Bishops block Rome curb on local powers

BY VIVIANE HEWITT IN ROME
THE MAJORITY OF Episcopal Conferences have rejected a Vatican document allegedly designed to curb their powers, according to unofficial sources in Rome this week.
The publication of the "Theological and Juridical Statute of Episcopal Conferences", set for late last year, has been postponed by divisions within the episcopal ranks over What some bishops view as Roine's attempts to rein in national Churches.
A spokesman for the Congregation of Bishops refused to comment on further claims from inside the Vatican that some national Churches were heading for a clash with Rome over the document, which was drafted by a commission working under the supervision of the hard-line Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The national Churches who are believed to be the more "wayward", over-independent Churches of North America and northern Europe, specifically the Netherlands.
The General Secretary of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, Mgr Philip Carroll, said he knew of the report but had not read its final draft. The spokesman merely confirmed that the "paper is still under preparation". The document was initially rumoured to be an "Instruction", the form the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under its German prefect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has used in the past in its calls to order.
Though the Congregation looks set to drop the title "Instruction", the final draft of the document if it had been approved was expected to bring about some radical changes to the workings, functions and, above all, the scope of national episcopal conferences.
In outlining the "boundaries" of conference action, the paper stressed theology, reports said, and this point has sparked open debate between two of Catholicism's leading experts on the socalled "collegiate factor" in the Church.
As if to reinforce Rome's right to make episcopal conferences tow the pontifical line, Fr Umberto Beni, the Rector of the Pontifical Lateran University and a consultant to the Secretariat of State, Cardinal Ratzinger's Congregation and to the Congregation of Bishops, said that episcopal conferences had no foundation in dogma. This statement was publicly contested by Fr Yves Congar, the French-born expert personally appointed by Pope John XXIII to Vatican II, and who served on the Council's Theology Commission.
He said that while he agreed that episcopal conferences were "outside the Church's divine constitution" he dismissed as "not altogether true" the Rector's statement denying these assemblies' dogmatic foundation.
"They are a collegiate fonn. The college is a divine institution because it is the succession of the Twelve," he said.
Rome had hoped that the Vatican's new "Statute" on conferences would bring a decades-long debate on their powers to a definitive end.
As far back as the Second Vatican Council, the "collegiate factor" has proved the subject of debate.
The majority of Conciliar Fathers voted on the enhancement of the "collegiate factor" in the running of the universal Church, but Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who was Holy Office Prefect at the time, denied the validity of the vote.
The new Statute is expected to expand the Council of European Episcopal Conferences to include more national Churches.