The synod is discussing the teaching authority of bishops’ conferences. It’s not a new debate.

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Among the issues raised at this year’s session of the Synod on Synodality was that of the role and authority of bishops’ conferences in the church—and specifically, their authority to teach definitively on questions of faith and morals. It should come as no surprise that a focus on synodality should prompt such a discussion, but it is in fact not a new one in the church. Since the Second Vatican Council, the question has come up more than once.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, didn’t think much of bishops’ conferences, the national or regional groupings of bishops that were established around the world after Vatican II, when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) in the 1980s. “We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis,” he said in 1985. “They do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a practical, concrete function.” Among those who disagreed with the cardinal was Francis A. Sullivan, S.J.

In a 2002 article in Theological Studies, Father Sullivan addressed Cardinal Ratzinger’s assertion that “A bishops’ conference as such does not have a mandatum docendi. This belongs only to the individual bishops or to the College of bishops with the pope.” In typical fashion, Father Sullivan went step by step through the historical development of such conferences and the implications for the church of their role and authority. He never directly disagreed with Cardinal Ratzinger, but his article was read as a quiet correction.

It wasn’t the only time he played such a role. In journals like Theological Studies, in his many books, in his many articles for America and other outlets and in his more than six decades in the classroom, Father Sullivan was a charitable but stout defender of many theological expressions that emerged from the council but became points of contention in the church in the decades following. When the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University gave him an honorary degree in 2012 (my only time to meet the man), he was recognized for “his accessible writing, his contributions to the charismatic and ecumenical movements, his steadfast defense of Vatican II, his exemplary life of scholarship and faith, and his generosity and availability to all students and inquirers.”

Father Sullivan died in 2019 at 97 years of age. “You can learn much about ecclesiology from his lectures and writings, but I for one learned an immense amount above all about Christian service from just being in his genial company and witnessing his dedication to church, academy and world,” said Thomas Massaro, S.J., in an obituary for Father Sullivan that ran in America.

Born in 1922, in Jamaica Plain, Mass., Sullivan entered the Society of Jesus in 1938 at the age of 16 (👀). He taught Latin, math and English at Fairfield Prep in Connecticut during his Jesuit formation and was ordained in 1951. After receiving his doctorate in 1956, Sullivan was assigned to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he would stay until 1992, serving as a professor of ecclesiology and also as dean from 1964 to 1970. (Two of his early students there were Avery Dulles, S.J. and the Rev. Joseph Komonchak.)

While he did not participate in Vatican II as a peritus, Sullivan did play a role in the council according to Jesuit lore: When Archbishop John McEleney, S.J., of Kingston, Jamaica, shared an early draft of “Lumen Gentium” with him, Sullivan made suggestions for alterations to the constitution’s reflections on charisms in the church that made it into the final document.

After leaving Rome, Sullivan taught at Boston College from 1992 until 2009, finally retiring at the age of 87. He authored eight books over the course of his career, including Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church, Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium, The Church We Believe In: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic and From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church. In 1994, the Catholic Theological Society of America honored Father Sullivan with its John Courtney Murray award, its highest honor, given yearly to a scholar for “a lifetime of distinguished theological achievement.”

Widely regarded as an authoritative voice on questions of ecclesiology and magisterial teachings, Sullivan also provided something of a quiet counter to more theologically conservative voices in the church during the 1980s and 1990s. On questions like the infallibility of the church’s teaching on women’s ordination, the role and authority of bishops, the right of Catholic theologians to dissent from church teaching, the reception and authority of encyclicals like “Humanae Vitae” and the aforementioned question of episcopal conferences, Sullivan provided an expert voice. He is perhaps most famous (okay, among theologians) for his contribution to the discussion of what exactly Vatican II meant by saying the church of Christ “subsists in” (subsistit in) rather than “is” the Catholic Church.

In 2009, Father Sullivan (along with Msgr. John Strynkowski and John O’Malley, S.J.) contributed to “A Call for Collegiality,” an article in America discussing the ways in which the Vatican and the bishops could work together in a way more simpatico with the aims of Pope Paul VI and the documents of Vatican II. Since that council, Sullivan asserted, “the popes have continued to take important decisions affecting the whole church without the collaboration of the episcopate. I have in mind Humanae vitae, Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Ad tuendam fidem and most recently, the lifting of the excommunication from the four schismatic bishops.”

In each of those cases, he argued, the pope could have given the heads of episcopal conferences “deliberative voice” and shared responsibility. “Would the decisions have been better than what the popes decided without their help? God only knows,” Sullivan wrote. “But they would surely have met with a better reception from the faithful than the decisions that the popes have made without them.”

In 2001, in a lecture at Fordham Law School that was sponsored by America (and published here as “The Magisterium in the New Millennium”), Father Sullivan discussed the ways different church bodies might more fully become “structures of participation” and “instruments of communion.” It is impossible to read the article without seeing it as a forerunner of the church’s greater embrace of synodality in recent years, with its emphasis on collaboration, collegiality and greater inclusion in church decision-making processes.

“I conclude by recalling the words of Pope John Paul in his apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte,” Father Sullivan wrote in that article. “‘To make the church the home and school of communion: that is the great challenge facing us in the millennium which is now beginning if we wish to be faithful to God’s plan and respond to the world’s deepest yearnings.’”

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Gaza,” by Kirby Michael Wright. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

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The synod is discussing the teaching authority of bishops’ conferences. It’s not a new debate.

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