The Limits of Magisterial Authority
There’s a lot of confusion and ignorance and false statements about the extent to which Roman Catholic bishops have teaching authority, so it’s difficult for many people, including Catholics, to understand when a bishop is speaking authoritatively and when he’s giving his opinion in an authoritative fashion. The bishops speak on everything from the dignity of human life to the political meaning of “pro-life,” from the right to health care to the nuts and bolts of the Affordable Care Act, from stewardship of the environment to the EPA’s proposed standards for hazardous emissions. Add to this array of issues the different kinds of teaching authority exercised in the church, debates over fallibility and infallibility, credibility problems, and different bishops saying contrary things, and you’ve got a recipe for widespread uncertainty.
When interpreting a statement, letter or other text from a bishop or the bishops, we need to keep in mind three different acts the bishop or bishops may be performing: 1) the teaching on matters of faith and morals, 2) the interpretation of the situation on the ground to which this teaching may be applied, and 3) the application of the teaching on faith and morals to the concrete situation. The bishops have the authority (assuming they have teaching authority) to speak on the principles of faith and morals, but they do not possess some special authority or ability to accurately assess the concrete realities to which those principles would be applied. As a result, they really don’t have a strong authoritative ground to stand on when speaking of the application of those principles.
For example, in a statement about immigration, the bishops could speak authoritatively about the justice due to immigrants, but they could, in the same statement, be wrong about the actual status of immigration at a particular location, wrong in their interpretation of civil legislation concerning immigration policy, or wrong about the particulars of that policy. Therefore, they could erroneously apply the principles on which they are able to speak with teaching authority.
I trust I make myself obscure.
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I would also include the context of a statement – when, where, and to whom the statement is being expressed – in judging Magisterial authority.
Yes, the audience is important as well. Good point.
Dear Kyle,
Of course, this sounds right. But, practically speaking, I think that things are more complex. Let me provide five reasons:
1. The distinctions between 1, 2 and 3 appeared to be quite murky during the debate over health care. Cardinal George: “It seems that what some people are saying is that the bishops can’t, or shouldn’t, speak to the moral content of the law, that we should remain on the level of abstract principles.” Needless to say, he disagrees. Thus, in George’s view, the bishops do have competence to speak authoritatively about legislative interpretation – to make “moral judgments” about specific pieces of legislation, so that they can effectively speak for the Church on subjects of controversy.
2. The distinction assumes that Catholics owe assent to bishops “on the principles of faith and morals,” but leaves the assessment of “concrete realities” and the “practical application of those principles” as activities with uncertain (if any) theological weight. Eduardo Penalver has asked about the “minimum threshold of rationality” for the discernment of practical application. I’m not sure what the answer is. This is perhaps the problem with “creeping infallibility” – it tends to secularize everything that cannot be deemed “authoritative.”
3. I wonder if the distinction can be subject to political critique. One criticism of Catholic social thought has been that it is never quite specific enough, sufficiently concrete, or adequately radical to be useful. Thus, the institutional church can happily find common purpose with any political party and ensure its flourishing in just about any situation. The confining of authority to principles that can float harmlessly in the air is good for institutional self-preservation because it is less likely to lead to any repression.
4. The distinction seems to be modernistic. We now have a pure theory of authority that can be separated from any praxis. The question is whether this adequately describes how a holy man and woman might act when confronted by a neighbor in need. Do they move from secure principles to assessment to practical application?
5. Finally, I wonder if the distinction is even sustainable. Let’s assume that a Catholic concludes that the bishops are completely wrong about immigration – the actual status of immigration, the interpretation of legislation concerning immigration, the likely effects of the legislation if enacted. It is more than likely that he might conclude that these are men lacking judgment. Lacking confidence in them, it is also likely that he will consider them poor interpreters of Catholic teaching on the justice due to immigrants. He will confine his adherence to statements from the pope and only the pope.
Thanks.
Neil
Good thoughts, Neil. I never turn a chance to muddy the waters. I’ll respond to each in turn.
1. It’s often very clear what a civil law will do, in which case there’s really no controversy about the concrete situation and therefore the application of the principles. If Congress were to pass a law akin to the Freedom of Choice Act, the bishops wouldn’t be stretching their authority to condemn the law on the grounds that abortion ought to be outlawed and not enshrined as a legal right. If a well-known Catholic theologian writes a book explicitly arguing against the Trinity, I wouldn’t expect the bishops to keep quiet. Matters get murkier when understanding something at the concrete level requires specialized knowledge the bishops may or may not have or means taking a position on a debatable matter. Catholics don’t look to the bishops for how one ought to interpret the U.S. Constitution, for example.
2. I’m not sure either. I imagine this is an area that will develop as the Church grows.
3. I’m okay with the abstract aspect of CST. It allows for prudence and deliberation, both of which, let’s face it, are difficult, but necessary in my opinion for a sound political order.
4. The holy man or woman isn’t necessarily claiming to speak with moral authority, so the situation and the analysis would be different.
5. Well, the Pope might make the same sort of practical judgment, applying principles of faith and morals to a concrete situation the pope may or may not understand, so this Catholic with lost confidence in the bishops could also lose confidence in the Pope. Perhaps the bishops should be more careful in their judgments on concrete matters so that it’s clear to the audience that the bishops may not have the concrete situation right. Otherwise, they lose credibility when they say, for example, that civil law will do X and civil law turns out not to do X.
Well, I was going to sign on and say that I’m in rare agreement with Kyle. But now that I’ve read Neil’s comment I agree with him too.
The example I immediately thought of while reading Kyle’s post was the Iraq war. And I still think you’re right on this: The bishops don’t necessarily have any special competency in diplomacy and international relations; they certainly don’t have any divine charism in that area. So how could they pronounce authoritatively, based on their office, that diplomatic efforts had not yet been exhausted, or that there were other feasible ways of achieving the desired result?
But Neil’s points are well taken as well. I hope someone comes along and shows us how to reconcile them. : )
I gave it a shot.
Agellius,
Did the Church definitively declare the Iraq War unjust?
Phillip:
My recollection is that both popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI spoke publicly to the effect that the conditions for a just war were not met in Iraq.
See for example here: http://catholicism.about.com/od/thechurchintheworld/f/popes_on_iraq.htm
Kyle R. Cupp: “The bishops have the authority (assuming they have teaching authority) to speak on the principles of faith and morals, but they do not possess some special authority or ability to accurately assess the concrete realities to which those principles would be applied. As a result, they really don’t have a strong authoritative ground to stand on when speaking of the application of those principles.”
Nope to the “As a result..”. The Church can certainly make authoritative judgments about morality as it is applied to specific circumstances. E.g Catechism #2032, as consistently practiced from beginning of the Church.
If understanding the specific circumstances only requires ordinary human reasoning, then the Bishops can supply that themselves, and thus decide on the morality of an action. If more specialized knowledge is required, the Bishops can utilize the expertise of the rest of the Church to have the facts explained to them, and can then authoritatively decide on any related moral issues.
Claiming otherwise sort of sounds like what the Jansenists attempted: they claimed that although the Church certainly had the authority to teach faith and morals, it didn’t have the authority to determine whether a specific book contained erroneous teaching, on the grounds that interpreting a book was a human matter. The Church emphatically disagreed, and threatened excommunication for the Jansenists that persisted in claiming otherwise.
If understanding the specific circumstances only requires ordinary human reasoning, then the Bishops can supply that themselves, and thus decide on the morality of an action. If more specialized knowledge is required, the Bishops can utilize the expertise of the rest of the Church to have the facts explained to them, and can then authoritatively decide on any related moral issues.
Well, sure, the bishops can exercise human reasoning like the rest of us, but their being bishops doesn’t mean they have solid human reasoning skills. Some obviously do. Others not so much. As for utilizing the expertise of the rest of the church, they can do this too, but then the experts may or may not be correct about the facts, the bishops may or may not comprehend the what the experts have to say.
It’s fair to say that the bishops can authoritatively interpret as interpretation is required for understanding faith and morals.
Kyle R. Cupp: “the bishops [...] do not possess some special authority or ability to accurately assess the concrete realities to which those principles would be applied. As a result, they really don’t have a strong authoritative ground to stand on when speaking of the application of those principles.”
If ordinary reasoning is required, the bishops can supply that themselves. If expert reasoning is required, they have access to that. Now, as you correctly point out, it might sometimes be the case that access to those resources isn’t sufficient. If the bishops were working within some kind of purely worldly organization (some kind of Consumer Reports) your objections would be valid. We wouldn’t be able to rely on the authority of such an organization.
But the Church isn’t that kind of organization. Which is why your objections fail.
Paul,
So is your position that bishops never fail or make an error when exercising ordinary reasoning? If we go through every instructive letter on diocesan letterhead and with the bishops signature, we’ll never come across a factual error or faulty argument?
Firstly, I don’t see why you think it is significant that “the experts may or may not be correct about the facts”. If I were concerned about the consequences of some action, and consulted some experts who said (for example) that it would lead to the avoidable death of innocent people, then I can be morally bound not to carry out that action, whether or not the experts are correct. (While waiting, presumably, for the super-experts to come up with a more-correct answer.)
My position has three factors to it:
(1) Ordinary human investigation, whether done by the bishops themselves or by the experts that they consult, can decide a large number of cases quite reasonably. I think that you perhaps exaggerate the difficulty of this.
(2) The Church is divided into dioceses that are, to a large extent, trying to stay both reasonable, and in unison.
(3) Since the Church is a supernatural organization, not a purely natural one, it has access to all kinds of protection.
I certainly don’t believe that individual bishops always have protection from error. However, the combined effects of (1),(2), and especially (3), lead to a Church which is extremely often making decisions that are correct.
Dear Kyle,
Thank you very much for your generous answer. So that we might focus, I’ll just respond to #1 and #4.
1. You are right that, at times, the meaning of a law is very clear. In such a situation, the bishops can pass moral judgment on the law, because there is really “no controversy” at all about the practical application of abstract principles. But in other situations, interpreting the meaning of a law requires a great deal of specialized knowledge that the bishops might be unlikely to have.
Most laws, I suspect, fall somewhere in between these two extremes of clarity and murkiness. Thus, as Richard Gaillardetz has suggested (my emphasis), there is a “gradual attenuation of Episcopal authority as it moves further and further away from revealed truth” towards matters in which moral judgment depends upon expertise in public policy, law or other disciplines. “[C]omplexity diminishes” the authority of Episcopal judgments.
The problem is that we have no way to chart this “gradual attenuation.” Thus, we can recall the controversy regarding the health care bill, which was doubtless painful to many participants. That’s what happens when nobody is really sure about the “level” of Episcopal authority on a specific matter.
Furthermore, I suspect that some bishops will want to be maximalists regarding Episcopal authority – reducing the “gradual attenuation” as much as possible. This is because Cardinal George and others are concerned about a unified Catholic witness, which would seem to be more effective.
So, we really need a way to chart the “gradual attenuation” for your original distinction to be useful.
4. My concern here was that the bishops are meant to be teachers. They are meant to lead the Catholic community in discernment. How might the distinction between abstract principles and concrete realities and practical applications help in this sort of discernment?
I worry that the distinction may, in fact, not be useful. The distinction between abstract principles (theoria) and practical application (praxis) seems to be a modern one, mirroring the distinction between content and form. Theologically, we can speak of the separation between dogmatic theology and ascetic or spiritual theology. (More down to earth, some Bible studies still attempt to extract doctrines from each chapter of Scripture and then move to what’s explicitly called “application.”)
I wonder if we have any examples of Catholics, saints or otherwise, who figure out what to do in a real situation by recalling timeless principles and then interpreting the situation on the ground, and finally applying the timeless principles.
My guess is that most Catholics don’t work that way. Perhaps they’ll use a form of virtue ethics – “What might a wise person, perhaps St Francis, do regarding illegal immigration in a Northern Virginia town?” Perhaps certain stories from the Bible effectively “redescribe” the situation in such a compelling way that they associate illegal immigration with a theological “alienation” in this world, creating solidarity where it did not exist before.
I’m simply not sure if the distinction you make helps the bishops actually teach. (It still might be good for purposes of controversy.)
Thanks.
Neil
Neil,
Granting the attenuation of which you write, I wouldn’t say it eliminates the usefulness of my distinction, although it adds a layer of complexity and ambiguity to interpreting what the bishops say. The distinction is useful; it’s just not the last word. Interpretation is a problematic enterprise. The Magisterium may provide authoritative interpretations, but these interpretations are themselves texts that require our interpretation.
I should reiterate that my distinction is made to assist with the interpretation of what church authorities say; I do not mean it as a description of how people, especially the bishops, typically make moral judgments. I’m describing the acts that go into the production of authoritative texts. Pick any such instructive text that covers something in the practical sphere, and I’ll show you the results of these three acts.
Dear Kyle,
Thanks for writing. I suppose that I’m slightly concerned about the “layer of compexity and ambiguity.” And I understand that you are describing the “acts that go into the production of authoritative texts,” but I’m curious to know how these authoritative texts actually function as aids to discernment. Obviously, they can set distant boundaries, but, given their present form, do they effectively function in any other way? (Perhaps this is a question for a different thread …)
Neil