Papal Primacy and the Communion of Churches

Themes from the Synod's Last Two Public Theological-Pastoral Fora

How should we understand the relationship between the local Church—the churches of Corinth or Philippi in the Apostle Paul’s day, the hundreds of dioceses and eparchies of today—and the universal Church, the one Body of Christ? How can we think about the role of the pope, the bishop of Rome, as the head of the Church in light of synodality? These were the topics of the final two public theological-pastoral fora held last week as part of the second session of the Synod on Synodality, now in its final days.

Last week, I offered a summary of key themes from the first two fora held on October 9 on the themes of “The People of God, Subject of Mission” and “The Role and Authority of the Bishop in a Synodal Church.” Here I hope to do something similar and identify some of the key themes from the two fora held on October 16, on “Mutual Relations between the Local and Universal Church” and “The Exercise of Primacy and the Synod of Bishops.” As Ricardo da Silva, S.J., an associate editor at America, has noted, many found the fora difficult to follow, both because of the language barrier and the use of theological jargon, so hopefully these summaries provide a useful service.

The first of the two fora, on the local and universal Church, was moderated by Dr. Anna Rowlands, the St. Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who had likewise hosted one of the fora the previous week. The presenters included:

• Fr. Miguel de Salis Amaral, a Portuguese-born theologian and a professor at the Faculty of Theology, and the Director of the Centre for Priestly Formation, at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

• Fr. Antonio Autiero, a professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Münster and former director of the Research Centre for Religious Sciences at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy.

• Dr. Myriam Wijlens, a Dutch-born professor of canon law at the University of Erfurt, Germany, and a vice-moderator for both the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission.

• Cardinal Robert Prevost, O.S.A., the Chicago native who serves as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and was formerly the Bishop of Chiclayo, Peru.

Dr. Klara Csiszar, a professor of pastoral theology at the Faculty of Theology of the Catholic University of Linz, Austria likewise served as moderator for a second time, in this instance leading the discussion of papal primacy. The presenters in that forum included:

• Fr. Dario Vitali, a professor of dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the coordinator of the Synod’s theological experts.

• Dr. Catherine Clifford, a professor of systematic and historical theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. (And I could add she is the co-editor, with Massimo Faggioli, of The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, to which I was a contributor!)

• Fr. José San José Prisco, the dean of the Faculty of Canon Law at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain.

• Timothy Costelloe, S.D.B., the Archbishop of Perth, Australia, and the President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

I highlighted all of the fora participants in my series on the Synod last year, except for Clifford, because I did not discuss participants from North America (who had been covered elsewhere) and both Amaral and Autiero, who were only added as theological experts for this year’s second session, and who I mentioned here.

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Fr. Amaral’s presentation provides a good entrée into the themes of the two sessions. He explained that the local Church and the universal Church should not be understood as if they are in opposition, or even as if strengthening one necessarily means diminishing the other. Rather, the relationship between the two is characterized by what he called “mutual interiority”: the universal is in the local and the local is in the universal. In other words, a local Church should not be understood as a “part” of the universal Church, which suggests both that the local Church is incomplete and likewise that the universal Church is merely the sum of its parts. In reality, the universal Church in its essence is wholly present in each local Church. At the same time, each local Church belongs to the communion of Churches that is the universal Church. As Cardinal Prevost put it in his presentation, even though the universal Church is wholly present in each local Church, no single local Church exhausts the riches of the universal Church.