William Shea on "The Imperial Papacy"

William M. Shea is the director of the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross.  Shea's reflections, titled The Imperial Papacy, will appear in the May 6th Commonweal.  To read the whole piece now, click here.  Two excerpts:

Many other things must be said about the last papacy, but I have the awful sense that over the past twenty-five years one voice has filled the ecclesial airwaves, leaving little room for any other. Pardon me a hyperbolic metaphor, but in this regard I would say the Catholic Church has been undergoing asphyxiation. I see two large problems in this. I hope the next pope can begin to resolve them, but I have serious doubts that he will be able to do either. Both have to do with governance of the church.

First, the last papacy revealed in acute form what everyone knew already: the Catholic Church is a monarchy. That fact grounds both the achievements and failures of John Paul II. Though the intensity of the monarchical rule depends on factors ranging from political context to the psychological character of the monarch, historical inertia has lead to the centralization of power in the pope and his curial servants and advisors. Though many regard this centralization as having a supernatural root, I do not. To me it has been and remains an unfortunate natural development resting on the myth of Peter and the gradual and willful accretion of political and ecclesial power to the bishops of Rome. This power has been hardened in Catholic doctrines of the papacy and has displayed itself in the popular revival of ultramontanism in the last papacy.
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The second problem the next pope will face is reversing the quality of the episcopate created by his predecessor. That Catholic bishops, like Catholic popes, are and should be men of orthodox catholic faith, well-versed in the classical creeds, conciliar teaching, and the doctrines of the churches of Christ, seems evident. But there is no need for Catholic bishops to be hermeneutical parrots. Bishops, archbishops, and cardinals seem devoted to repeating, without nuance, the never ending stream of papal and curial pronouncements under John Paul. We need bishops with brains and the courage to use them, bishops who believe that their job is to witness to the gospel in their own circumstances without wary and pious eyes cast over their shoulders to “the holy father,” waiting on him for enlightenment. They are appointed to witness to Christ’s resurrection and to serve their churches, not to witness to the papacy and serve it. They should be men capable of telling the pope he is wrong. I am not sanguine about this possibility, although under as powerful men as Pius XII and John XXIII such men were raised to the episcopacy and revealed themselves at the council. The full flown imperial papacy has been in place now for a quarter of a century and one must ask whether reversal is any longer possible and whether the bishops, most of them appointed by the deceased pope, are capable of honest and decent rule of their churches. Surely they are not up to a council and John Paul II could not have abided one.