January-February 2001

CTA hears bishops debate Ex Corde rules for theologians

With press credentials from the Catholic Press Association, which recently approved membership for CTA publications, CTA staff attended the November meeting of the U.S. bishops when they discussed draft guidelines to implement the Vatican decree “Ex Corde Ecclesiae.” It requires theologians teaching at Catholic colleges and universities to have a mandatum or approval from the local bishop.

Many bishops were confused about the nature of a mandatum: does it have legal ramifications? Archbishop Daniel Pilarcyzk, chair of the drafting committee, said no. “This is not about hiring and firing. This is an ecclesiological issue,” he said.

According to the draft, a mandatum acknowledges that the theologian is “within the full communion of the Catholic Church,” committed to teach authentic Catholic doctrine. But the mandatum “has no teeth,” Pilarczyk insisted.

So why have many U.S. theologians already said that they will not request one, and will even refuse one if it is offered? Theologian Daniel Finn, who chairs a committee on the mandatum for the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), addressed the bishops on this subject. CTSA, he said, worries about giving a local bishop power to decide whether a teacher is “within the full communion of the Catholic Church.” This vague criterion is “a recent invention and fraught with ambiguity.” CTSA also fears “the absence of widely recognized standards of due process for the ‘hard’ cases.” Any doctrinal issue would be quickly remanded to Rome, “where many of the due process standards affirmed in canons 1732ff. have been explicitly disavowed.”

Finn warned the bishops of legal trouble if the mandatum should ever affect hiring and firing, and said theologians may be giving up civil rights by submitting to one. He said the mandatum comes from a European model of bishops’ relation to academia, but doesn’t fit American universities, whose credibility depends on academic freedom.