St Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops

Does anyone today like bishops, or see them as anything other than a corrupt bunch of self-serving gangsters and sexual abusers? If your local one is okay, what about his being yoked to his brothers? Can the Church retreat into local structures and communities and ignore the wider corruption? If not, what should we do then?

These are not new questions, as we see in a new book, St. Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops by Benjamin Safranski (Fortress Academic, 2018), 250pp. I am especially gratified to see how much this new book is indebted to Afanasiev, who is no stranger to these parts.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book assesses episcopal cooperation as envisioned by the third-century bishop Cyprian of Carthage. It outlines and assesses the interactions between local bishops, provincial groups of bishops, and the worldwide college. Assessing these interactions sheds light on the relationship between Cyprian’s strong sense of local autonomy and the reality that each bishop was responsible to the world-wide college. Episcopal consensus was the sine qua non, for Cyprian, for a major issue of faith or practice to become one that defined membership in the college and, ultimately, the Church.

The book brings this assessment into a modern scholarly debate by concluding with an evaluation of the ecclesiology of the Orthodox scholar Nicolas Afanasiev and his critiques of Cyprian. Afanasiev lamented Cyprian as the father of universal ecclesiology and claimed that Cyprian’s college wielded authority above that of the local bishop. This book argues that Afanasiev fundamentally misconstrued Cyprian’s understanding of collegiality. It is shown that, for Cyprian, collegiality was the framework for the common ministry of the bishops and did not infringe on the sovereignty of the local bishop. Rather, it was the college’s collective duty to define the boundaries of acceptable Christian belief and practice.

Ukrainian-American Bishop Constantine Bohachevsky

For more than five years now, since working with a grad student who was doing field research in Sugarloaf, PA, home of the Byzantine Carmelite sisters, I have thought that Eastern Catholics are exceptionally bad at telling our own history, and such defects must be remedied wherever possible. I am therefore delighted to see this biography forthcoming in November of this year: Ukrainian Bishop, American Church: Constantine Bohachevsky and the Ukrainian Catholic Church Hardcover by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak (Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 544pp.

I greatly look forward to reading this, and I hope to be able to arrange an interview on here with the author.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Constantine Bohachevsky was not a typical bishop. On the eve of his unexpected nomination as bishop to the Ukrainian Catholics in America, in March 1924, the Vatican secretly whisked him from Warsaw to Rome to be ordained. He arrived in America that August to a bankrupt church and a hostile clergy. He stood his ground, and chose to live simple missionary life. He eschewed public pomp, as did his immigrant congregations. He regularly visited his scattered churches. He fought a bitter fight for the independence of the church from outside interference – a kind of struggle between the Church and the state, absent both. He refashioned a failing immigrant church in America into a self-sustaining institution that half a century after his death could help resurrect the underground Catholic Church in Ukraine, which became the largest Eastern Catholic church today.

This trailblazing biography, based on recently opened sources from the Vatican, Ukraine and the United States, brings the reader from the placid life of the married Catholic Ukrainian clergy in the Habsburg Empire to industrial America.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church, formalized in 1595, melds Eastern religious practices with Western hierarchic structure, thus healing the 1054 Christian divide. While there is doctrinal unity, Eastern Catholic practice differs so markedly from that of the Latin Rite that Ukrainian immigrants in the US created their own churches. The death of the first bishop in 1916 and the long hiatus in naming a replacement led to widespread unrest. Yet, under Bohachevsky's forceful leadership, within a decade, the church developed a network of parishes, schools, colleges, and eventually a seminary, cultivating its clergy and its understanding of Eastern Catholicism. In 1958, the Pope erected the Ukrainian Catholic Archbishopric of Philadelphia and appointed Bohachevsky its Metropolitan/Archbishop.

A Note on Episcopal Elections

Whenever I argue, as I did here today, about episcopal elections in the Catholic Church, invariably someone reacts with horror at the prospect of sinful lay people participating. To which my response is always the same: find me an election, to any office however lowly, at any point anywhere in history in any ecclesial body on the planet that was not composed of and conducted by sinners.

Catholics are unused to the idea of episcopal election, but those in the Christian East (including Eastern Catholics) are not. I documented the different synodal-electoral structures and practices across the East in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, reviewing more than a dozen different models for the selection of bishops--some very centralized on the modern Roman model, and others very much involving lay people and parish clergy at the local level.

Is any one model perfect? Of course not. Has any one model a monopoly on producing saints for candidates? Don't be silly. I am well aware that local election by no means guarantees--as I said in the final paragraph of my essay--that we will not have "lunatics" (Adrian Fortescue's phrase). No system is perfect. The idea that papal appointment will always produce competent non-criminals, much less saints, is obviously false to anyone who has been paying attention. Each system has flaws, which is to be expected since they are all composed by and of human beings.

My overall point was a simple one: local election is the minimum necessary to convince the Orthodox of Catholic good faith and desire for full communion. I am, in other words, arguing this out on ecumenical-ecclesiological grounds, not because I'm a romantic populist of some sort.

For those who want to get into some of the historical details about episcopal elections, then let me recommend several works. Joseph O'Callaghan's book, Electing Our Bishops: How the Catholic Church Should Choose Its Leaders, is perhaps a good place to begin for the non-specialist. It is, as the title suggests, more of a plaidoyer than an historical monograph strictly recounting details.

For that, one must turn to Peter Norton's fascinating and invaluable Episcopal Elections 250-600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity. He shows, inter alia, that "election" sometimes meant ham-fisted imperial appointment, sometimes meant little more than mobs dragging candidates to the altar, and sometimes meant something closer to the popular selection we moderns imagine by that term of  "election."

Norton's study is now just over a decade old. More recent works include the wide-ranging collection Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity, eds. Johan Leemans,‎ Peter Van Nuffelen, and‎ Shawn W. J. Keough.

Finally, and more widely for those who want to consider the larger issue of synodality, in addition to my book noted above, I also commend to you the wide-ranging, multi-lingual collection Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact, edited by Alberto Melloni and‎ Silvia Scatena.

The Problem of Bishops

It has been well known among scholars since at least 1970 that the office Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran Christians call "bishop" is a relatively late development, that is, the idea that there is one figure with exclusive "jurisdiction" (to use a notoriously slippery term) over a discrete and delimited territory is probably a late second-century development, if not later. Such a phenomenon--the so-called monepiscopate--is, as far as we can see, something that predates our more customary understanding of the episcopacy--one man to one city. But a new book, released this summer, looks like it will challenge some of these understandings: Alistair C. Stewart, Original Bishops, The: Office and Order in the First Christian Communities (Baker Academic, 2014), 416pp. 

About this book we are told:

A leading authority on early Christianity provides a new starting point for studying the origins of church offices, offering careful readings of the ancient evidence. This work provides a new starting point for studying the origins of church offices. Alistair Stewart, a leading authority on early Christianity and a meticulous scholar, provides essential groundwork for historical and theological discussions. Stewart refutes a long-held consensus that church offices emerged from collective leadership at the end of the first century. He argues that governance by elders was unknown in the first centuries and that bishops emerged at the beginning of the church; however, they were nothing like bishops of a later period. The church offices as presently known emerged in the late second century. Stewart debunks widespread assumptions and misunderstandings, offers carefully nuanced readings of the ancient evidence, and fully interacts with pertinent secondary scholarship.

Strengthen Your Brethren

It has often been remarked that too many bishops today are much more corporate executives than spiritual fathers. A new book would seem to go some way in at least one instance towards changing that: J. Peter Sartain, Strengthen Your Brothers: Letters of Encouragement from an Archbishop to His  Priests (Liturgical Press, 2012), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In recent years, Archbishop Peter Sartain has written to the priests of the Diocese of Joliet (where he served from 2006-10) and the priests of the Archdiocese of Seattle (where he currently ministers). These intimate, thoughtful letters of encouragement and support are collected here. From a place of commitment and care, Archbishop Sartain addresses a variety of spiritual, theological, pastoral, and personal situations that challenge priests. His personal experience and spiritual insights come together in a moving pastoral way, offering the reader a deep sense of God s care for the world and those who shepherd his people.

Archbishop Sartain's confidence that God is in charge and ministry is based on surrendering control to God s truth, love, and simple presence permeates this book. Priests will find it uplifting, as will others who serve in ministry, and the people who care about them.

Episcopal Accountability

As I noted last fall when the publisher drew my attention to a the imminent publication of Michael J. Lacey and Francis Oakley, eds., The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity (Oxford UP, 2011), viii+381pp.
we are living through a time in which any claims to ecclesial authority are controverted. This is true for bishops in several Orthodox Churches--including, inter alia, the OCA and the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America--and it is true, a fortiori, for Catholic bishops the world over, but perhaps especially in North America and Ireland. Part of this has to do with the culture we inhabit at this moment in history, where emotivism, as Alasdair MacIntyre demonstrated, destroys the distinction between power and authority and makes all forms of authority appear inherently irrational and intrinsically manipulative; but much of it has to do with the bishops themselves and their conduct (or lack thereof) when dealing with, inter alia, financially corrupt or sexually abusive priests--or being abusers themselves as happened, e.g., not once but twice with two bishops in succession in the same diocese (Palm Beach, Florida between 1998 and 2002). The lack of accountability of such bishops is the real skandalon here for most people, and without addressing it the hierarchs are unlikely to recover some measure of hard-won respectability. In this regard, I was encouraged by the newly appointed archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, when, in an interview with John Allen, he said:

JA: Do you think there are sufficient accountability provisions for bishops right now?

CC: I'll say something that many people in the church aren't saying, which is that we ought to study this question and reflect on it very seriously. We should take up the issue of accountability, including accountability for bishops, in a formal, clear, and decisive kind of way.

To which let all the faithful say: Amen, and Amen. Clearly this is an archbishop who is ἄξιος.

I spent a great deal of time in my book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity
sketching out the diverse ways in which various Eastern Churches are synodally structured. When it works, synodality within a patriarchal church is a marvellous gift in which it is clearly possible to see "accountability" in action--to find instances of "fraternal correction" by and among bishops together (following Apostolic Canon 34) with the one who is their "head."

No system is perfect, but much of what frustrates Western Christians, especially Roman Catholics today, is precisely the lack of any visible correction by bishops of bishops. Part of this is by design: Catholic "episcopal conferences" (as one must ceaselessly remind even those who should know better) are most certainly not the equivalent of a synod. The former have no real authority whereas the latter in the East are legislative, electoral, and disciplinary bodies with real powers expressed in diverse forms that I review in great detail. I also show that the West, too, has a very long and venerable history of real synodality that was gradually lost in the second millennium, but desperately needs to be recovered today.