Quinn, Martini, many bishops urging reform of papal power

Amid signs of John Paul II's serious health impairment and wide public speculation that he might even resign after the year 2000, prominent members of the hierarchy are offering recommendations for papal reform that could dramatically shape the next papacy.

Since John Paul II himself, in a 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, invited suggestions about ways to exercise papal primacy that would foster ecumenism, retired San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn made headlines in 1996 with an Oxford University speech calling for a major shift in decision-making away from the Vatican and toward the worldwide college of bishops (ChurchWatch, August 1996). Now Quinn has published a book that develops his Oxford themes: The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity. He was in Rome in December, giving a copy to the pope and pushing its ideas in an Italian magazine interview, and now is giving public lectures in the U.S.

Quinn's main message: today's papacy as absolute monarchy should yield to the more collaborative papal role in the first 1,000 years of church history, when "the idea did not exist that the Bishop of Rome would intervene in the affairs of other churches on a routine basis or in normal times." Quinn details many recent examples of Rome's "interventions" that undercut the pastoral role of other bishops: like rejecting English liturgical translations after years of work by the U.S. Bishops (see related story), gutting the teaching authority of national bishops' conferences, appointing an archbishop in Vienna without any local consultation (it led to the We Are Church referendum movement in protest), and having Cardinal Ratzinger call the invalidity of Anglican ordinations "definitive teaching" without a word to the ecumenical official, Cardinal Cassidy.

Quinn's book offers detailed chapters on how to reform the College of Cardinals, the Roman Curia, and especially the selection of bishops: he thinks they should be elected by local churches.

Martini speaks out

An even higher-profile spokesman for papal reform is Milan's Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, 72, widely regarded as a leading candidate to succeed John Paul II. The biggest headlines in Europe during the October Synod of European Bishops came from Martini's speech advocating "full exercise of episcopal collegiality" - which sounded almost like a call for a new ecumenical council. One month later Martini told Italian radio that ecumenism required the Catholic Church to rethink "the way we exercise papal primacy."

Meanwhile, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 77, a veteran Vatican official of French Basque origin and another possible papal candidate, told an ecumenical conference that the papal office needed rethinking: the pope should not be "a kind of super-bishop." He said "the Petrine ministry is at the dawn of a new era."

He may be right. Even conservative prelates like Cardinals Meissner of Cologne and Tettamanzi of Genoa lodged complaints at the European Synod against Rome's micromanagement of their dioceses. And when Cardinal Ratzinger in December told a French Catholic newspaper the Church's disciplinary and doctrinal problems stemmed from people's lack of faith, Cardinal Pierre Eyt of Bordeaux pointedly disagreed. A member of Ratzinger's own doctrinal commission, Eyt said the hierarchy must be more open to dialogue and even adaptation on issues Martini listed in his synod address: the role of women in the Church, laity in ministry, sexuality, marriage, penitential practice, and the need to revive ecumenism.