its procedures and deliberately ignoring the positions and expectations of the local episcopates. One glaring example of this papal autocracy was the appointment of the new archbishop of Chicago in the person of Blase Cupich.

In any case, the reflection on how a renewed congregation for bishops could operate is adrift at sea. The proposal of the election of bishops on the part of the local communities recurs often in the media, but on the level of mere wishful thinking.

When instead there should be plenty of room for better founded and more practicable innovations.

The following text indicates a few of these possible innovations.

It is in the form of a letter to the pope, and its author is the Australian theologian Paul Anthony McGavin of the archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, a former head of the School of Business of the University of New South Wales and dean of the academic faculty board, then a priest and pastor and today chaplain of the University of Canberra, an author of esteemed writings.

The five innovations that he proposes are mainly derived from a critical analysis of the concrete ways in which bishops act with their priests.

This analysis occupies the first part of the latter, the complete text of which is available on this other page of www.chiesa:

> Open Letter to Pope Francis. About the Reform of the Congregation for Bishops

While the following are the beginning and second part of the letter, with the five proposals for the reform of the congregation for bishops.