Second Vatican Council turned the bishops into "absolutist princes"
Schüller: exaggeration of the bishop's office is not true to the originals
Canon lawyer Thomas Schüller
The Second Vatican Council turned the bishops into "absolutist princes", believes Thomas Schüller, a canon lawyer from Münster. He criticises the present-day clinging of the chief shepherds to their power.
According to Thomas Schüller, an expert in canon law from Münster, the exaltation of the episcopate is not true to its origins. Rather, it is a consequence of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, Schüller told the monthly magazine "Publik-Forum" (Thursday), published in Oberursel, Hesse. The Council had turned the bishops into "absolutist princes".
Schüller criticised the bishops' clinging to their power. "If you already have no spiritual authority any more, then at least it is still the formal power that makes you feel good," the canon lawyer said. Even the reformers among the bishops did not want to give up power.
The Synodal Way, which ended in mid-March, had decided in September to set up a Synodal Council to continue the talks between bishops and laity - despite a ban from Rome. Schüller is a member of an intermediate committee that is to prepare this Synodal Council. There is "a legal non-bindingness" hovering over all this, the canon lawyer conceded: "On the other hand, Rome would not react so panic-stricken if the same issues were not breaking out in all corners of the world church." One of them, he said, was the question of power.
Cathcon: So modernists can criticise Vatican II if they want to overturn it to prepare for Vatican III but traditionalists are bound to strict adherence to every letter. The collegiality promoted by the Council, while it touched on and constrained in some sense the power of the Papacy, hardly created a string of episcopal tyrants as suggested here. I will grant that the laity began to think themselves priests, priests began to think themselves bishops (see the liturgical arrangements fot the new Mass where the priest sits behind the altar as a bishop does in his cathedral) and bishops thought that their jurisdiction derived from the wider Church as represented by the Pope inhered in them. However, Father Schüller clearly needs to study the history of absolutism more closely to understand the wildness of this claim.
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