We must resist collegiality'

In the years following the First Vatican Council there grew up, maybe through appeals to the spirit of the Council rather than to the severely limiting Council document, what came to be called "creeping infallibility". Two front page stories in your September 6 edition suggest to me that in our own post-Conciliar age we should take steps to resist an outbreak of "creeping collegiality."
One may have many reasons for disagreeing with the Bishop of Roermond's decision not to attend a pastoral conference, but in no sense can his action be described as "a severe jolt" to "collegiality in the Netherlands" since none of the story's three elements concerns that doctrine.
It is not involved in the idea of a pastoral conference nor in the idea of the head of a local Church taking decisions on his own, and it is certainly not involved in his being a member of an episcopal conference sponsoring the event.
One suspects that when collegiality began creeping, it crept first into the popular understanding of episcopal conferences. That this contradicts the teaching of the Council can be seen in Vorgrimler's "Commentary of the Documents of Vatican II", Vol II, page 280 et seq.
The second case of creeping collegiality concerns your story about the relations between our own regional episcopal conference and the National Conference of Priests. You ask how long the hierarchy can continue to ignore demands made by the NCP and observe that "the clergy of England and Wales do not intend to let the matter drop."
The short answer to your question is that the bishops can ignore demands from this assembly for ever for, according to the Catholic Herald of June 28, 1973 no fewer than two-thirds of the priests themselves ignore the conference and have been ignoring it since its inception. In contradiction to your observation, two-thirds of priests in England and Wales have let the matter drop. Let the bishops follow suit with equanimity.
A more important reason for the hierarchy to drop the NCP is the view common among priests that so long as an NCP is maintained, diocesan senates— the assemblies established by the Second Vatican Council for the proper sharing of responsibility between bishop and priest — will remain in their infancy.
The only justification for maintaining a National Conference of Priests is the idea that just as a diocesan bishop has his senate to advise him, so an episcopal conference may enjoy the advice of a parallel conference of priests. This error is the classic example of creeping collegiality. The argument assumes thth as a diocesan bishop is to a diocese, so an episcopal conference is to a particular region: but this is not so. It was not the intention of the Council that bishops of a particular nation (or of distinct nations, as is the case in our own conference of the hierarchies of England and Wales) should assume that because they all belong to the one Episcopal College of the Universal Church, they should pool their personal responsibilities towards their own local Churches and regard their region as one local church.
An episcopal conference is not a synod established for the ecclesiastical government of a region. It is a matter of opinion whether it be desirable that it should become so, but it is a matter fact that it is not so.
According to'both the letter and the spirit of the Council, an episcopal conference is, esssentially, an experiment in collaboration between the heads of local Churches whether they be members of the Episcopal College or not, and membership is extended only to those bishops who actually hold a canonical mission in the local Churches of the region.
The conference exists for the good of the distinct local Churches. Its agreed policies, except in matters of liturgy, have no canonical status in any local Church except in so far as the local Ordinary makes them law in his diocese.
Between this conference and the local Churches, there is no assembly, not even of any kind, whose demands may be heard over and above the voice of diocesan senates established by law "to give effective help to the bishop in his ruling of the diocese" (Ecclesiae Sanctae No.15),
When the voices of these senates, expressed through their leading members and heads are heard in episcopal conferences with the clarity of expression presently permitted to the National Conference of Priests, collegiality — albeit in an analogous sense only, can be said to have crept into the right quarters.
So long as you publish stories which perpetuate the myth of false collegiality, the collegiality of national conferences be they of bishops, priests, deacons or lay people, our perception of Christ's Church existing in each local Church will languish.
Furthermore, those diocesan bishops who are prepared to be accounted before God as the apostolic leaders of their local Church rather than be seen simply as members of a national committee will appear to your readers, as Bishop Gijsen surely must, like so many Canutes, vainly resisting the creeping tide of collegiality.
(Fr) J. Ambrose Walsh 71 Heol Hir, Llanishen, Cardiff.