After defining, within strict limits, the infallibility of papal teaching on faith and morals, the First Vatican Council intended to take up the parallel question of the authority of bishops in the Church. But the Franco-Prussian War interrupted Vatican I in 1870; the Council was never reconvened, and it was left to the Second Vatican Council to fill out the picture of who exercises authority, and how, in the Church.

Vatican II did this in two documents: its seminal Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) and its Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church (Christus Dominus). These texts taught that the Church’s bishops are the heirs of the Apostles appointed by Christ; that the bishops form a “college” that is the successor of the apostolic “college” in Acts 15; and that this “college,” with and under its head, the Bishop of Rome, has “supreme and full power over the universal Church.”

Vatican II corrected an imbalance in the relationship between the pope and the bishops that had crept into Catholic theology and practice since Vatican I by teaching that bishops are true vicars of Christ in their local Churches, not mere branch managers of Catholic Church, Inc., executing instructions from the CEO in Rome. And that is the case because ordination to the episcopate confers upon a bishop the three offices of teacher, sanctifier, and governor. The proper exercise of episcopal governing authority depends upon the local bishop’s communion with the Bishop of Rome. The authority itself is a sacramental reality conferred by reception of Holy Orders in the highest degree.

These crucial teachings have now been called into question, even contradicted, by various aspects of the still amorphous, but nonetheless protean, synodality project.

On Sept. 15, 1965, Pope Paul VI established a Synod of Bishops that would meet occasionally to assist the Pope in his governance of the universal Church. This new body was a synod of bishops; it was not a parliament in which different states of life in the Church (clergy, consecrated religious, laity) played equivalent roles. Pope Paul’s Synod was, therefore, an expression of Vatican II’s teaching on the episcopate as a “college” governing the Church in union with the Pope.

That changed dramatically in October 2023 and October 2024, when the “Synod of Bishops” became known as “the Synod:” a body composed of bishops, consecrated religious, priests, and laity, all of whom had both voice and vote. The membership of this innovative body was deliberately constructed to get a sufficient number of voices with the “correct” views into the Synod Hall, and its functioning was carefully controlled (some would say, manipulated) through the process of so-called “Conversations in the Spirit.”

Now Cardinal Mario Grech, Synod general secretary, has informed the world episcopate that a new, three-year synodal process, culminating in a 2028 “Ecclesial Assembly,” will evaluate the implementation of Synod 2023 and Synod 2024. In this “Ecclesial Assembly” — a term with no precedent in Catholic tradition — the bishops will be but one component part, and in preparation for the Assembly the bishops are to “accompany” their people, i.e., not lead them. Thus, Vatican II’s teaching on the authority of bishops as the governing body of the Church, with and under the Pope, continues to be severely attenuated.

Then there is the 2022 apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, reconfiguring the Roman Curia. According to that text, the foundation of governing authority in curial departments (dicasteries) is papal appointment to an office, period, not the governing authority conferred sacramentally by Holy Orders.

When the Church’s cardinals met in August 2022 to discuss the new Curial structures, Cardinal George Pell asked Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, a major influence on Praedicate Evangelium, “Does this mean that a religious sister or a laywomen could be Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops?” Cardinal Ghirlanda blithely replied, “Oh, that would never happen.” To which Cardinal Pell replied, correctly, “The question, Your Eminence, is not whether it would happen; the question is whether it can happen.”

In that exchange, Cardinal Pell was the authentic voice of the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Ghirlanda, for his part, was the voice of absolutist papal autocracy, a distortion of ecclesiology characteristic of some Catholic thinking between Vatican I and Vatican II.

Vatican II decisively rejected Catholic czarism, effecting a correction in the Church’s self-understanding that both John Paul II and Benedict XVI held up as one of the Council’s great achievements.

There have been many ironies in the ecclesiastical fire over the past 12 years. The revival of papal autocracy among Catholic progressives, and the consequent degradation of bishops, is surely one of the most striking — and most concerning.